A Lost World: the Galician Shtetl and Siberia

Abstract

The lost world of the Eastern European Jews meets the lost world of life under the Soviet rule. From the Galician shtetl of Mościska (Mostyska)—now in Ukraine near the Polish border—the story follows a Jewish family through two World Wars, deportation to a labor camp under the Soviet regime, through Central Asia, the Middle East, to America. These are the lost worlds the author vividly brings to life. Holding onto Jewish tradition in the darkest of places, surviving mass, grave human rights violations. 80% of Polish Jews, who survived the Second World War, did so through the Soviet Union. Meier Landau and his family escaped Germans, but were deported by the Soviets from Lviv, along with thousands of other Jewish families. This is their story—prisoners in a world so strange, it is almost unbelievable to them. This text is a testament to the power of remembering—a necessary reading when war and refugees are present again where this real-life story unfolds.