Run East

Jack Pomerantz fled east from his home in Radzyn, Poland, when the German planes attacked, walking by night and hiding in the forests of eastern Europe by day. He was just twenty-one when this saga of devastating loss and inspiring courage began. His flight took him on a harrowing, dangerous odyssey through Siberia, to Taskent, to Siberia again, and then - in Polish uniform - back to his home as a liberator. A peddler's son who had known only poverty throughout his childhood and adolescence, Pomerantz provides a poignant picture of the many Jewish refugees who had to escape not only Nazi terror but also the forces of Stalin and the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. Run East provides remarkable detail about a part of the Holocaust that has remained relatively unexplained - the world of European Jews who escaped into what was then the Soviet Union, only to be used by the Soviets, sometimes as laborers in Siberia and sometimes as soldiers fighting on the eastern front. Lyric Wallwork Winik conducted nearly two hundred hours of interviews with Pomerantz to create her narrative, then verified dates, events, and locations through extensive archival research. The result is a revealing look at the life of one man who absolutely refused to give up or give in.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.