A Long Journey to Russia

"An extraordinary memoir.” Luba Vinogradova, co-author of A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist With the Red Army, 1941-1945

“An important contribution to our understanding of the Second World War in Eastern Europe, and also very funny, which I was not expecting.” Antony Polonsky, author of The Jews in Poland and Russia

As the Nazi army swept into Eastern Europe in 1939, Richard Fenigsen, a sixteen year-old Polish Jew, fled his hometown of Radom and arrived with his family in the Soviet-controlled city of Lwów. Within months, they were ordered to board a train and deported thousands of miles into the heart of Russia. For the next two years the Fenigsens made their way through the Soviet Union by boat, foot, and rail, as World War II ravaged Europe and the Nazi war machine systematically eradicated the Jews of Poland.

From the logging camps of the mysterious independent Mari Autonomous Republic to the outpost of Yoshkar Olá, Fenigsen’s observations are of places and people for which no other account exists in the English language. A singular, poignant portrait of daily life in Russia during World War II, A Long Journey to Russia is an epic adventure at the periphery of a great tragedy, and a testament that the welcoming of strangers is possible even in the darkest of times.