Yosef Mednik was born in Mizoch; Feiga Geldi, in Shumsk. Both towns are in the Volhynia region of Poland, about twenty miles apart. Married in 1939 before WWII began, in 1941 the desperate couple fled east in advance of the Einsatzgruppen Aktions (mobile killing squads). Their families refused to flee with them, thus dooming themselves to a tragic fate.

Yosef and Feiga journeyed east, settling temporarily in Zaporizhia, Ukraine. When the Germans caught up with them, they fled farther east with the Red Army, ending up in Tašhkent, in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). Their experiences of life on a kolkhoz, a collective farm, and, for Yosef, in the Polish/Soviet Army are profoundly moving.

Yosef and Feiga Mednik experienced the Holocaust in places readers rarely hear about. Most readers know about the ghettos and concentration camps but are not cognizant of the number of Jewish refugees who fled to the U.S.S.R. Yosef’s and Feiga’s experiences in Tašhkent on the kolkhoz and in the Polish/Soviet Army provide readers with a better understanding of where Jews fled to escape murder at the hands of the Nazis. This is a part of the Holocaust that has not been fully explored. We can be grateful to Gary Mednick’s determination to publish his parents’ memoir, Flight to Tašhkent, for enlightenment about Jews in the Soviet Union during the Holocaust.