The Wanderers: A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II, with Daniela Gerson

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Daniela Gerson and her wife, Talia Inlender, met at a picnic in Los Angeles, not knowing that 75 years earlier, their grandparents had left homes only blocks away from each other in a small Polish town, and fled east to Ukraine. The Gersons and the Inlenders would go on parallel odysseys of 5,000 miles to survive the Holocaust—one that would, after a deceitful loyalty test from Stalin, put them on cattle cars to a Soviet Gulag, years in limbo in Central Asia, and would end, after a decade on the run, with new lives built on secrets and lies.

For years, Daniela and Talia simply accepted this painful shared history as a sign that they were b’shert, meant to be. Their families’ refugee past fueled their work: Daniela as an immigration journalist; Talia an immigration attorney. But as Daniela uncovered more, she realized that their grandparents shared this escape path in the Soviet Union with most Polish Jews who survived; a group—sometimes collectively called “the Wanderers”—that is almost entirely absent from popular understanding of World War II. And unlike most Holocaust sagas that focus on the exceptionality of the Nazi genocide, theirs was also a universal story of refugees making impossible decisions when forced to seek safety, protect their children, and find new homes.

Daniela Gerson is an award-winning immigration reporter whose work has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, WNYC, Der Spiegel, and Financial Times. An associate professor of journalism at California State University, Northridge and editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square, she previously co-founded Migratory Notes, worked as a community engagement editor at the Los Angeles Times and as a staff immigration reporter for the New York Sun. Gerson lives in Los Angeles with her two children and wife, an attorney specializing in immigrants’ rights.