Daniela Gerson, "The Wanderers: A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II" (Grand Central Publishing, 2026)

September 8, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In the eighth grade, Daniela Gerson wrote a report on how her family had survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Decades later, she met her wife, Talia, at a picnic; both were dating other people at the time. When they discovered that both their families came from the same small Polish town—Zamość—they vowed to reconstruct their ancestors’ journeys. Instead, they fell in love, got married, and only years later, after Gerson’s father died and she wrote a New York Times essay about his fake identity to enter the U.S., did an editor tell her: that’s a book. The result is The Wanderers, which interweaves a couple’s detective work with the harrowing, little-known story of Polish Jews who fled east into the Soviet Union during World War II.

The Town That Wasn’t Just a Grave

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What you'll learn

1 Timestamped Navigation Outline
2 (01:20) **Introduction and Guest Background** - Host Paul Lerner welcomes Daniela Gerson, author of *The Wanderers*, and summarizes her career as an award-winning journalist and journalism professor
3 (03:22) **Origin Story: From Eighth Grade Report to Book Deal** - Gerson explains how her family's survival story in the Soviet Union sparked a lifelong curiosity
4 (08:26) **Zamość: The Destroyed Town That Was Also a Beautiful City** - Gerson describes the significance of this Polish town in both families' imaginations and the surprise of discovering its living beauty
5 (15:21) **The Flight East: Choosing the Soviet Union** - Gerson explains the complex decision facing Polish Jews when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland simultaneously
6 (20:58) **The Journey to Uzbekistan: Word of Mouth and Chaos** - Gerson traces how refugees ended up in Central Asia, a movement with no single explanation
7 (27:13) **By Train, Foot, and Field: The Physical Journey** - Gerson reconstructs how families actually traveled across the Soviet Union

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Show Notes

In The Wanderers: A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II (Grand Central Publishing, 2026), an immigration journalist and her wife trace their family’s intertwined past to unearth a history of how hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews survived Hitler’s Holocaust at the brutal hands of Stalin—a story that sheds light on the enduring power of hope and love.
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—journeys that would, after a deceitful loyalty test from Stalin, put them on cattle cars to a Soviet Gulag, trap them for 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.

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