Author Event: John B. Simon

They were young boys ripped from their homes, taken to military schools, and forced to serve in the imperial army. One hundred years later, during World War II, 260,000 German soldiers arrived in Finland. The Nazis murdered millions of Jews around Europe, but in Finland Jews fought alongside the Germans against the Soviet Union. Not a single one was harmed by their Nazi brothers-in-arms. A field synagogue functioned on the front line, and several openly Jewish soldiers were even awarded the German iron cross. This happened nowhere else. How was it possible in Finland?

The reader is guided through 100 years of history via narrative nonfictional passages and the personal accounts of three fictional protagonists: Pesach, who was forced to serve in the imperial army and sent to Finland in the 1850s; Pesach’s son Mendel, who started a flourishing business producing hats for the Russian army; and Mendel’s son Benjamin, who ended up waging war against the Soviet Union alongside the Germans in World War II. Just as it outgrows the strict limits of fiction and nonfiction, Strangers in a Stranger Land reconfigures the history of
European antisemitism and the participation of European Jews in the seminal war of the 20th century.