When I read Iran and the Strzok name being Polish, I immediately thought of a 2017 BBC article I had read just the other night. Perhaps Strzok's family were Poles who had been sent to Iran during the war. Here's the opening paragraphs of that article titled: "CAPTURED, DEPORTED, HUMILIATED, VICTORIOUS...The incredible tale of the Poles who fought back"
"Behind the Jala photography shop in Isfahan, Iran stands an old outbuilding. It is filled with boxes of glass negatives taken by Abdolqasem Jala, a brilliant photographer in the middle of the 20th century. The plates, surprisingly intact, include portraits of Polish people who found refuge here during the Second World War.
Most of the negatives show women and children, including some of the 13,000 Polish orphans who lived in Isfahan. A few of these orphans are still alive. “To us, Iran was a paradise,” remembers Henrika Levchenko, who married and settled in the Middle East. “People were so kind. Iran was a wonderful place, after everything we had been through.” Henrika is one of around 1 million men, women and children deported from Poland by the Soviet authorities in 1941. They were sent to labour camps in the USSR and later dispersed around the world, founding the Polish communities that we know today, from Tel Aviv to London to Melbourne. For decades, the story of their odyssey was hardly known. In Poland, it did not fit the wartime narrative generated under communism. Abroad, immigrants finding their feet had neither time nor appetite to look back. Many deportees concealed their stories even from their own children.
This missing history is now emerging, through the testimony of survivors and evidence scattered around the world. A pile of gramophone records, a cinema poster, a suitcase of letters – all are clues being assembled by scholars and by a new genera- tion of Poles eager to make sense of their past."
My goodness. This is amazing and fascinating.