Rescued Jewish Children

Mika Karnovsky-Ash

Just Another Baby ‘From the Train’

Mika Karnovsky-Ash

From Smuggled in Potato Sacks
Fifty Stories of the Hidden Children of the Kaunas Ghetto

Editors
Solomon Abramovich
and Yakov Zilberg


I was born on 13 June 1941, delivered by my grandmother, Cerna-Beile Sandler, who was a midwife. On 16 June my maternal grandparents and my aunt Lea Sandler were deported to Siberia. The shock of all this stunted my mother’s ability to breastfeed. On 21 June my mother, Gita Karnovsky née Sandler came out of hospital, a day before the war began.
The Germans soon entered Kaunas. My father, Grigorij, an engineer, was working with Mendel Kamber, building military fortifications for the Soviet Army, somewhere in the provinces. When they heard about the outbreak of war, they both hurried back to Kaunas to their families.
In Kaunas a Soviet officer caught sight of Mendel Kamber, whom he knew before, and asked whether he could drive. On hearing a positive response, he ordered Mendel to get behind the wheel of his vehicle and would not listen to any objections or explanations. Mendel was ordered to catch up with the retreating Soviet Army. That was why Mendel did not reach his family and did not know that his wife was pregnant.
Father came home and, alongside his relatives, experienced all the horrors of the ghetto and the camps. My mother had been studying biology, but before the war she had not worked in her chosen field: she had travelled wherever her husband had been sent and kept the accounts.
Our family went to live with my paternal grandmother, Anna Osipovna Karnovsky. She had been a widow since the time of the First World War; she had lost her husband in Kharkov when Lithuanian Jews were forcibly evacuated on orders from Russia’s czarist government. She was a very strong character, an enterprising and intelligent woman. She had managed to survive that forcible evacuation and eventually return to Kaunas with her three children, Grigorij, Nina and adopted son Otto. Now she was the first person to have sensed the grim times ahead and had taken pains to lay in reserves of food for the whole family. This made life for our family a great deal easier, at least in the early days.
My aunt Nina was married to a rich Kaunas Jew called Yakov (Kuba) Gudinsky. Later he would serve in the Jewish police; he was a good man and helped as many people as he could. Kuba was a well-known contractor in Kaunas and he had many connections among the engineers of the town. With one of them, who used to live in Slobodka, he had swapped flats. A Lithuanian engineer moved into Yakov’s flat at the end of the central avenue in Traku Street, while my parents, grandmother and the Gudinsky family, Kuba, his wife Nina and their 2-month-old Rina, moved into the Lithuanian’s small house inside the ghetto area.
One episode was recalled by the family regarding the time between their old life in the town and the move into the ghetto. Mother had to cross the whole town on foot from Traku Street to Slobodka with luggage and a pram, and Lithuanians were pushing her off the pavement onto the roadway right under the wheels of the carts, since the road was already teeming with traffic and crowds of people being herded into the ghetto.
On the same floor of that small house in the ghetto, apart from the Gudinskys and the Karnovskys, there were two other families. One of them was the Rabinovich family with an 11-year-old son, Muki Rabinovich.
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