I Have Retained a Great Love of LIFE!
Gidon Sheftel

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

Editors
Solomon Abramovich
and Yakov Zilberg

My mother, Chaviva Libaite, was born in 1915 in Lithuania in the small town of Varniai. In her youth, being pretty and lively, she had always been a centre of attention for many Jewish young men. Aharon Dambe, a young man from Varniai and one of Mama’s admirers, made her a proposal of marriage. He was older than she was by six to eight years and she turned him down.
In 1938 my mother moved to Kaunas to start a job there, after she had had her application for a permit (‘certificate’), to emigrate to Palestine turned down. She had been a member of the organization ‘Hashomer Hatsair’ in Varniai.
Aharon in the meantime had set off to Palestine to seek his fortune there. In 1939 he had still not found his feet in Palestine and came back to Kaunas, where he met my mother again and once more started courting her. When he proposed for a second time, my mother accepted his offer of marriage. This time Aharon Dambe and Chaviva Libaite became man and wife; I was born on 6 February 1940. My father worked as the chief accountant in one of the town’s large factories and my mother had an office job somewhere. My parents lived very well up until the war. They had a beautiful flat, opposite the Opera Theatre.
When the war began my parents tried to escape to Russia, but the train was bombed by the Germans. Half of the train moved off to the east, but they had been in the ‘wrong’ half. Lithuanians surrounded the remaining passengers, led the men off and shot them in the woods straightaway. To this day I do not know where my biological father’s grave is. My mother and I were taken to the Kaunas Ghetto, but I do not know where we lived there or where she worked.
In 1943 a German soldier from the Wehrmacht, who had taken a shine to my mother, warned her about the Children’s Action and advised her to take me through the fence when he was on guard duty at the gate at night, so as to take me to safety.
I was taken in by a Polish family by the name of Wilkancas Raimundas, living near the ghetto in the Slobodka district who also had a son and daughter of their own. My mother had previously given Wilkancas the key to our flat, saying that he could take all its contents including the bag of jewels that was hidden there. Since I had curly blond hair and blue eyes as a small child, nobody suspected that I was Jewish. I was taught to pray, while living with the Polish family, and became a proper little Polish
Catholic boy.
After the ghetto in Kaunas was disbanded, my mother was taken to the Stutthof camp, which was eventually liberated by the Soviet Army. When my mother went back to Kaunas, she collected me from the family of my rescuers. After the war Wilkancas became a People’s Judge. His family was still living in the same house in Slobodka. In the spring of 1947 the Neman and Vilija rivers both broke their banks and there was a serious flood, which affected a large part of the city. My parents offered the Wilkancas family the opportunity to come and stay with us, but they declined. One night, when Wilkancas had not been at home, the whole of his family was drowned. Wilkancas subsequently married a second time. My parents helped him and his family a good deal, and Wilkancas even attended my wedding. Unfortunately he was in the habit of drinking heavily and in 1968 he died.

At the beginning of 1946 Yakov Sheftel had returned to Kaunas from the war. In the past he too had been one of mother’s group of friends in Varniai. From 1942 he served in the 16th Lithuanian Division, took part in many battles and made his way as far as the Kaliningrad region. There he had been severely wounded in the head near Tilsit. A detachment from a penal battalion came across him lying unconscious on the battlefield, where he had been abandoned, because everyone had thought him dead. My father-to-be was first sent to a field hospital, where they did not start treating him but sent him as quickly possible to a hospital out of harm’s way in the Urals. In a military hospital out there a Jewish doctor, despite everyone predicting the worst, braved all the risks and operated: he oversaw Yakov’s treatment and saved him from certain death. Yakov Sheftel was invalided out of the army classified as a Group-1 war invalid – the most seriously injured. Soon afterwards he met up with my mother again, and after all that they had lived through and all the losses and suffering they had experienced, the two of them decided to marry and begin a new life. In April 1948 my sister Sara was born.
My father, Yakov Sheftel (all through my life I have regarded him as my father and called him ‘Father’) went on to open a factory and a shop to make and sell meat products, and succeeded in making ‘a whole heap of money’ at it; later his shop was nationalized. Yakov was a generous man and gave money to the Jewish Orphanage and kindergarten and helped many Jews, who used to pass through our flat between 1946 and 1948 before their final departure to Palestine.
I studied for four years in the Jewish school and when it was closed I moved to the Russian school, from which I graduated in 1956. I gained a place straightaway at the Kaunas Polytechnic, graduating from it as an electrical engineer in 1961. I was given work in the Kaunas Planning Institute, known as ‘Promproekt’, where I soon became a team leader and member of the Komsomol Committee.
In 1963 our family decided to apply for the papers needed for emigrating to Israel. Prior to that, my father, as a war invalid, had not dared to leave. I think that it was the first time that the municipal authorities, including the KGB, had encountered such a ‘shameless’ request of this kind from a young engineer and Komsomol member. Soviet bureaucracy demanded that, when applying to emigrate, I had to provide a character reference from work and even the request for such a document alarmed those in charge at ‘Promproekt’. Three Komsomol meetings were held at which the question of my exclusion from the Komsomol was discussed. It was only on the third occasion that I was finally excluded, but even then the vote had not been unanimous. I was one of the first young men at the time to pluck up the courage to apply for permission to go to Israel; inevitably, our request was turned down.
In 1967 I married Shulamith Levin, a very pretty Jewish girl. Shulamith had been born in 1945, after the war, in the town of Osh in Russia. Her mother had been evacuated there for the duration of the war. In 1967 our son Arik was born. In 1969 my wife’s mother and sister emigrated to Israel, after which we, too, made a second attempt, and on 20 January 1972 we at last flew to Israel. Immediately after completing the Hebrew language school, I started to work in the profession for which I had been trained. My wife found a job as a translator. In 1974 our second son Alon was born and in 1985 our daughter Miri.
In 1987 my father died, and my mother died in 1995. It was not until a few years after her death that a family friend, Yakov Levin, a Jew from Varniai, told me all about my early years. After hearing all those details I started to recall how during my childhood, when visitors were present and I happened to go into the room where they had congregated, everyone suddenly used to fall silent for some reason.
Mother had kept everything secret and had never mentioned the name Aharon Dambe, or told me that Yakov Sheftel was not my biological father. I do not know whether I behaved correctly as regards my real father, but I decided ‘not to go there’ and let everything be, just as my poor deceased mother would have wished. I retained the very warmest of feelings towards Yakov Sheftel, the father who had helped my mother bring me up with affection and patience. Today, as a pensioner, I have four remarkable grandchildren and have retained a great love of LIFE!!

Kfar Sava, Israel, 2008
First published in 2011 by Vallentine Mitchell
London, Portland, OR