rescued jewish children
Lilit (Lida) Yoffe-Davidson
‘Pesahl, a Wonderful Child’
Lilit (Lida) Yoffe-Davidson
From Smuggled in Potato Sacks
Fifty Stories of the Hidden Children of the Kaunas Ghetto
Editors
Solomon Abramovich
and Yakov Zilberg
When the Germans entered Lithuania we were living in Panevezis. I was aged 2 at the time and my father, Leiser Yoffe, was working as a doctor in the hospital there, and my mother Yulia (née Segal) as a dentist. The Germans drove all the hospital staff out into the street and demanded that the Jews and Communists be identified. The only person who was not betrayed that day was my father who was loved and respected by colleagues and patients alike.
We fled to Kaunas, where we soon landed up in the ghetto. My father worked there as a doctor but my mother was sent to work outside the ghetto. Lithuanian friends of my parents, who were members of the anti-fascist underground, made contact with them and used to send food into the ghetto with my mother’s help, and Mother in her turn kept them informed of what was going on inside the ghetto. With the help of those friends we were all able to escape from the ghetto and go into hiding until the end of the war.
Certain episodes from our life in the ghetto have etched themselves on my memory: how my mother cried when my father told her that her parents and younger brothers had been killed. There was another episode when I was in the kindergarten. One of the children asked a nanny which foot he should put his shoe on. ‘On your left foot,’ she had replied. The boy then asked what he should do with his second shoe; I thought to myself, what an idiot he must be. Those children were later taken away to certain death together with their nanny, who refused to abandon them.
Hardly a single day goes by without me remembering Pesahl, a wonderful child, who had been a neighbour in our cramped flat in a dilapidated wooden house in the ghetto. Little Lord Fauntleroy in person, he had an angelic face and heart and he behaved like a noble adult. My parents later confirmed the impression I had had of him as a little girl of 3 or 4. One day a group of us children was playing in the main street of the ghetto and we saw a man with one leg moving about on crutches. We all began to laugh and then suddenly came Pesahl’s voice, exclaiming, ‘And if that had happened to you?!’ Pesahl died, like most of the children in the ghetto, and I never knew his surname or how old he was.
And then I remember well July 1944. The Germans were retreating and the Russians were advancing, moving through the village where Mother and I hid during the last year of the occupation. My mother had to pretend to be ‘a Lithuanian refugee from the nearby town’. When she said goodbye to the peasant for whom she had worked in return for shelter, she told him that she was a Jew. He replied, ‘Do you think I didn’t realize?’
We managed to scrounge a lift into town in a lorry that was full of cheerful soldiers and I heard my mother mutter to herself, ‘Has that idiot managed to survive or not?’ I realized that she was very worried about my father, who was staying in the house of my nanny Anna in Kaunas. Most of the time he spent in a cupboard, only coming out at night to breathe some fresh air at the window.
Our reunited family, complete with nanny, was allocated a spacious flat by the Soviet authorities. My parents both had jobs, and parcels from Israel from my father’s sisters started arriving. What a treat it was to have needles and thread!
I knew that my father’s sister had died with her husband in Kurshenai and that Mother had lost two brothers in Rokishkis and that we had no other relatives left, apart from those in Palestine. I could spend whole days looking at the photographs which my parents had managed to salvage, despite all the ups and downs of the war they had experienced; they showed my parents in the circle of their large family, young and carefree. I was only 5 or 6 at the time, but each night I used to have a nightmare about the Germans chasing after my grandmother, my grandfather and my mother’s younger brothers, whom I used to think of as my own brothers. One night I imagined that I was standing with a cudgel and lashing out with it at my nightmare with all my strength, so as to drive it out of my mind once and for all: the nightmare never came back. Then I decided that I would grow up to be a doctor so as to invent medicine that would bring my grandfather and grandmother back to life.
By means of my fictitious marriage, we came to Israel in 1958 through Poland. I graduated from the Hadassah Medical School and worked as a dentist. I am married and have two children.
Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to prove to everyone that I had been worth saving.
Jerusalem, Israel, 2008
First published in 2011 by Vallentine Mitchell
London, Portland, OR
Lilit (Lida) Yoffe-Davidson
From Smuggled in Potato Sacks
Fifty Stories of the Hidden Children of the Kaunas Ghetto
Editors
Solomon Abramovich
and Yakov Zilberg
When the Germans entered Lithuania we were living in Panevezis. I was aged 2 at the time and my father, Leiser Yoffe, was working as a doctor in the hospital there, and my mother Yulia (née Segal) as a dentist. The Germans drove all the hospital staff out into the street and demanded that the Jews and Communists be identified. The only person who was not betrayed that day was my father who was loved and respected by colleagues and patients alike.
We fled to Kaunas, where we soon landed up in the ghetto. My father worked there as a doctor but my mother was sent to work outside the ghetto. Lithuanian friends of my parents, who were members of the anti-fascist underground, made contact with them and used to send food into the ghetto with my mother’s help, and Mother in her turn kept them informed of what was going on inside the ghetto. With the help of those friends we were all able to escape from the ghetto and go into hiding until the end of the war.
Certain episodes from our life in the ghetto have etched themselves on my memory: how my mother cried when my father told her that her parents and younger brothers had been killed. There was another episode when I was in the kindergarten. One of the children asked a nanny which foot he should put his shoe on. ‘On your left foot,’ she had replied. The boy then asked what he should do with his second shoe; I thought to myself, what an idiot he must be. Those children were later taken away to certain death together with their nanny, who refused to abandon them.
Hardly a single day goes by without me remembering Pesahl, a wonderful child, who had been a neighbour in our cramped flat in a dilapidated wooden house in the ghetto. Little Lord Fauntleroy in person, he had an angelic face and heart and he behaved like a noble adult. My parents later confirmed the impression I had had of him as a little girl of 3 or 4. One day a group of us children was playing in the main street of the ghetto and we saw a man with one leg moving about on crutches. We all began to laugh and then suddenly came Pesahl’s voice, exclaiming, ‘And if that had happened to you?!’ Pesahl died, like most of the children in the ghetto, and I never knew his surname or how old he was.
And then I remember well July 1944. The Germans were retreating and the Russians were advancing, moving through the village where Mother and I hid during the last year of the occupation. My mother had to pretend to be ‘a Lithuanian refugee from the nearby town’. When she said goodbye to the peasant for whom she had worked in return for shelter, she told him that she was a Jew. He replied, ‘Do you think I didn’t realize?’
We managed to scrounge a lift into town in a lorry that was full of cheerful soldiers and I heard my mother mutter to herself, ‘Has that idiot managed to survive or not?’ I realized that she was very worried about my father, who was staying in the house of my nanny Anna in Kaunas. Most of the time he spent in a cupboard, only coming out at night to breathe some fresh air at the window.
Our reunited family, complete with nanny, was allocated a spacious flat by the Soviet authorities. My parents both had jobs, and parcels from Israel from my father’s sisters started arriving. What a treat it was to have needles and thread!
I knew that my father’s sister had died with her husband in Kurshenai and that Mother had lost two brothers in Rokishkis and that we had no other relatives left, apart from those in Palestine. I could spend whole days looking at the photographs which my parents had managed to salvage, despite all the ups and downs of the war they had experienced; they showed my parents in the circle of their large family, young and carefree. I was only 5 or 6 at the time, but each night I used to have a nightmare about the Germans chasing after my grandmother, my grandfather and my mother’s younger brothers, whom I used to think of as my own brothers. One night I imagined that I was standing with a cudgel and lashing out with it at my nightmare with all my strength, so as to drive it out of my mind once and for all: the nightmare never came back. Then I decided that I would grow up to be a doctor so as to invent medicine that would bring my grandfather and grandmother back to life.
By means of my fictitious marriage, we came to Israel in 1958 through Poland. I graduated from the Hadassah Medical School and worked as a dentist. I am married and have two children.
Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to prove to everyone that I had been worth saving.
Jerusalem, Israel, 2008
First published in 2011 by Vallentine Mitchell
London, Portland, OR