rescuers of jews
Balčinienė Barbora
A Pit beneath the Bed
Josef and Aviva Gilis
From Smuggled in Potato Sacks
Fifty Stories of the Hidden Children of the Kaunas Ghetto
Editors
Solomon Abramovich
and Yakov Zilberg
Girsh Gilis, a jeweller and watchmaker, and Chana, née Levner, a housewife, had three sons: Peisah (1926), Izya (1928) and myself, in August 1938. When my mother was pregnant with me, she was prepared to have an abortion, but her brothers intervened, ‘Don’t do that, he’ll bring you good luck!’
My paternal grandfather, Peisah, had been a jeweller and watchmaker in Kretinga. After his death my grandmother (I do not even know her name) had taken over the business and with the help of her sons made a success of it. One of her local customers had often taken items from my grandmother to sell for her. Not long before the war she stopped trading with him, because he had begun to keep the money for the goods entrusted to him. He blackmailed her, but my grandmother was adamant: she stuck to her guns and would not give him anything else. According to eye-witness accounts, after the German invasion, this man came to my grandmother’s shop, beat her and took her to the place where Jews were being killed. There he buried her alive.
Our family owned a plot of land near Kaunas. A Russian Old Believer, Konstantin Samokhin, asked my grandfather, Moshe Levner, to sell him the plot adjacent to his own land. Grandfather refused, which made Samokhin very angry. As he left he said, ‘You’ll live to regret this.’ On the second day of the war my grandfather, my uncle and father were all at home. When he saw Samokhin with Germans out in the yard, my father ran off and hid on the landing of a neighbour’s house. The mistress of that house realized that my father was hiding from the Germans and drove him out, shouting as she did so. The Germans caught my father, took him back into his own house, found my grandfather and uncle as well, and led them all off to Fort Seven, where they were shot. As soon as the Germans left, some Lithuanian neighbours broke into the house and stole everything they could take.
Another uncle, Henekh Levner, was a strong imposing man and could turn his hand to anything. He was also a very fine 3584 VM Smuggled in Potato 25/8/10 9:59 AM Page 289 cook; the commandant of the ghetto took him on to work as his family’s cook. During the ‘Great Action’ my mother was sent to the Ninth Fort. Henekh came out looking for us, running round shouting and calling for my mother, but could not find her. He realized that things were looking very bad. Trembling with fear, he rushed to the Gestapo officer Rauca. Henekh beseeched him, lying that his own wife and children had been sent to Fort Nine and begging Rauca not to send them there. Rauca said, ‘Fetch them back. Take a Lithuanian policeman with you and look for her.’ Henekh turned to one of the Lithuanian policemen, promising that he would pay him fifty marks for his trouble.
They began looking for my mother in the long column of people, running about like lunatics, calling out, and asking people if they had seen her. Mother was half-stunned by everything going on around her. In her hand she held a little bag in which she had been keeping her money and valuables ‘for a rainy day’: she did not realize that day had already dawned. When Henekh eventually found her, he grabbed this bag from her hands and gave it to the Lithuanian policeman. This made my mother very angry, she had no idea that the money had been used to buy her own and her children’s lives back.
As early as the age of 3 I began to understand what was going on around me and to remember it all. The first thing I remember is how I spent all my time in the bed of my grandmother Simha; she had ten children and they were all in the ghetto. The children often used to visit her, bringing her an apple or a piece of bread. She did not eat what they brought but fed it to me. Only when I was no longer hungry did she eat what was left over. Grandmother Simha eventually died in the ghetto.
My mother, uncles and aunts would go out to work every day into the town. My eldest brother, Peisah, was employed by the Germans as a driver. He offered our mother the opportunity to drive us all out of the ghetto, but she refused.
During the ‘Children’s Action’ I was hidden first in the attic under the broken tiled roof. A few hours later I was taken into a pit that had been dug out in the room, where my uncle Meir Levner lived. To get into the pit, we had to pull out the drawer containing bed linen from under the divan, remove its plywood base and then, under that, open up the small door in the floor and climb down into the pit. The pit was cramped, with a very low roof and it was cold. I sat there with my mother and cousin, Edik Levner. Mother made sure that we did not make any noise.
The pit was only a metre square and there was not enough air; a pipe was fixed up leading out of the pit, through which we took it in turns to breathe air. Each person felt they had to wait too long until it was his or her turn. After a few hours we heard Germans come in looking for children. They asked Uncle Meir whether he was hiding any children, saying that if they found them, he and everybody else would be shot. Down in the pit we heard someone open up the base of the divan and start throwing out the bed linen. According to Uncle Meir, who had been standing in the room, numb with fear, the policeman accompanying the Germans did not bother to lift up the plywood base of the divan and informed the Germans that there was no one hiding in it. We remained in the pit for two days. All we had to eat or drink was water and a little bread. Things calmed down in the ghetto by the third day and people started being led out to their work places once again. What could still be heard however was the heart-rending cries of those whose children had been taken off. Uncle Meir took my mother and me back to our flat. The neighbour from the adjacent room, a shoemaker, caught sight of me, safe and sound, and began shouting and screaming, ‘How can that be? They killed my daughter and he’s still alive!’ He went straight to the Gestapo to complain.
As soon as the neighbour had left, my mother took me back to Uncle Meir, who in his turn, ran over to his sister Riva. Her husband, Zalman Baikovich, was in charge of the ghetto’s food store. Zalman used to send a cart out of the ghetto into the town with empty barrels and sacks on it, which would then be brought back containing food. Uncle Meir got in touch with a ‘kind’ SS officer, whom he knew well and paid him 20,000 marks, just to make sure that the next day when the cart would be driven up to the gate by its Jewish driver Lourie, he would sit on the open floor of the cart, where I would be hidden, to ensure that no problems arose at the gate. A Lithuanian woman would be waiting in the town on a deserted street to take charge of me.
Early in the morning of the following day, I had to curl up and be placed in a large bag, which was then locked, but a crack was left open, so that I should not suffocate. The bag was taken over to Baikovich’s house. It would have been dangerous to actually take me into the house, because Baikovich’s daughter Shulamith was hiding there. I was taken out of the bag and placed in an empty sack, which was left two metres from the house where there were some empty barrels. I lay there for four hours without moving, gripped by horrible fear. I could hear the steps and voices of the nearby Germans. When the cart drew up, empty barrels were loaded on to it and the sack with me in it was stowed in one of them.
Lourie, the cart driver, was sitting on a high seat. He placed his feet in the barrel that contained the sack with me in it. The German sat down on the floor of the cart and we all drove out of the ghetto without any problems. Miss Balchinaite, as arranged, met us. She lifted me out of the sack where I had been lying curled up. It was several hours before I could stand upright again. I was all of five and a half.
Meir himself managed to escape, but my uncle Chaim Levner, who served in the Jewish ghetto police, was shot later on for refusing to help the Nazis carry out another of their round-ups.
Josef and Aviva Gilis
From Smuggled in Potato Sacks
Fifty Stories of the Hidden Children of the Kaunas Ghetto
Editors
Solomon Abramovich
and Yakov Zilberg
Girsh Gilis, a jeweller and watchmaker, and Chana, née Levner, a housewife, had three sons: Peisah (1926), Izya (1928) and myself, in August 1938. When my mother was pregnant with me, she was prepared to have an abortion, but her brothers intervened, ‘Don’t do that, he’ll bring you good luck!’
My paternal grandfather, Peisah, had been a jeweller and watchmaker in Kretinga. After his death my grandmother (I do not even know her name) had taken over the business and with the help of her sons made a success of it. One of her local customers had often taken items from my grandmother to sell for her. Not long before the war she stopped trading with him, because he had begun to keep the money for the goods entrusted to him. He blackmailed her, but my grandmother was adamant: she stuck to her guns and would not give him anything else. According to eye-witness accounts, after the German invasion, this man came to my grandmother’s shop, beat her and took her to the place where Jews were being killed. There he buried her alive.
Our family owned a plot of land near Kaunas. A Russian Old Believer, Konstantin Samokhin, asked my grandfather, Moshe Levner, to sell him the plot adjacent to his own land. Grandfather refused, which made Samokhin very angry. As he left he said, ‘You’ll live to regret this.’ On the second day of the war my grandfather, my uncle and father were all at home. When he saw Samokhin with Germans out in the yard, my father ran off and hid on the landing of a neighbour’s house. The mistress of that house realized that my father was hiding from the Germans and drove him out, shouting as she did so. The Germans caught my father, took him back into his own house, found my grandfather and uncle as well, and led them all off to Fort Seven, where they were shot. As soon as the Germans left, some Lithuanian neighbours broke into the house and stole everything they could take.
Another uncle, Henekh Levner, was a strong imposing man and could turn his hand to anything. He was also a very fine 3584 VM Smuggled in Potato 25/8/10 9:59 AM Page 289 cook; the commandant of the ghetto took him on to work as his family’s cook. During the ‘Great Action’ my mother was sent to the Ninth Fort. Henekh came out looking for us, running round shouting and calling for my mother, but could not find her. He realized that things were looking very bad. Trembling with fear, he rushed to the Gestapo officer Rauca. Henekh beseeched him, lying that his own wife and children had been sent to Fort Nine and begging Rauca not to send them there. Rauca said, ‘Fetch them back. Take a Lithuanian policeman with you and look for her.’ Henekh turned to one of the Lithuanian policemen, promising that he would pay him fifty marks for his trouble.
They began looking for my mother in the long column of people, running about like lunatics, calling out, and asking people if they had seen her. Mother was half-stunned by everything going on around her. In her hand she held a little bag in which she had been keeping her money and valuables ‘for a rainy day’: she did not realize that day had already dawned. When Henekh eventually found her, he grabbed this bag from her hands and gave it to the Lithuanian policeman. This made my mother very angry, she had no idea that the money had been used to buy her own and her children’s lives back.
As early as the age of 3 I began to understand what was going on around me and to remember it all. The first thing I remember is how I spent all my time in the bed of my grandmother Simha; she had ten children and they were all in the ghetto. The children often used to visit her, bringing her an apple or a piece of bread. She did not eat what they brought but fed it to me. Only when I was no longer hungry did she eat what was left over. Grandmother Simha eventually died in the ghetto.
My mother, uncles and aunts would go out to work every day into the town. My eldest brother, Peisah, was employed by the Germans as a driver. He offered our mother the opportunity to drive us all out of the ghetto, but she refused.
During the ‘Children’s Action’ I was hidden first in the attic under the broken tiled roof. A few hours later I was taken into a pit that had been dug out in the room, where my uncle Meir Levner lived. To get into the pit, we had to pull out the drawer containing bed linen from under the divan, remove its plywood base and then, under that, open up the small door in the floor and climb down into the pit. The pit was cramped, with a very low roof and it was cold. I sat there with my mother and cousin, Edik Levner. Mother made sure that we did not make any noise.
The pit was only a metre square and there was not enough air; a pipe was fixed up leading out of the pit, through which we took it in turns to breathe air. Each person felt they had to wait too long until it was his or her turn. After a few hours we heard Germans come in looking for children. They asked Uncle Meir whether he was hiding any children, saying that if they found them, he and everybody else would be shot. Down in the pit we heard someone open up the base of the divan and start throwing out the bed linen. According to Uncle Meir, who had been standing in the room, numb with fear, the policeman accompanying the Germans did not bother to lift up the plywood base of the divan and informed the Germans that there was no one hiding in it. We remained in the pit for two days. All we had to eat or drink was water and a little bread. Things calmed down in the ghetto by the third day and people started being led out to their work places once again. What could still be heard however was the heart-rending cries of those whose children had been taken off. Uncle Meir took my mother and me back to our flat. The neighbour from the adjacent room, a shoemaker, caught sight of me, safe and sound, and began shouting and screaming, ‘How can that be? They killed my daughter and he’s still alive!’ He went straight to the Gestapo to complain.
As soon as the neighbour had left, my mother took me back to Uncle Meir, who in his turn, ran over to his sister Riva. Her husband, Zalman Baikovich, was in charge of the ghetto’s food store. Zalman used to send a cart out of the ghetto into the town with empty barrels and sacks on it, which would then be brought back containing food. Uncle Meir got in touch with a ‘kind’ SS officer, whom he knew well and paid him 20,000 marks, just to make sure that the next day when the cart would be driven up to the gate by its Jewish driver Lourie, he would sit on the open floor of the cart, where I would be hidden, to ensure that no problems arose at the gate. A Lithuanian woman would be waiting in the town on a deserted street to take charge of me.
Early in the morning of the following day, I had to curl up and be placed in a large bag, which was then locked, but a crack was left open, so that I should not suffocate. The bag was taken over to Baikovich’s house. It would have been dangerous to actually take me into the house, because Baikovich’s daughter Shulamith was hiding there. I was taken out of the bag and placed in an empty sack, which was left two metres from the house where there were some empty barrels. I lay there for four hours without moving, gripped by horrible fear. I could hear the steps and voices of the nearby Germans. When the cart drew up, empty barrels were loaded on to it and the sack with me in it was stowed in one of them.
Lourie, the cart driver, was sitting on a high seat. He placed his feet in the barrel that contained the sack with me in it. The German sat down on the floor of the cart and we all drove out of the ghetto without any problems. Miss Balchinaite, as arranged, met us. She lifted me out of the sack where I had been lying curled up. It was several hours before I could stand upright again. I was all of five and a half.
Meir himself managed to escape, but my uncle Chaim Levner, who served in the Jewish ghetto police, was shot later on for refusing to help the Nazis carry out another of their round-ups.
Balchinaite kept me in her house for a week, but then took me to Zhemaitija, to a village called Grazhuriu, near the town of Kvederna, to stay with her sister Barbora and brother-in-law Jonas Balchinas. They had no children of their own. That was at the beginning of April 1944. By this time I was so used to going hungry that I often turned food down. I found it impossible to eat. Realizing that I had lost my appetite, Jonas used to make me drink a small glass of home-made vodka every day. My appetite soon came back. I got used to Jonas and followed him about wherever he went. After a while I began to call Jonas ‘Father’ and Barbora ‘Mama’.
In Jonas’ house there also lived Barbora’s sister Stefania, an uneducated woman who could not even write, but sincere, kind and friendly. She grew fond of me and used to treat me like one of the family. I remember clearly how some Germans who came into the farmstead treated me to some chocolate and I said ‘Danke schön’; the Germans were surprised and asked how I knew German. Jonas explained that I had grown up in Königsberg. When the fighting was close to our village, Stefania used to take me into the woods and hide out there with me, until the danger was past.
Not only did Jonas grow crops, but he was also a server in the village church. For many years he had known the priest there and had complete confidence in him. He asked the priest for help, so as to keep me and his own family safe. The priest was a kind, humane man. He found a space for the right year in the book in which he recorded marriages and births, and registered me as Vitautas Balchinas. The priest wrote me out a birth certificate. A story was concocted for the inhabitants of the village to the effect that Barbora had gone to Königsberg in 1938 for medical treatment and had been pregnant at the time and given birth there. Since she was still feeling weak, she had come back to the village, leaving the boy with her cousin who was ready to look after him. Only now had she at last brought him home.
Apart from Yiddish I did not know any other languages, but my colloquial Yiddish was accepted in the village as German. The neighbours suspected that I was Jewish, but by this time the front line was approaching ever nearer and nobody gave me away.
When it was all over, my brother Izya came to the village to fetch me back. Izya was 16 years old at the time. From him I learnt that Peisah had perished in Dachau a few weeks before it was liberated. Izya had managed to escape in a group of about thirty prisoners when the ghetto was set on fire. They were chased, some had been killed, but Izya survived, pretending he was shot dead. Izya was hidden by the mother of his friend, Alfonsas Rudminaitis. Jonas and Barbora tried hard to persuade Izya to leave me with them, because, after all, times were hard. Izya did not agree though: he said that we needed to be in Kaunas and wait there, since our mother might soon be coming back from a concentration camp. However, in Kaunas there was nothing to eat, so in the end Izya returned me to the Balchinas home.
Our mother had been transferred to Stutthof, where three times she had succeeded in running out of the row of prisoners destined for the crematorium into the ‘correct’ queue of people. She had also survived the ‘March of Death’. After the liberation she came to fetch me.
I was 7 by then and mother was 52, but she looked desperately old and I did not recognize her. I used to say, ‘What does that Yid woman want with me? Take her away!’ Jonas and Barbora persuaded my mother to stay and live with them, saying that there would be enough room and food in their new house. My mother stayed on there for a few weeks, so that I could get used to her; she devoted all her time and attention to me. She used to tell me about our old home and various little details soon began to resurface in my memory. Eventually I realized that Chana was my real mother. After that she took me back to Kaunas
My mother was an energetic and enterprising woman. She started baking rolls, which she sold at the market. It was hard to come by any kind of food and her rolls sold out as fast as she could bake them. Our room was soon full of sacks of flour and sugar. Under the bed little sacks containing money were kept. There was a good deal of it. But in 1947 the old currency was replaced with new notes, which made everyone’s savings worthless. It had also become dangerous by then to bake rolls and sell them privately: the Soviet authorities were coming down hard on all forms of private enterprise. In the meantime someone had told us that the Balchinas couple had died.
In 1990 I was paid a visit by a well-known Lithuanian journalist, Birute Vishniauskaite. I told her about my earlier life and asked her to find out whether anyone from the Balchinas family was still alive. This was what she found out: Barbora had indeed died in the early 1950s, but Jonas had lived to the age of 105. After the death of Barbora, Jonas had taken a second wife, her sister Stefania. All those years he had hoped to see us again. He had finally died not long before the journalist made her trip to his village. Now the only person from the family still alive was Stefania. In 1992 I visited Stefania. She was 88 at the time and was very glad to see me. She lived in a house on her own. I helped her to prepare firewood for the winter and hired people to help her out in the house, leaving her a large amount of money.
When I visited her again a week later, she complained that she could no longer find the money. We searched the house, but there was no money anywhere. It turned out that poor illiterate Stefania could not read the amounts on the notes and had handed the people she needed to pay the whole pile, just saying, ‘Take what you are due.’ Soon after that Stefania died. Jonas Balchinas, Barbora and Stefania have been recorded as ‘Righteous among the Nations’. My conscience still troubles me to this day with the thought that I did not do as much for the Balchinas family as I might have done.
I draw a clear distinction between those Lithuanians who are rampant anti-Semites and those who during the war were putting their own lives in danger by rescuing Jews. Since Lithuania became independent, I have been going back every year to visit those who helped save me and my relatives, assisting and paying them the respect they deserve. This gives me a real sense of satisfaction.
In 1948, at the age of 10, I went to school for the first time. As a young man I was a keen sportsman, a skilful motorcyclist and tennis player, and competed in Lithuania’s team, before going on to become a tennis coach. Later on I studied and worked as a coach in the Kaliningrad Education Institute. I married Aviva Feller, whom I had known ever since I had first gone to school.
Aviva, born in 1940, was taken into the Kaunas Ghetto as a child. After the ‘Great Action’ Aviva had been very ill and her mother had said at the time, ‘It would be better for her to die a natural death than to be killed by the Germans.’ Her father, Dr Feller, insisted, ‘I am going to make her better.’ He got hold of some medicine and did indeed make his daughter better. Ever since then, one of Aviva’s heart valves has not functioned properly, which is even more of a problem now. When Aviva’s father had learnt that there was going to be a round-up of children, he went to see Doctor Elkes, a head of the Jewish Council, but did not find him at home. Aviva’s father talked to the doctor’s wife, and asked her to help take his daughter out of the ghetto and into hiding. She replied, ‘What is going to happen to all the children will happen to your daughter as well.’ That statement, undeniably true, which underlined how all were equal before God, seemed harsh and unfeeling to Aviva’s father at the time. It left a searing wound in him and was something he could never forget. Aviva’s father could not rest and when he went out into the town with his brigade, he made contact with Jonas Vainiauskas, a stage-set designer, whose children he had treated before the war free of charge. He asked the man to hide Aviva; Jonas and his wife Onute immediately agreed. Aviva was brought out through a hole in the fence and taken to Shanchiai, a suburb of Kaunas.
I came to Israel in 1972 with Aviva, our daughter Simona and my mother. I was able to obtain responsible posts. I joined the Labour Party, and became an active party worker. Today I am a pensioner and I no longer take part in any political activities. Aviva completed training as a nurse and worked in Israel in her chosen profession.
Netanya, Israel, 2008
First published in 2011 by Vallentine Mitchell
London, Portland, OR
In Jonas’ house there also lived Barbora’s sister Stefania, an uneducated woman who could not even write, but sincere, kind and friendly. She grew fond of me and used to treat me like one of the family. I remember clearly how some Germans who came into the farmstead treated me to some chocolate and I said ‘Danke schön’; the Germans were surprised and asked how I knew German. Jonas explained that I had grown up in Königsberg. When the fighting was close to our village, Stefania used to take me into the woods and hide out there with me, until the danger was past.
Not only did Jonas grow crops, but he was also a server in the village church. For many years he had known the priest there and had complete confidence in him. He asked the priest for help, so as to keep me and his own family safe. The priest was a kind, humane man. He found a space for the right year in the book in which he recorded marriages and births, and registered me as Vitautas Balchinas. The priest wrote me out a birth certificate. A story was concocted for the inhabitants of the village to the effect that Barbora had gone to Königsberg in 1938 for medical treatment and had been pregnant at the time and given birth there. Since she was still feeling weak, she had come back to the village, leaving the boy with her cousin who was ready to look after him. Only now had she at last brought him home.
Apart from Yiddish I did not know any other languages, but my colloquial Yiddish was accepted in the village as German. The neighbours suspected that I was Jewish, but by this time the front line was approaching ever nearer and nobody gave me away.
When it was all over, my brother Izya came to the village to fetch me back. Izya was 16 years old at the time. From him I learnt that Peisah had perished in Dachau a few weeks before it was liberated. Izya had managed to escape in a group of about thirty prisoners when the ghetto was set on fire. They were chased, some had been killed, but Izya survived, pretending he was shot dead. Izya was hidden by the mother of his friend, Alfonsas Rudminaitis. Jonas and Barbora tried hard to persuade Izya to leave me with them, because, after all, times were hard. Izya did not agree though: he said that we needed to be in Kaunas and wait there, since our mother might soon be coming back from a concentration camp. However, in Kaunas there was nothing to eat, so in the end Izya returned me to the Balchinas home.
Our mother had been transferred to Stutthof, where three times she had succeeded in running out of the row of prisoners destined for the crematorium into the ‘correct’ queue of people. She had also survived the ‘March of Death’. After the liberation she came to fetch me.
I was 7 by then and mother was 52, but she looked desperately old and I did not recognize her. I used to say, ‘What does that Yid woman want with me? Take her away!’ Jonas and Barbora persuaded my mother to stay and live with them, saying that there would be enough room and food in their new house. My mother stayed on there for a few weeks, so that I could get used to her; she devoted all her time and attention to me. She used to tell me about our old home and various little details soon began to resurface in my memory. Eventually I realized that Chana was my real mother. After that she took me back to Kaunas
My mother was an energetic and enterprising woman. She started baking rolls, which she sold at the market. It was hard to come by any kind of food and her rolls sold out as fast as she could bake them. Our room was soon full of sacks of flour and sugar. Under the bed little sacks containing money were kept. There was a good deal of it. But in 1947 the old currency was replaced with new notes, which made everyone’s savings worthless. It had also become dangerous by then to bake rolls and sell them privately: the Soviet authorities were coming down hard on all forms of private enterprise. In the meantime someone had told us that the Balchinas couple had died.
In 1990 I was paid a visit by a well-known Lithuanian journalist, Birute Vishniauskaite. I told her about my earlier life and asked her to find out whether anyone from the Balchinas family was still alive. This was what she found out: Barbora had indeed died in the early 1950s, but Jonas had lived to the age of 105. After the death of Barbora, Jonas had taken a second wife, her sister Stefania. All those years he had hoped to see us again. He had finally died not long before the journalist made her trip to his village. Now the only person from the family still alive was Stefania. In 1992 I visited Stefania. She was 88 at the time and was very glad to see me. She lived in a house on her own. I helped her to prepare firewood for the winter and hired people to help her out in the house, leaving her a large amount of money.
When I visited her again a week later, she complained that she could no longer find the money. We searched the house, but there was no money anywhere. It turned out that poor illiterate Stefania could not read the amounts on the notes and had handed the people she needed to pay the whole pile, just saying, ‘Take what you are due.’ Soon after that Stefania died. Jonas Balchinas, Barbora and Stefania have been recorded as ‘Righteous among the Nations’. My conscience still troubles me to this day with the thought that I did not do as much for the Balchinas family as I might have done.
I draw a clear distinction between those Lithuanians who are rampant anti-Semites and those who during the war were putting their own lives in danger by rescuing Jews. Since Lithuania became independent, I have been going back every year to visit those who helped save me and my relatives, assisting and paying them the respect they deserve. This gives me a real sense of satisfaction.
In 1948, at the age of 10, I went to school for the first time. As a young man I was a keen sportsman, a skilful motorcyclist and tennis player, and competed in Lithuania’s team, before going on to become a tennis coach. Later on I studied and worked as a coach in the Kaliningrad Education Institute. I married Aviva Feller, whom I had known ever since I had first gone to school.
Aviva, born in 1940, was taken into the Kaunas Ghetto as a child. After the ‘Great Action’ Aviva had been very ill and her mother had said at the time, ‘It would be better for her to die a natural death than to be killed by the Germans.’ Her father, Dr Feller, insisted, ‘I am going to make her better.’ He got hold of some medicine and did indeed make his daughter better. Ever since then, one of Aviva’s heart valves has not functioned properly, which is even more of a problem now. When Aviva’s father had learnt that there was going to be a round-up of children, he went to see Doctor Elkes, a head of the Jewish Council, but did not find him at home. Aviva’s father talked to the doctor’s wife, and asked her to help take his daughter out of the ghetto and into hiding. She replied, ‘What is going to happen to all the children will happen to your daughter as well.’ That statement, undeniably true, which underlined how all were equal before God, seemed harsh and unfeeling to Aviva’s father at the time. It left a searing wound in him and was something he could never forget. Aviva’s father could not rest and when he went out into the town with his brigade, he made contact with Jonas Vainiauskas, a stage-set designer, whose children he had treated before the war free of charge. He asked the man to hide Aviva; Jonas and his wife Onute immediately agreed. Aviva was brought out through a hole in the fence and taken to Shanchiai, a suburb of Kaunas.
I came to Israel in 1972 with Aviva, our daughter Simona and my mother. I was able to obtain responsible posts. I joined the Labour Party, and became an active party worker. Today I am a pensioner and I no longer take part in any political activities. Aviva completed training as a nurse and worked in Israel in her chosen profession.
Netanya, Israel, 2008
First published in 2011 by Vallentine Mitchell
London, Portland, OR