Rescued Jewish Children

I was born on 10 September 1941 at the time of the Holocaust. In my passport, Kaunas is indicated as the place of birth. Actually, it should be – the Kaunas Ghetto. It was that inferno where in the first days of the war the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators drove all the Jews of Kaunas. Among them there were the newlyweds Levin – my pregnant mother Zina (nee Shneideryte), and my father Jurgis (Gregori, Grigori), as well as their parents and all the relatives. It was a miracle that we have survived. I was too young to remember anything from a childhood passed behind barbed wire. Therefore it is natural that my narrative is based on the reminiscences of my late mother and archival documents that I have collected during the past ten years. Both of my parents came from fairly affluent families. They acquired a good education for those times. My father finished the Kaunas German gymnasium in June 1933. Before the war he was a manager of the Trikol dry-cleaners. This company belonged to the Danish firm Raaschou & Schmidt. In the ghetto, he initially worked in the construction site of the Kaunas airport, and then as a worker at the Trikol dry-cleaners where the tunics of German officers were cleaned. On 15 July 1944, my father and my grandfather Juozas (Joseph) Shneider were taken to Dachau concentration camp. Father died there on 15 January 1945. My grandmother Stela Shneideriene was taken from the ghetto to the Salaspils concentration camp in Latvia. The date of her death has not been determined yet. I should call the story of my rescue a miracle. Early in May 1944 the rumours spread that the ghetto would be soon liquidated. Most of the inmates realised that the chances of escape for grownup's were minimal; therefore most of the parents did all they could to save their children. My mother managed to come into contact with Bronislava Kristopavičienė, a medical nurse whom she knew very well. She selflessly agreed to carry me from the ghetto and hide me in a village. She also said that the risk was high, but it would be possible since I was a girl and not a boy. Bronislava gave me some soporific medicine, put me – senseless and helpless in a sack covered with sprouting potatoes, and... that was how I survived. Bronislava also rescued my mother and another Jewish family, the Kasimovs. I regret to say that the life of this kind-hearted Lithuanian woman took a tragic turn. Before the war her husband, Povilas Kristopavičius, was an officer, the head topographer of the Lithuanian army. In 1941, the “troika” of the NKVD sentenced him to 25 years and he was deported to Kolyma. In 1946, the “forest brothers” shot her 16-year-old son dead in her presence because he refused to join the resistance fighters. In 1946 my mother married Leonid Rysenberg, who adopted me in 1948. He brought me up from the age of five, and I had his surname. It goes without saying that my mother was hiding from me the fact that he was not my real father. I first heard about it from “well-wishers” quite late, just before my marriage. During recent years, I have been trying to restore the history of my real father's short life. As can be seen from a few surviving photographs, I look very much like him.
With a Needle in the Heart. Memoirs of Former Prisoners of Ghettos and Concentration Camps. Genocide and resistance research centre of Lithuania. Vilnius. 2003.