One winter night...
by Elena Žalinkevičaitė-Petrauskienė
National Artist of Honour
It was heavy winter. The sun sets early this time of year. The night had already come by, when the phone rang in the apartment. I picked up with no special feeling or interest, and heard the words: “This is Mrs. Karlinskienė speaking”. I was surprised and cheered at the same time. Mrs. Karlinskienė was a good friend of mine, the wife of doctor Karlinskis, and we had spent several summers in the same neighbourhood in the resort town of Palanga. Of course, at a different time, this phone call would have been just an ordinary warm invitation for a chat with a friend, but we were in the middle of the grim Nazi occupation and Mrs. Karlinskienė was of the Jewish nationality...
“I have a favour to ask,” I heard from the phone.
“Please, come to me at once. I will be waiting,” I said and even without hearing the answer realised what nonsense I had just said. At that time, we were living in Laisvės Avenue near the theatre in the very centre of the city. Most of the apartments in the house were occupied by the Germans and it was actually impossible to get in unnoticed.
“No, I can’t at the moment... Please, come to the churchyard gate tomorrow at 7 pm,” she told me the name of the church, but I can’t recall it now.
“Sure. I will come,” I replied.
She hung up. From my pious associates, I found out where the church was and went to its gate. I looked around but no one was there. I waited for some time thinking about that phone call and remembered that the voice of the caller had seemed a bit strange to me, so I thought that this might have been a lame joke and decided to go home. All of a sudden, a miserable and unfamiliar woman – as far as I could see in the dim light – appeared from the gateway and approached me.
“Thank you for coming,” she said quietly.
“Is that you?” I was surprised. “You’ve changed so much. I would have never recognised you.”
“You can’t recognise me, because we do not know each other...”
“Then why did you call yourself Mrs. Karlinskienė?”
“You wouldn’t have come, if someone you don’t know asked you to come. I am Mrs. Karlinskienė’s sister.”
“I did not know Mrs. Karlinskienė had a sister...”
The stranger winced, and despair and fear ran across her face.
“I believe you,” I said. “Where is Karlinskienė?”
“I don’t know,” the woman replied, and the pain in her voice convinced me better than a thousand words. We stood there in silence for a moment.
“I have a girl. She is blond and blue-eyed. She doesn’t look like a Jew at all. A roundup is coming, I have been warned. She will be killed. Please, take her, save her,” her whispers mixed with tears. “My husband is Mr. Pomerancas, a violinist. You must have heard of him. Take the girl, she is so pretty...”
“Take her... But how?”
“Come to the ghetto.”
I realised the impracticability of the scheme. Me going into the ghetto, taking the child and leaving...
“This is impossible. But if you could take her out of there, I will host her. You should think about it and I will think about it – we might come to a solution somehow. But don’t hesitate,” I added.
We parted. She called me a few days later. This time, we met in the gateway of the Polish gymnasium. There was a man, who agreed to take the baby from the ghetto and bring it to us. Director of the fur factory, a Lithuanian, whose name I can not recall. However, he did not show up on the appointed day (or night to be precise). A few days later, another day was appointed by phone. He did not show up again. After several nights of waiting, when I had lost all hope, a doorbell rang quietly at about 3 am. I thought this was my husband Kipras Petrauskas coming from the hunt so I rushed to the door. But upon opening the door, I saw an unfamiliar man and an old woman with a big wrap in her arms. I quickly let them in, slammed the door and took the guests to the kitchen, which was the most remote place of our apartment. We unwrapped the baby. She was sleeping quietly. I took it to my bedroom. The man gave me a letter, a bundle of clothes, a bottle with a teat and left together with the old woman.
I was left alone with a sleeping baby. My children and the nanny did not hear anything and were sleeping tightly. Only then I realised the entire gravity of the situation. I remembered the circumstances of death of the notary Vilkaviškis family... I sat there and thought: what if this man brings the Germans the next day?.. He might not even wait for the dawn… Or he might... I thought about many things that night. This even might have been a wrong baby. But anyway it was a baby, an innocent baby.
I read the note that was given to me: “Her name is Suzi, but you should call her Danutė.”
I looked into the bundle, returned to the bedroom, sat down on the edge of the bed and started pondering again how to minimise the risk. Every visitor – and we had lots of visitors – would definitely notice the new family member. Moreover, her appearance had to be explained to my children and the nanny. My mother and my sister were living just round the corner (present address Liepos St 21). I decided to leave the girl with them for a while. But they would also want some kind of explanation. I remembered my cousin Adelė, who was living in Kiev. She was studying there and just before the German invasion we had heard that she married some Mr. Petrauskas. I forged a letter from her to me, in which Adelė was asking to take her daughter Danutė. I wrote that her husband had been killed and she herself was suffering from an illness in a hospital with no one to take care of the baby. An acquaintance of hers had ostensibly agreed to bring the baby to us on his way through Lithuania. I can not recall the name that I gave to this fictitious man. I tried to make the handwriting and the signature different from mine. Once I finished forging the letter, I patiently waited for the dawn. Then I took the girl, left a note for the nanny saying that I had went to my mother for breakfast (which was quite common) and left the apartment with the baby. I was lucky not to meet anyone in the street. And that morning, Danutė became the member of our family.
We were spared from peril many times by the fate, but this would be a story of many pages.
Returning to this day, I would like to note with great pride that the girl who was brought to me on that grim winter night has finished the Moscow conservatory under the famous violinist David Oistrakh and is further mastering her skills in post-graduate studies.
Unarmed Fighters. Ed. S. Binkienė. Vilnius, 1967
