Rescued Jewish Children

Letter to My Grandson Idan
Dan Vaintraub

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

Editors
Solomon Abramovich and Yakov Zilberg

My dear Idan!
Today you asked me how it was in Holocaust. I saw you, a gentle soul, hesitating to ask, trying not to hurt me.
Maybe it is time to tell you the story of a child from the ghetto. It all starts with the stories of my mother, Helena Vaintraub, born Girshovich. My father, Haim Vaintraub, who also survived this hell, reluctantly refused to speak about it until his death in May 1993. Only after his death my mother started to recount her ghetto stories; sometimes the details would differ, but the main events remained the same. Over the years, her stories merged with the few memories I had preserved deep down in my own head, hidden in the dark corners of my mind and reluctant to surface.
I was born on 10 November 1938 (the very night of Kristallnacht) and I was nearly 3 when we entered the ghetto. I was 5 years old on 17 November 1943, the day I was smuggled out of the ghetto.
The very first event I remember: it happened when I might have just turned 3 years old. There was a knock at the window, a sign that something ominous was stirring in the ghetto, my mother recalls. My parents got dressed and quickly dressed me. And then I asked in German ‘Das Ghetto ist Umtzingelt?’ (‘Is the Ghetto surrounded?’). How did a thought like this enter the mind of a 3-year-old? Perhaps I had heard the adults talking about this and associated it with a feeling of danger. Perhaps this was the reaction of a child seeing the look of terror in his parents’ faces.
It was very difficult sharing my memories with others. Especially difficult was recounting the story of the neighbours’ son who was older than me by a few years and who had once teased me in the street. I choke up with tears every time I recall this. Yet I have to tell it here for the sake of that boy whose name I don’t even remember but whose voice still hums in my head after all these years. My mother had clothed me in some kind of a dress or long apron before sending me out to play in the yard. That 6 or 7-year-old boy taunted me for wearing a dress in a song that he made up on the spot, the song that still rings in my ears today:

Danke di meidel trogt a kleidel,
Danke di meidel trogt a kleidel.

This means in Yiddish, ‘Danny the girl is wearing a gown’.
I can still hear his voice and I recognize it. Or perhaps I just imagine hearing it. But what difference does it make? That whole family perished. Whether in the ghetto or in the camps my mother could not remember.
The only thing left in this universe of that little boy who played in the streets of the Kaunas Ghetto is the song that he sang that autumn of 1941 which for sixty years has been preserved in the memory of another little boy.

I remember another chilling event that took place in the street. I was outside when I saw a beautiful wagon with nickel trimmings. I was thrilled by the sight of this car and started running so as not to loose sight of it. And then I caught sight of my mother standing at the entrance of our house, and she is mortified, there is a look of terror on her face that I will remember till the day I die. My mother recognized that the man in the convertible car was the ghetto commander.
The brigades were groups of several hundred men and women whom the Germans would lead to slave labour outside the ghetto. After removing the yellow star my mother slipped away from the brigade. She went to meet Marite, a Lithuanian lady who was a relative of my nanny. They were going to finalize the details of how to rescue me. On her way to meet Marite at the arranged place she suddenly spotted the history professor who had taught her at the university. Before she could even contemplate the danger that was posed, the professor lifted his hat in a gentlemanly manner and said, ‘Good luck Girshovitciute’, which was mother’s maiden name.
On 17 November 1943 I was smuggled out of the ghetto and straight into my nanny Mariona’s arms, after Father had bribed the Romanian soldiers who were in charge of watching the gates.
I remember a day when I was playing with Nanny Mariona’s knitting needles (I do not remember her surname). One needle represented Russian cannons and the other the Germans, and I was aware back then that the Russians were good and the Germans were bad. To hide the Russian cannons I stuck them inside the hay mattress but pushed too far and lost them inside; I remember Mariona being angry with me. This happened in Aleksotas, at the home of a Lithuanian couple, relatives of my nanny.
We were there until the spring of 1944 when my parents escaped from the ghetto. The River Neman separated the ghetto from the suburb where I was hiding and my parents crossed this river in a boat. Father had bought the boat from Gentiles in exchange for the family house in the very centre of Kaunas. An interesting fact: they kept the paper signed by my father all through the years of the communist era until the disintegration of USSR and Lithuania regained its independence – and then claimed the property for themselves.
So my parents moved in with my nanny’s relatives, but then they decided to move Mariona and me away to live with her other relatives in a tiny village called Zuikine. They were afraid that a little boy my age might behave with less caution in the presence of his mother and that this might endanger us all.
I have an amusing memory of being in the village. One goose got into the habit of biting me on the backside, he would creep up behind me and attack; it must have happened three or four times and has stuck in my memory.
In my new home I was given the name Antanas and the master of the house, Mr Kulikauskas, pretended I was his son. He and his wife became my adoptive parents and insisted I call them ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’, even when we were alone. Their children didn’t know that I was Jewish, they were told I was the son of relatives and that I had been orphaned. Sometimes five or six German soldiers from the anti-aircraft unit located nearby would sit at our long wooden farm table and my adoptive father would bring homemade schnapps and fresh bread, while the soldiers would bring preserved food, which may have been their battle rations. Sometimes we would be called to join them at the table, and sometimes Kulikauskas’ children would play with the soldiers at their military post and I would go with them. My ‘father’ would urge me not to go saying, ‘Do not go there and, if you do go, keep quiet’.
One day a high-ranking German officer came for dinner and we all sat at the table. The drink was flowing. Then the German said something that my adoptive father did not understand; I understood what the officer had said because German had been my first language, and so translated it to my ‘father’.
The German officer suddenly sobered up, ‘How come this child understands German?!’
My ‘father’ stroked my head with one hand, and with the other he pinched me hard in the leg. In a mixture of Lithuanian and German he answered, ‘Children are always wiser than we are’.
I will never know why the German decided to let the matter drop. Many years later, when the memories began to surface, I felt an enormous urge to find this officer and to ask him if he had known my true identity. On my only visit to German soil, I had to spend the night in Frankfurt. It was 13 September 1993. I went out to feel, to see and to smell Germany for the first time in my life. I skimmed the faces in the street wondering whether this or that man could be him. I peered into coffee shops trying to find the faces of older German men to see if this could be the officer from years past. Only later I did the maths; that officer would have been 40 years old in 1944, by then he would have been 90, if he hadn’t met his death somewhere in the war. But I couldn’t let the matter rest. Perhaps this was the ultimate expression of the ties between the victim and the executioner.
And finally I remember the thunder of cannons as the front approached. My adoptive mother prayed incessantly, I remember my nanny reciting prayers and knitting, of being rushed to the trenches that the Germans had built for cover. I never understood why the Germans would have cared for our safety. One day when we were all in one trench, a horrified German officer ran in shouting ‘Russian planes!’ I remember the terror in his face.
I don’t know if we stayed in the trench through the night, I don’t remember any explosions, I just remember that I felt hunger for the first time since coming to the village. When we emerged from the trench, there were no Germans, there were no Russians and there were no rockets. This was the end of July 1944.
My reunion with my parents was embarrassing rather than happy. It was a few weeks after the liberation of Kaunas by the Soviet Army. I remember myself standing in the middle of the barn facing the sunlit doorway and repeating time and again some Russian dirty words I had recently learned from passing Red Army soldiers, when suddenly I saw my mother’s shadow in the doorway.
Because of the strong sunlight I couldn’t see her face, but somehow I knew it for sure: this woman was my mother. After a few moments my father appeared in the doorway. Years later, he complained that he couldn’t expect any better from a person like me: all that I could learn from a Russian soldier was a couple of dirty words.

Anyhow they took me back to Kaunas where we spent the next twenty-five years together with Itamar and Abigail, my two cousin-orphans who survived the ghetto and were adopted by my parents. I graduated from the Kaunas Polytechnic Institute in 1961. We all emigrated to Israel 1972, where I work as selfemployed structural engineer.
I tried many times to organize my memories and put them on paper. Somehow I never succeeded to do it. Why? Fear? Maybe, but now I am finally able to complete the story. I think that it will be right that you, my dear Idan and your sister Karin will have my memoirs, and will read the life story of their grandfather who was fortunate not to end up as a cloud of smoke from a chimney.

With all my love,
Saba (Grandfather in Hebrew) Dan
Herclija, Israel, 2005

First published in 2011 by Vallentine Mitchell
London, Portland, OR