Rescuers of Jews

     I, Viktė Paukštienė, née Golumbiauskaitė, was born on 9 May 1931 in Žalioji farmstead, Butrimonys rural district, Alytus County. My parents, Petras Golumbiauskas and Pranė Golumbiauskienė, were well-off and owned a fairly large farm of about 60 hectares of land and many livestock. In addition to me, there were three other sisters in the family – Janina, Marė and Stasė – and a brother, Zenonas.
     In 1941, after Nazi Germany occupied Lithuania, our entire family was living in our home. At the end of February 1942, a Jewish family of six asked my parents for help and shelter. Without much hesitation, my parents took the Jewish family in and hid them in the bathhouse. At night, we would bring them water and food and tell them the latest news. Although the bathhouse stood in a secluded location, the neighbours noticed that Jewish people were hiding there. The Germans were informed about this.
     On 2 April 1942, an armed squad arrived and surrounded the bathhouse where the Jewish family was being hidden. A shootout followed: the Jewish men were killed, the Jewish women were arrested, and only one young Jewish man managed to escape into the forest. That same day, on German orders, the police of the Butrimonys rural district arrested my father, Petras Golumbiauskas, and his brother Bronius Golumbiauskas and took them to Alytus. My father and his brother were imprisoned in the Alytus detention facility for hiding and sheltering Jewish people.
     From the day they were taken away and imprisoned, we never saw them again. At first, it was said that they had been taken to Germany for forced labour. Some time later, after my mother repeatedly inquired about their fate, she was informed that they had been interrogated and shot.
     On the night of 16 September 1942, the police came to our home and took my mother and all of us children to the Alytus prisoner-of-war camp. That night, we were taken away to be shot as part of the genocide of the Polish people. The police behaved brutally: they beat my mother when she tried to resist, did not even give us time to get dressed, and did not allow us to take anything from the house, neither food nor essential clothing. When we arrived at the Alytus prisoner-of-war camp, we found pits already prepared for burials. That same day, death certificates were issued for all the prisoners and a priest was summoned. The camp was under strict guard, and armed men dressed in black, wearing armbands on their sleeves, were walking everywhere. The execution was supposed to take place immediately, but for reasons unknown to us, it was cancelled.
     We continued to be imprisoned in the Alytus prisoner-of-war camp. We were subjected to a prison regime: we lived in barracks surrounded by wire fences and heavy security, slept on bare floors, and received food only once a day. After approximately one or two weeks, people were transported from the Alytus prisoner-of-war camp to Germany for forced labour. Because we children were still very young, my mother and we children were not taken away. And so we remained there.
     At the beginning of October 1942, we were transferred to the Radviliškis forced labour camp. In the Radviliškis forced labour camp, my mother performed forced labour digging peat. The work was extremely hard and the food was very scarce. Our family of six received only a quarter of a loaf of bread and two ladles of soup per day. Food was distributed according to the number of people who worked, so we received only one person’s ration and were constantly starving. Because of the lack of food and hunger, and with the onset of the winter cold, we children began to swell and fall ill.
     At the end of December 1942, we were released from the Radviliškis forced labour camp. We simply walked wherever the road took us. We had to beg for food and alms, and sometimes kind people we met along the way gave us shelter. When we reached our native village, we found strangers living in our home – Lithuanian settlers who had arrived from Poland. Our own family home no longer belonged to us.
     Taking pity on my mother and her young children, the people living in our house gave us a small room, since we had no shelter and nowhere else to go. We lived in extreme hardship and poverty. Ours was a large family, and those of us who were older went into service merely in exchange for a morsel of bread. As a result, we did not even have the opportunity to attend school and remained without an education.
     In the summer of 1944, after the Russians occupied Lithuania, our home was returned to us as victims of German Nazism. We found nothing but bare walls – everything had been stolen or destroyed. Before we were taken to the Alytus prisoner-of-war camp and the Radviliškis forced labour camp, we had lived comfortably. When we regained our home, we found nothing left. We had to start our lives again from the beginning. It was extremely difficult because our mother was left alone with five young children. Those of us who were older went to work for other people, but it was still difficult for the family to get back on its feet, as there were no adult men in the household to help with the work.