rescued jewish children
Benya Chaitas
‘If the Child Is Circumcised, He Will Be Saved’
Benya Chaitas
From: Smuggled in Potato Sacks
Fifty Stories of the Hidden Children of the Kaunas Ghetto
Editors
Solomon Abramovich
and Yakov Zilberg
In September 1939 my mother, Genia Saitovich, at the age of 18 set off from her native town of Rokishkis to Kaunas in search of employment. She began to work in one of the local kindergartens.
In Kaunas she met Leibe Chaitas, who was a carpenter by profession; they married in 1940. When the war started my parents decided to flee to Russia. My mother was seven months pregnant at the time. They had not covered a large distance from Kaunas, when the Germans caught up with them at the small town of Jonava.
The Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators drove everyone into the Market Square in Jonava to sort them out. At the time there were Soviet planes above the square and they started bombing. The Germans fled to seek safety and everyone else naturally started running off in all directions too. My parents ran back to the direction of Kaunas.
When my parents finally managed to reach Kaunas it was already occupied by the Germans. They returned to their flat under cover of night; they were too frightened by then to set foot outside. Only occasionally my father would go out looking for food.
Vilijampole, the district where my parents lived, had been chosen as the site for the ghetto, so some relatives moved into my parents’ room. The time for my mother to give birth was approaching, and my parents were getting very worried. I was born in 1941. A midwife by the name of Markovich attended my mother in secret; she survived the war and emigrated to Israel.
One of our relatives was a very religious woman. Naturally, the next question to be decided was whether or not I should be circumcised. The religious relative demanded that the circumcision should go ahead, saying, ‘If the child is circumcised, he will be saved’. So they did. The other problem arose immediately after I was born. Mother had no milk. The religious cousin took on the task. Every day she managed to get hold of 50 grammes of milk, which was very little, but better than nothing.
The Germans began to register all the inmates of the ghetto. They checked out everybody who was in the flat and removed everything that took their fancy. Mother told me about the ‘Great Action’:
On 27 October 1941, Germans left the first shift of workers at Aleksotas airport and did not let the night shift to go to work. This is why Leibe had not been at home at night between the 27th and 28th. On the evening of the 27th members of the Jewish police went round all the houses explaining that the next day, at six o’clock in the morning, all the inhabitants of the ghetto had to assemble in Democracy Square. In the morning I was shivering with fright. It wasraining and freezing cold, so I grabbed you, wrapped in as many pieces of cloth as I could find, turning you into a big bundle, and went out into the street. I went to the square with my cousin and her family. I could not hear you breathing and I was worried that I had suffocated you. Only when it was time for feeding did you start to give any signs of life. I sat down in some inconspicuous corner, the family stood round me and I fed. Meanwhile the Germans were lining everyone up in rows. I passed you to my cousin and ran to look for my husband. Once I had found Leibe, I felt calmer.
The men from the SS were drawing nearer and nearer to us to start sending people to the right or the left. The old and ill were being moved to the right, while the young and healthy were sent to the left. Our religious cousin was sent to the right and we went the left. Those sent to the right were then led away to the Ninth Fort.
On our return home, I found you were wet from head to foot.
In place of our cousin and her family, the ghetto police sent two more families to move into our quarters. Leibe’s brother Zalman and his wife Sara Chaitas also moved into our flat. So we lived, all crammed together until October 1943, when Zalman and Sara were sent to the Klooga Camp in Estonia. Zalman died there, Sara his wife was transferred to Stutthof and survived.
Initially I had hoped we would be transferred to Klooga as well. Zalman advised us to stay in Kaunas promising that if the conditions there were good they would let us know and, if it proved possible, we would join them later. The conditions in Klooga were perfectly dreadful . . .
When their area of the ghetto was reduced, my parents were ordered to leave their flat. Father found a small storehouse, cleaned it and we moved in there. We were joined by another of my mother’s cousins, Sara, her husband, Berl Shpak, and their son Boris. All three survived. Boris came to Israel and lives in Bat Yam. We lived in that storehouse, until the ‘Children’s Action’ took place.
That morning my father had gone off to work, leaving Mother to sleep on. Suddenly my mother’s cousin appeared, shouting, ‘Why are you still asleep? Get up, there’s a round-up! You can’t imagine what’s going on!’ Mother dressed in a hurry and was sitting there totally bewildered.
Benya Chaitas
From: Smuggled in Potato Sacks
Fifty Stories of the Hidden Children of the Kaunas Ghetto
Editors
Solomon Abramovich
and Yakov Zilberg
In September 1939 my mother, Genia Saitovich, at the age of 18 set off from her native town of Rokishkis to Kaunas in search of employment. She began to work in one of the local kindergartens.
In Kaunas she met Leibe Chaitas, who was a carpenter by profession; they married in 1940. When the war started my parents decided to flee to Russia. My mother was seven months pregnant at the time. They had not covered a large distance from Kaunas, when the Germans caught up with them at the small town of Jonava.
The Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators drove everyone into the Market Square in Jonava to sort them out. At the time there were Soviet planes above the square and they started bombing. The Germans fled to seek safety and everyone else naturally started running off in all directions too. My parents ran back to the direction of Kaunas.
When my parents finally managed to reach Kaunas it was already occupied by the Germans. They returned to their flat under cover of night; they were too frightened by then to set foot outside. Only occasionally my father would go out looking for food.
Vilijampole, the district where my parents lived, had been chosen as the site for the ghetto, so some relatives moved into my parents’ room. The time for my mother to give birth was approaching, and my parents were getting very worried. I was born in 1941. A midwife by the name of Markovich attended my mother in secret; she survived the war and emigrated to Israel.
One of our relatives was a very religious woman. Naturally, the next question to be decided was whether or not I should be circumcised. The religious relative demanded that the circumcision should go ahead, saying, ‘If the child is circumcised, he will be saved’. So they did. The other problem arose immediately after I was born. Mother had no milk. The religious cousin took on the task. Every day she managed to get hold of 50 grammes of milk, which was very little, but better than nothing.
The Germans began to register all the inmates of the ghetto. They checked out everybody who was in the flat and removed everything that took their fancy. Mother told me about the ‘Great Action’:
On 27 October 1941, Germans left the first shift of workers at Aleksotas airport and did not let the night shift to go to work. This is why Leibe had not been at home at night between the 27th and 28th. On the evening of the 27th members of the Jewish police went round all the houses explaining that the next day, at six o’clock in the morning, all the inhabitants of the ghetto had to assemble in Democracy Square. In the morning I was shivering with fright. It wasraining and freezing cold, so I grabbed you, wrapped in as many pieces of cloth as I could find, turning you into a big bundle, and went out into the street. I went to the square with my cousin and her family. I could not hear you breathing and I was worried that I had suffocated you. Only when it was time for feeding did you start to give any signs of life. I sat down in some inconspicuous corner, the family stood round me and I fed. Meanwhile the Germans were lining everyone up in rows. I passed you to my cousin and ran to look for my husband. Once I had found Leibe, I felt calmer.
The men from the SS were drawing nearer and nearer to us to start sending people to the right or the left. The old and ill were being moved to the right, while the young and healthy were sent to the left. Our religious cousin was sent to the right and we went the left. Those sent to the right were then led away to the Ninth Fort.
On our return home, I found you were wet from head to foot.
In place of our cousin and her family, the ghetto police sent two more families to move into our quarters. Leibe’s brother Zalman and his wife Sara Chaitas also moved into our flat. So we lived, all crammed together until October 1943, when Zalman and Sara were sent to the Klooga Camp in Estonia. Zalman died there, Sara his wife was transferred to Stutthof and survived.
Initially I had hoped we would be transferred to Klooga as well. Zalman advised us to stay in Kaunas promising that if the conditions there were good they would let us know and, if it proved possible, we would join them later. The conditions in Klooga were perfectly dreadful . . .
When their area of the ghetto was reduced, my parents were ordered to leave their flat. Father found a small storehouse, cleaned it and we moved in there. We were joined by another of my mother’s cousins, Sara, her husband, Berl Shpak, and their son Boris. All three survived. Boris came to Israel and lives in Bat Yam. We lived in that storehouse, until the ‘Children’s Action’ took place.
That morning my father had gone off to work, leaving Mother to sleep on. Suddenly my mother’s cousin appeared, shouting, ‘Why are you still asleep? Get up, there’s a round-up! You can’t imagine what’s going on!’ Mother dressed in a hurry and was sitting there totally bewildered.
From Mother’s memoirs:
There was chaos outside in the streets. Lorries were driving to and fro. Warnings were coming through loudspeakers: the Germans were insisting that everyone stay inside. I grabbed you and opened the door. Our neighbour suggested to me, ‘Come over to us: we’ll be together’. This remarkable German woman had come into the ghetto to stay with her Jewish husband Burstein. I was about to go over to join her, but at that moment a German appeared and insisted that I should go back into my own quarters. When he left, I ran to the neighbour’s house. My cousin ran after me. In the house we saw Gutner, a Jewish policeman. He led Germans into the room where he himself lived. They did not come out of it for a long time. Out of curiosity I peeped in through the keyhole. I saw Gutner lift up the sofa, take something out and hand it to the Germans. The Germans walked out and left a mark on the door to show that the house had been checked. Gutner saw us and demanded, ‘Leave immediately! There are too many children here.’ I couldn’t help myself and said, ‘I saw what you did in your room. I know that it must have cost you dear. I am ready to pay you as much as I can, but please let us stay. This house is less dangerous than the others.’ ‘No, no!’ Gutner shouted at me, ‘Get out of here!’ ‘All right’, I said, ‘We will leave, but if I lose my son, you will lose your two children’. After a short silence Gutner said, ‘Hide in the upper storeroom’. Gutner brought along his children, his girl friend and his parents and we lay there, while the Germans went from house to house carrying out their search.
The screaming outside was terrible. The crying of the children and their parents was enough to break one’s heart. Children and old people were being loaded into lorries. Suddenly you began to cry as well. In that larder there was a clock and you demanded that it should strike ‘Ding-dong’. I tried to make you keep your mouth shut, but I failed. A German heard a child crying and threw a hand grenade into the house. It went off, but luckily no one was hurt. We sat there the whole day. When darkness fell, the Germans left the ghetto.
At the end of the day columns of men and women started coming back from work. The terrible suffering of that day was a blow for everyone. You had been saved, but this had to be kept secret from everybody. We were afraid that the resentment of those who had lost their children could lead to tragedy.
Kazis Tamashauskas, who worked with my father, told him that if I was still alive on his return to the ghetto he was prepared to help to save me. However, he seemed to be in no hurry. Mother decided to go out to work with my father, leaving me behind with her cousin. She met the Lithuanian, fell to her knees, kissed his feet and started to weep. She begged him to take me as soon as possible. Kazis promised that he would take me within a few days. When my parents met him after the war, he said to my mother, ‘You fell to your knees and kissed my feet: I couldn’t refuse.’
One evening my mother had gone to see the members of the Jewish ghetto police who were due to be on watch at the gate and told them what she was planning. She asked them to help at the gate, when she and my father would be searched. One of them was called Jankele and the other Matskin. Next morning I was given a Luminal injection. Father put on his work overalls, stuck one of my legs into the inner pockets and tied me tightly up against him with a towel. Finally, he put on a large coat and set out.
He was standing between tall men in his roomy coat. One of the team leaders turned to him and asked whether he had started dealing in illegal trade. Jankele shouted at the leader, ‘Be quiet and stop asking questions’. Suddenly I started coughing and everyone froze. Jankele, who had also heard the coughing, gave an order to the whole work brigade to start coughing forthwith. Jankele stopped another man, who was also wearing a coat too large for him, and began to search him. He found he had a duvet wrapped round him. The man was punished by being sent to Alexotas. A lorry took my father and mother to their work place. By this time I had woken up, poked my head out of father’s coat and began talking. The German who was accompanying the team said, ‘I can hear a child’s voice’. One of the men distracted the German’s attention saying, ‘If you want to hear a child’s voice, just listen!’ He then proceeded to imitate a child. ‘If you want to hear a cock crow, I can lay that on too’.
My father had warned the German in charge of them that he would be bringing along his baby and asked him to allow us to spend the day in the attic of the work premises. The German made no reply: his silence was assumed to imply his agreement. I finally woke up in that attic, began to cry and wet myself. My urine began to drip down on the heads of the men working below. ‘What’s dripping over there?’ asked one of the Germans. Fortunately he had to leave soon after that.
At the end of the working day the Lithuanian team leader, whose wife was meant to be coming to fetch me, delayed the whole team until she finally appeared. His wife took me, loaded me into a cart and carried us off to the village of Panemune. On the way back to the ghetto my parents saw that celebrations of some kind were going on in Kaunas. It was 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. My mother was weeping. Someone said to her, ‘You shouldn’t be crying, you’ve handed your child over to save him’.
Now that I was safe with Jadzia and Kazis Tamashauskas, my parents decided to escape from the ghetto, but did not succeed. Mother was sent to Stutthof. From Stutthof they transferred her to Tranza, where my mother survived until the camp was liberated by the Red Army on 22 January 1945. The Russians sent my mother to work as a nurse in a military hospital. She wrote a letter to Kaunas asking the authorities to contact Tamashauskas and find out what had become of me; she did not receive any answer.
There was chaos outside in the streets. Lorries were driving to and fro. Warnings were coming through loudspeakers: the Germans were insisting that everyone stay inside. I grabbed you and opened the door. Our neighbour suggested to me, ‘Come over to us: we’ll be together’. This remarkable German woman had come into the ghetto to stay with her Jewish husband Burstein. I was about to go over to join her, but at that moment a German appeared and insisted that I should go back into my own quarters. When he left, I ran to the neighbour’s house. My cousin ran after me. In the house we saw Gutner, a Jewish policeman. He led Germans into the room where he himself lived. They did not come out of it for a long time. Out of curiosity I peeped in through the keyhole. I saw Gutner lift up the sofa, take something out and hand it to the Germans. The Germans walked out and left a mark on the door to show that the house had been checked. Gutner saw us and demanded, ‘Leave immediately! There are too many children here.’ I couldn’t help myself and said, ‘I saw what you did in your room. I know that it must have cost you dear. I am ready to pay you as much as I can, but please let us stay. This house is less dangerous than the others.’ ‘No, no!’ Gutner shouted at me, ‘Get out of here!’ ‘All right’, I said, ‘We will leave, but if I lose my son, you will lose your two children’. After a short silence Gutner said, ‘Hide in the upper storeroom’. Gutner brought along his children, his girl friend and his parents and we lay there, while the Germans went from house to house carrying out their search.
The screaming outside was terrible. The crying of the children and their parents was enough to break one’s heart. Children and old people were being loaded into lorries. Suddenly you began to cry as well. In that larder there was a clock and you demanded that it should strike ‘Ding-dong’. I tried to make you keep your mouth shut, but I failed. A German heard a child crying and threw a hand grenade into the house. It went off, but luckily no one was hurt. We sat there the whole day. When darkness fell, the Germans left the ghetto.
At the end of the day columns of men and women started coming back from work. The terrible suffering of that day was a blow for everyone. You had been saved, but this had to be kept secret from everybody. We were afraid that the resentment of those who had lost their children could lead to tragedy.
Kazis Tamashauskas, who worked with my father, told him that if I was still alive on his return to the ghetto he was prepared to help to save me. However, he seemed to be in no hurry. Mother decided to go out to work with my father, leaving me behind with her cousin. She met the Lithuanian, fell to her knees, kissed his feet and started to weep. She begged him to take me as soon as possible. Kazis promised that he would take me within a few days. When my parents met him after the war, he said to my mother, ‘You fell to your knees and kissed my feet: I couldn’t refuse.’
One evening my mother had gone to see the members of the Jewish ghetto police who were due to be on watch at the gate and told them what she was planning. She asked them to help at the gate, when she and my father would be searched. One of them was called Jankele and the other Matskin. Next morning I was given a Luminal injection. Father put on his work overalls, stuck one of my legs into the inner pockets and tied me tightly up against him with a towel. Finally, he put on a large coat and set out.
He was standing between tall men in his roomy coat. One of the team leaders turned to him and asked whether he had started dealing in illegal trade. Jankele shouted at the leader, ‘Be quiet and stop asking questions’. Suddenly I started coughing and everyone froze. Jankele, who had also heard the coughing, gave an order to the whole work brigade to start coughing forthwith. Jankele stopped another man, who was also wearing a coat too large for him, and began to search him. He found he had a duvet wrapped round him. The man was punished by being sent to Alexotas. A lorry took my father and mother to their work place. By this time I had woken up, poked my head out of father’s coat and began talking. The German who was accompanying the team said, ‘I can hear a child’s voice’. One of the men distracted the German’s attention saying, ‘If you want to hear a child’s voice, just listen!’ He then proceeded to imitate a child. ‘If you want to hear a cock crow, I can lay that on too’.
My father had warned the German in charge of them that he would be bringing along his baby and asked him to allow us to spend the day in the attic of the work premises. The German made no reply: his silence was assumed to imply his agreement. I finally woke up in that attic, began to cry and wet myself. My urine began to drip down on the heads of the men working below. ‘What’s dripping over there?’ asked one of the Germans. Fortunately he had to leave soon after that.
At the end of the working day the Lithuanian team leader, whose wife was meant to be coming to fetch me, delayed the whole team until she finally appeared. His wife took me, loaded me into a cart and carried us off to the village of Panemune. On the way back to the ghetto my parents saw that celebrations of some kind were going on in Kaunas. It was 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. My mother was weeping. Someone said to her, ‘You shouldn’t be crying, you’ve handed your child over to save him’.
Now that I was safe with Jadzia and Kazis Tamashauskas, my parents decided to escape from the ghetto, but did not succeed. Mother was sent to Stutthof. From Stutthof they transferred her to Tranza, where my mother survived until the camp was liberated by the Red Army on 22 January 1945. The Russians sent my mother to work as a nurse in a military hospital. She wrote a letter to Kaunas asking the authorities to contact Tamashauskas and find out what had become of me; she did not receive any answer.
I was not allowed to leave the Tamashauskas house, but I was growing and so was my curiosity about the outside world. Somehow I managed to get out of the house. I saw a horse and a German standing near it. I called, ‘horse, horse’ in Yiddish. Jadzia, on discovering that I had left the house, came running to fetch me. The German asked her, ‘How come the child knows German?’ Jadzia quickly recovered her calm and said, ‘My sister married a German, who was killed in battle and this is her child. It’s difficult for her to bring him up and so he lives here with me.’ The German treated me to a biscuit. The Tamashauskas family had a 12-year-old son called Vitas. Jadzja and Kazis taught Vitas to play hide-and-seek with me, telling me that I should hide in an enormous wooden box they had, if any stranger should come into the flat unexpectedly. Two months later Jadzia, without telling anyone took me to another village, to stay with a woman and her daughter.
She wrapped me up in a blanket and laid me down near the door of that woman’s house. It was raining hard at the time. I soon got wet and began to cry. The woman I was to stay with heard a noise outside the door and thought it was a cat meowing. She opened the door and carried a ‘parcel’ into her house. I was already 3 years old by that time. The Gestapo, however, came for me. I was a thin, fair-haired boy with blue eyes; nobody had ever imagined that I was Jewish. They had not even bothered, or maybe did not want, to take my trousers down to check whether I was circumcised. One of the neighbours, who came to the woman’s house, looked at me and pulled down my trousers, confirming that I was Jewish. By now the Russian troops were not far from Kaunas and she said to the woman looking after me, ‘Keep the child. If the parents turn up they’ll give you good money for your pains.’
After liberation, a young man, Shmuel Peipert, who was released from the Red Army, took upon himself the task of looking for Jewish children living with Lithuanian families. He would travel around the local villages, talking to people and asking questions, which is how he came across me. He immediately told the woman that she should hand over her Jewish child to him. She refused: ‘Not for anything. I promised to give the child back only to his parents.’ When the woman went out of the house, Peipert grabbed hold of me and made off. He went with me to Panevezis, where Mother’s sister Sara, with her husband, Gershon Oshri, lived after they had returned from Siberia. Peipert turned to Sara, whom he already knew, and told her that he had found a Jewish child who was not well and needed looking after. However, Sara refused to take care of me, saying that she wanted first and foremost to find her sister’s child.
My father survived the Dachau camp. He learnt that Sara and Gershon were in Panevez.ys and informed Sara that his son had been living with the Tamashauskas family. Sara and her husband went to Kaunas, found the Tamashauskas family and asked where the child was. Jadzia said that she handed me over to a good family in a village, but then a Jew in army uniform came to their house and kidnapped the child. When asked to describe the child, Kazis brought out a tiny photograph and showed it to them. They looked at it and Sara realized who I was.
Gershon and Sara went to see Peipert in Panevezis, who, by this time, had placed me in an orphanage. Sara and Gershon rushed to the orphanage, where the director turned out to be a native of Rokishkes and had even been Sara’s classmate. He agreed to hand me over to Sara.
I began to grow used to Sara. I started understanding and speaking Yiddish again. I began calling Sara ‘Mama’ and Gershon ‘Papa’. It was not until 12 December 1945 that Mother eventually came back to Lithuania. Her cousin, Sara Shpak, who had been in hiding with a Lithuanian family, informed my mother that I was safe in Panevezis, and that my father had survived.
Mother then went to Panevezis. She arrived there late in the evening; it was dark and cold. She did not know where her sister lived. She just walked into a house chosen at random and asked, ‘Perhaps you know where Sara Oshri lives in this town’. The man, who was Jewish, led my mother to Sara’s house. When Sara, who was pregnant at the time, saw her sister, she fainted. In the flat Mother saw two children sitting at the table. She immediately recognized me and came running over to me. She took my hands and started kissing them. I began to cry and tried to pull my hands out of hers. ‘You’re not my Mama, make her go away, Mama’, I shouted. Next morning my mother began talking to me, giving me sweets and toys, which she had brought from Germany. I began to get used to her and gradually came to understand that she was my real ‘Mama’. I went on calling Sara ‘Mama’ and my mother ‘my real Mama’. Mother took me to Kaunas, told me about my father Leibe, and showed me his photographs. Almost every day we would go down to the station to meet my father. Yet, in August 1946, my father happened to turn up on one of the few days we were not at the station.
Normal life could begin once more. In Kaunas my brother was born. We all left for Israel in 1967. I married Sara Zaczepinksi, we have two sons. For thirty years until retirement in 1998 I worked in the Haifa Oil Refinery. After retirement I volunteered for the Israeli Police force.
Haifa, Israel, April 2009
First published in 2011 by Vallentine Mitchell
London, Portland, OR
She wrapped me up in a blanket and laid me down near the door of that woman’s house. It was raining hard at the time. I soon got wet and began to cry. The woman I was to stay with heard a noise outside the door and thought it was a cat meowing. She opened the door and carried a ‘parcel’ into her house. I was already 3 years old by that time. The Gestapo, however, came for me. I was a thin, fair-haired boy with blue eyes; nobody had ever imagined that I was Jewish. They had not even bothered, or maybe did not want, to take my trousers down to check whether I was circumcised. One of the neighbours, who came to the woman’s house, looked at me and pulled down my trousers, confirming that I was Jewish. By now the Russian troops were not far from Kaunas and she said to the woman looking after me, ‘Keep the child. If the parents turn up they’ll give you good money for your pains.’
After liberation, a young man, Shmuel Peipert, who was released from the Red Army, took upon himself the task of looking for Jewish children living with Lithuanian families. He would travel around the local villages, talking to people and asking questions, which is how he came across me. He immediately told the woman that she should hand over her Jewish child to him. She refused: ‘Not for anything. I promised to give the child back only to his parents.’ When the woman went out of the house, Peipert grabbed hold of me and made off. He went with me to Panevezis, where Mother’s sister Sara, with her husband, Gershon Oshri, lived after they had returned from Siberia. Peipert turned to Sara, whom he already knew, and told her that he had found a Jewish child who was not well and needed looking after. However, Sara refused to take care of me, saying that she wanted first and foremost to find her sister’s child.
My father survived the Dachau camp. He learnt that Sara and Gershon were in Panevez.ys and informed Sara that his son had been living with the Tamashauskas family. Sara and her husband went to Kaunas, found the Tamashauskas family and asked where the child was. Jadzia said that she handed me over to a good family in a village, but then a Jew in army uniform came to their house and kidnapped the child. When asked to describe the child, Kazis brought out a tiny photograph and showed it to them. They looked at it and Sara realized who I was.
Gershon and Sara went to see Peipert in Panevezis, who, by this time, had placed me in an orphanage. Sara and Gershon rushed to the orphanage, where the director turned out to be a native of Rokishkes and had even been Sara’s classmate. He agreed to hand me over to Sara.
I began to grow used to Sara. I started understanding and speaking Yiddish again. I began calling Sara ‘Mama’ and Gershon ‘Papa’. It was not until 12 December 1945 that Mother eventually came back to Lithuania. Her cousin, Sara Shpak, who had been in hiding with a Lithuanian family, informed my mother that I was safe in Panevezis, and that my father had survived.
Mother then went to Panevezis. She arrived there late in the evening; it was dark and cold. She did not know where her sister lived. She just walked into a house chosen at random and asked, ‘Perhaps you know where Sara Oshri lives in this town’. The man, who was Jewish, led my mother to Sara’s house. When Sara, who was pregnant at the time, saw her sister, she fainted. In the flat Mother saw two children sitting at the table. She immediately recognized me and came running over to me. She took my hands and started kissing them. I began to cry and tried to pull my hands out of hers. ‘You’re not my Mama, make her go away, Mama’, I shouted. Next morning my mother began talking to me, giving me sweets and toys, which she had brought from Germany. I began to get used to her and gradually came to understand that she was my real ‘Mama’. I went on calling Sara ‘Mama’ and my mother ‘my real Mama’. Mother took me to Kaunas, told me about my father Leibe, and showed me his photographs. Almost every day we would go down to the station to meet my father. Yet, in August 1946, my father happened to turn up on one of the few days we were not at the station.
Normal life could begin once more. In Kaunas my brother was born. We all left for Israel in 1967. I married Sara Zaczepinksi, we have two sons. For thirty years until retirement in 1998 I worked in the Haifa Oil Refinery. After retirement I volunteered for the Israeli Police force.
Haifa, Israel, April 2009
First published in 2011 by Vallentine Mitchell
London, Portland, OR