rescued jewish children

Just Another Baby ‘From the Train’

Mika Karnovsky-Ash

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

Editors
Solomon Abramovich
and Yakov Zilberg

I was born on 13 June 1941, delivered by my grandmother, Cerna-Beile Sandler, who was a midwife. On 16 June my maternal grandparents and my aunt Lea Sandler were deported to Siberia. The shock of all this stunted my mother’s ability to breastfeed. On 21 June my mother, Gita Karnovsky née Sandler came out of hospital, a day before the war began.
The Germans soon entered Kaunas. My father, Grigorij, an engineer, was working with Mendel Kamber, building military fortifications for the Soviet Army, somewhere in the provinces. When they heard about the outbreak of war, they both hurried back to Kaunas to their families.
In Kaunas a Soviet officer caught sight of Mendel Kamber, whom he knew before, and asked whether he could drive. On hearing a positive response, he ordered Mendel to get behind the wheel of his vehicle and would not listen to any objections or explanations. Mendel was ordered to catch up with the retreating Soviet Army. That was why Mendel did not reach his family and did not know that his wife was pregnant.
Father came home and, alongside his relatives, experienced all the horrors of the ghetto and the camps. My mother had been studying biology, but before the war she had not worked in her chosen field: she had travelled wherever her husband had been sent and kept the accounts.
Our family went to live with my paternal grandmother, Anna Osipovna Karnovsky. She had been a widow since the time of the First World War; she had lost her husband in Kharkov when Lithuanian Jews were forcibly evacuated on orders from Russia’s czarist government. She was a very strong character, an enterprising and intelligent woman. She had managed to survive that forcible evacuation and eventually return to Kaunas with her three children, Grigorij, Nina and adopted son Otto. Now she was the first person to have sensed the grim times ahead and had taken pains to lay in reserves of food for the whole family. This made life for our family a great deal easier, at least in the early days.
My aunt Nina was married to a rich Kaunas Jew called Yakov (Kuba) Gudinsky. Later he would serve in the Jewish police; he was a good man and helped as many people as he could. Kuba was a well-known contractor in Kaunas and he had many connections among the engineers of the town. With one of them, who used to live in Slobodka, he had swapped flats. A Lithuanian engineer moved into Yakov’s flat at the end of the central avenue in Traku Street, while my parents, grandmother and the Gudinsky family, Kuba, his wife Nina and their 2-month-old Rina, moved into the Lithuanian’s small house inside the ghetto area.
One episode was recalled by the family regarding the time between their old life in the town and the move into the ghetto. Mother had to cross the whole town on foot from Traku Street to Slobodka with luggage and a pram, and Lithuanians were pushing her off the pavement onto the roadway right under the wheels of the carts, since the road was already teeming with traffic and crowds of people being herded into the ghetto.
On the same floor of that small house in the ghetto, apart from the Gudinskys and the Karnovskys, there were two other families. One of them was the Rabinovich family with an 11-year-old son, Muki Rabinovich.

The Jewish Council and the Jewish police had, in the opinion of my mother, played a very positive role in the life of the ghetto, keeping order, attending to hygiene issues and sharing out any ‘benefits’ available as fairly as possible. For example, in the initial period in the ghetto, there were two cows, and each baby had been issued with 100 grammes of milk. Very soon the cows disappeared and there was nothing to feed me with; I was at death’s door. My mother actually heard her mother-in-law telling Nina that she could not understand why Gita was so agitated about the baby, as her days were obviously numbered. Father used to exchange valuables for 50-gramme lumps of butter, which he would then smear over his stomach and bring into the ghetto. Out of that butter they used to make some kind of drink for me.
There was a man in the ghetto called Teddy Blumenthal who had at one time been married to my mother’s elder sister Ester. He was regarded as one of the ‘representatives of German culture’. He had been born in Riga and had studied engineering at a German university. The Germans took him on to work as one of their translators and that was how he had access to important information. The Germans started bringing Jews from Western Europe into the Ninth Fort and then shoot them without further ado. Teddy was involved in sorting out their possessions and he managed to pinch some ‘Nestlé’ powdered milk for me.
Before the so-called ‘Intellectuals’ Action’, when about 500 of the most educated people in the ghetto were lured by a false promise of the Germans to enlist for ‘interesting work’, it was Teddy who warned my father and Kuba Gudinsky not to let themselves be ‘recruited’. During the selection process on the day of the ‘Great Action’ Teddy warned as many people as he could which side of the square they needed to move to, right or left. It is possible that my family was saved thanks to him.
At the end of 1943 it was decided that I should be smuggled out of the ghetto into safer hands. A friend of my father had known a childless family before the war: the husband was German and the wife Russian. They had already taken in one child ‘from the train’, namely one of the children handed over at railway stations to local inhabitants by Belarussian, Ukrainian or Russian young mothers, being deported to Germany for forced labour. That much the authorities would allow.
Father and his friend negotiated with Karl and Dunya Greide, who were simple, semi-literate people; they agreed to take me in. The members of our family were arguing amongst themselves as to whether they should hand over the baby or keep me with them to share the whole family’s fate. Muki Rabinovich’s mother, for instance, did not want to hand over her children to anyone. Luckily, my mother opted for the desperate and courageous step of parting with her daughter.
I was handed over the fence to Karl in a sack of potatoes, after my mother's sister Ester Blumenthal had first given me an injection to make me go to sleep and then bribed the guards. I had fair hair and grew up speaking only Russian, which meant that Karl and Dunia could tell the neighbours that I was just another baby ‘from the train’. Mother met my rescuers on a number of occasions, but then she decided to stop doing so, because it might only expose everyone to extra dangers.
Nina and Kuba entrusted their daughter Rina to the Garkauskas family, who had children of their own. This family clearly had some links with the Russians and it was perhaps as a result of this that Germans came to search their house one day, looking for leaflets or weapons. They did not find anything and were just sitting there drinking, when Garkauskas burst out while drunk, ‘You come looking for leaflets and don’t even notice that there’s a little Jewish girl right under your nose!’

Nina and Yakov heard about what had happened when they were hiding in the dugout known as ‘malina’, the ‘raspberry patch’. They tried to get Rina back from Garkauskas, but he refused to hand her over. I explain this by the fact that Garkauskas must have been frightened for his own children, who would then all have been shot, if he had not given Rina up to the Germans. As it was, only he was arrested and taken off to prison. That was how Rina Gudinsky perished.
In 1969 Garkauskas turned up at our flat. He had heard that the Gudinskys had survived and gone to Australia where they were prospering. Garkauskas asked us to tell them that he wanted some money. I can remember how I started to shout at him, ‘You traitor, you were responsible for the death of Rina, how dare you after all that ask for anything, get out!’ My Lithuanian acquaintance, Valdas Zheromskis, who happened to be in our flat at the time, threw out the uninvited guest.
After the ghetto was disbanded, my mother was taken to Stutthof and my father to Dachau. By some miracle they both survived. The family had paid some Lithuanians in Kaunas to hide my paternal grandmother. Mother, who had given up hope that any of her local relatives might have survived, gave those Lithuanians the address of some of her American relatives.
After the liberation Nina and Yakov Gudinsky came out of hiding and straight away went to fetch me from my rescuers, who had looked after me out of the kindness of their hearts, without taking anything for it. They were simple folk and quite old by then. Unfortunately, despite all the efforts of our family, they were deported from Lithuania to Central Asia, because the husband was German. We used to correspond with them and send them parcels.
My cousin Rachel Blumenthal had been saved by one of the Baublys brothers. After the liberation she went to live with Gudinsky as well. To this day she cannot forgive herself for what she feels was a ‘betrayal’ of Baublys. I have only vague memories of the time I spent with the Gudinsky family. I remember I used to call Nina ‘Mama’ and Kuba ‘Papa’.
My father was liberated from Dachau and made his own way back home with some other Jews along rivers and eventually reached Kaunas. The Gudinskys learnt that my father had survived and told me that my real papa would be coming to find me. I remember sitting in Father’s arms. He said to me, ‘We’ll go and wash now and then we’ll go to bed’, to which I responded by asking, ‘Papa, why do you say “We” when you’re talking about yourself?’ And father had replied, ‘Because I’m big’.
A few months later Father learnt that my mother had survived as well and we waited impatiently for her to arrive. She came back to Kaunas and, when walking out of the railway station, she met a Jew whom she knew and who took her to where my father was working. The two of them walked home together and in the garden I was out playing with Ilana Kamber, who lived nearby. Father asked my mother which of the little girls was Mika and she recognized me straightaway. Father told me, ‘That’s your Mama. She has a doll for you.’ I do not remember if I felt any particular excitement or agitated emotions at the time.
My mother tried for many years to bring back her parents from Siberia, but with no success. My grandmother died in Yakutia and Grandfather Rafoel only came home after Stalin’s death in 1955; a mere two years later he died. My Aunt Lea and Uncle Yehuda had been allowed to leave Siberia earlier.
I graduated from the Kaunas Polytechnic Institute, married Josef Ash and in 1973 left for Israel, where I practised the profession for which I had been trained. I have three children: two daughters, Viki and Bela, and a son Uri, whose twin brother Giora was killed while doing his military service in the Israeli army. My father died in Lithuania, but Mother is still alive today. She is now 94 years old and completely independent, in relatively good health and very alert.

Kiron, Israel, February 2009

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