rescued jewish children
Rona Rozental-Zinger
Keep Your Eyes Shut
Rona Rozental-Zinger
From: Solomon Abramovich and Yakov Zilberg “Smuggled in Potato Sacks”, 2011
Before the German occupation my parents, Rone and Schmuel Rozental and my brother Leo, born in 1937, lived in Kaunas. My father was the Principal of the Yiddish primary Shalom Aleichem School. My mother studied in Strasbourg-France and in the University in Brussels. Since 1934 she was the Director of kindergarten teachers training college for early childhood. Some of my mother’s students were nuns.
My parents, like many other Jewish people had foreseen the approaching catastrophe, and applied for visas to immigrate to other countries. But they were not successful.
In August 1941 my parents together with my brother Leo, my mother’s parents Oscher and Gitel Schmuilov and my twenty two years old uncle Eli (Lusi) Schmuilov with his wife Chaja (nee' Glushakaite) were forced to move into the Ghetto.
My maternal grandparents were murdered after the 'Great Action'.
My parents and my uncle were active members of the Ghetto underground resistance movement. Lusi Shmuelov was one of the leaders of the Young Ghetto underground resistance fighters. He was denounced and arrested by Gestapo during a joint committee meeting of the Anti-Fascist Organization in March 1942. He was tortured and murdered in the Ninth Fort in October 1942.
Father was forging identity documents and also teaching at the Yiddish underground Ghetto school which was located in a stable. Education for Jewish children in the Ghetto was banned in 1942. Mother's role in underground organization was to rescue Jewish children. She used her pre-war contacts with some of her students-nuns and with their help she arranged hiding places for the children in a monastery, in Dr Baublys’ orphanage and by placing children with Christian families. She had green eyes and in order to look Aryan she dyed her hair blond. She was able to enter in and out the Ghetto without having to wear the yellow Star of David.
I was told that even the people who shared my parent’s room in the Ghetto did not know that my mother was pregnant, until her 9th month; she was hiding it even from her friends. She did that by wearing a tight corset. Germans issued an order making pregnancy among Jewish women illegal. I was told, that I was born on the coldest day, in 31st January, 1943.
Most of the time I was kept in a special hiding place behind a wardrobe, ‘malina', that my father made for us. There were two babies that had to be hidden: me and my cousin, uncle’s Eli's daughter Liusia Shmuilov, who too was born in the Ghetto. My brother had to care for both of us, he had to push the prams into the hiding place every time some suspicious sounds were heard and he had to keep us quiet. Father once remarked, that babies in the Ghetto never cried, as if they understood the dangers.
In August 1943 my father smuggled out my brother Leo in a sack of potatoes. He was hidden in a small village close to the IX Fort at a poor farmer Macijauskas family, who were recognized as Righteous among the nations by Yad Vashem. They hid my brother and four other adults in a dug out cellar under a farm oven until Kaunas was liberated. Later my brother was placed in the Jewish orphanage.
In November 1943, I was smuggled out of Kaunas Ghetto and hidden by Mr and Mrs Stanionis, who lived in Nemuno Street in Kaunas. I was given a shot of 'Luminal' which put me to sleep, wrapped up and Pese Karnauskaite (today Musel), an active member of the Young underground fighters, carried me out of the Ghetto, mingling with the departing night shift workers and passed me to the Stanionis.
My cousin Liusia was smuggled out in similar way in December 1943. She was hidden by Brone Miliene until Kovno liberation and than was reunited with her mother. Her mother escaped from the Ghetto in December 1943 and joint the partisans group, called ‘Death to occupants'.
The Stanionis couple had no children of their own. Mrs Stanionis used to get drunk often and to visit us with his drunken friends. Mrs Zosia Stanionionene was afraid that they could betray me and she realized that it wasn’t safe for me to stay in Kaunas, so she decided to take me to her mother in Zemaitija, a Western part of Lithuania.
They hid me right through the war and even for three more years after the liberation, until May 1949. They had me baptized and gave me a new name of Lily Stanionyte and treated me like their own daughter. We went to Church regularly and I was proudly wearing a cross. I still love organ liturgy and I visit churches, when I travel.
Zosia risked her life hiding a Jewish child and running from town to town from village to village to keep away from persecution and from the front line. We were in constant danger of death; from outside as well as from inside the family. Even after the liberation still a lot of persecutions took place, committed by the Nazi sympathizers who were hiding in the forests.
Zosia didn’t tell her family that I was Jewish but they suspected it. Her sister had a son, a Nazi collaborator, who left her and joined the German Army. She wanted Zosia to adopt her son instead of me, which would clear her name. She denounced me to the 'Lithuanian partisans' and one night they came looking for me at her mother’s place. Although I have very sketchy memories of those days, yet some events stand out very clearly. I remember that at my adoptive grandmother’s place in the country, I slept on the top of the farm stove because it stayed warm long after the fire had gone out. It was late in the evening when I was suddenly awakened by men in uniforms searching under the bed and in the cupboards, in the room that I was in. I had blonde hair but dark eyes not like my foster parents who had blue eyes. It had been drummed into me to keep my eyes shut among strangers, which became a habit of mine in times of distress or during some dangers.
I saw them searching when I opened my eyes and then quickly closed them. Because of my blond hair, they assumed that the child sleeping on top of the farm stove was not Jewish.
Soon after they left my room to search the rest of the house, Zosia grabbed me and ran to the other side, across the lake that was frozen and still covered with ice. It was early spring, the ice was breaking and we got very wet and cold as we were jumping from one piece of ice to the other. I became very sick but Zosia was afraid to take me to a hospital. Many years later she told me that we were hiding for three days in a cellar in the fields, and as result of that she suffered from rheumatism. We were very close to the German border and Lithuanian 'partisans' were still searching for Jews.
My parents were among thousands of Ghetto inmates deported to German concentration camps in July 1944. Mother perished in Stutthof just before the liberation in 1945. My father had been sent to Dachau where the American Army liberated him. He was barely alive and spent months recovering.
On his return to Lithuania, the Soviet officials accused him of spying for America and interrogated him. But he was released and even got a position in the Ministry of Education in Vilnius to supervise Yiddish schools. My father tried to reclaim me on his return but the court ordered that in the absence of my biological mother, I should stay with the family Stanionis who brought me up till then.
I recall just a sensation of rejection I felt towards my father when he was visiting me in Kaunas. He looked so old and frightening. I would accept the presents from him but called him 'Zid' (Bloody Jew) and run away. I remember that he gave me a beautiful German doll with big blue eyes that opened and shut. It was my first doll that could even cry. I never had one like that. All the kids in the neighbourhood wanted to play with this doll!
One day I decided to investigate how the doll could open her eyes? My dream then was to have blue eyes, just like my foster parents. I cut open the doll’s head and removed the eyes and their attachments. Zosia would sometimes leave me alone at home while she went out to buy milk. That is when I proceeded to cut my forehead to replace my brown eyes with the doll’s blue ones. On her return Zosia discover me bleeding a lot.
Once my father took me to visit my brother in the Jewish orphanage in Kaunas, I have never seen so many skinny, dark haired children and I didn’t believe that he was my brother.
Life was tough. There were problems with housing, problems with food. Everything was a problem.
Finally in May 1949 my father managed to kidnap me with the help of his two friends. They came in policemen uniforms, while Zosia was out shopping. I opened the door, one of them shut my mouth, carried me under his arm and ran quickly down the stairs and put me in a police car. Father and his friends managed to get the police car and the uniforms by getting two policemen drunk. They took me to my father’s former student place in Kaunas and then to Vilnius where he settled.
Father renamed me Rona Rozental, so I was given my mother’s name when I was six years old. He sent me to the Jewish Kindergarten, which I attended till the end of August 1949. I couldn’t speak a word of Yiddish. Children surrounded me asking me what my name was. I began to cry and told them that I have a new name, which is very difficult to remember and I am not allowed to use my previous one. That didn’t make sense with them; consequently nobody wanted to play with me.
Father often had nightmares. His screams would wake me up in the middle of the night, and he would explain to me that he dreamt that the Nazis with dogs were chasing him.
In autumn 1949 all Jewish schools and organizations were closed. Father lost his job in the Education Department. He had to take other jobs, where the pay was lower. He was not able to focus on anything other than the loss of his wife and his profession. He was sick a lot and was often hospitalized. I was very sensitive to his war experiences and asked him very few questions about the past. At the young age of seven I became his career and his housekeeper. He never remarried. I was raised without a mother and I know how tough life is. I was reunited with my father and an older brother, but we all suffered from emotional traumas after the many losses that we experienced and we never could achieve any family closeness.
I was a very quiet, withdrawn and secretive child. I grew up with guilt complex of being born during the war. I hardly had time to go out and have some fun. I too was sick a lot as a child, but I never complained, even when I should have, thinking that whatever the pain was that happened to me it would go away. I preferred to hide it from my father, I never asked for anything, never wanted to upset him.
Following my reunion with my father in Vilnius, I had totally blocked out memories of my early childhood and for many years they were locked away.
I have re-established the contact with Zosia only after 1967, and looked after her until she died in May 1974. She suffered badly from rheumatism and was bed ridden for many years. Mr Stanionis passed away in the early 1950.
I graduated from the University of Vilnius, with honors degrees in Mathematic in 1964 and worked as an IT consultant. I married in 1971 and I have a daughter and a son. I had to re-invent parenting, as I never had any example or guidance about how to raise my children.
In June1978 we left Lithuania and arrived to Australia 10th of January 1979. Nowadays I am retired and work as a volunteer Guide in the Melbourne Holocaust Centre. My brother and his wife (a child survivor from Kovno) live in Vilnius, Lithuania. Their son, daughter and granddaughter live in Israel.
My father passed away in Vilnius in April 1984. The Lithuanian President honored my mother with a ‘Rescue Cross’ in 1993.
I grew up in Lithuania under the Communist regime, with almost no Jewish atmosphere at home and uninformed about the long History of Jews in Lithuania. The Holocaust was ignored by the Soviet historians. Survivors had their memories of the Holocaust silenced for many years and hid them inside themselves. They were deprived of recognizing openly their losses and of honoring the memory of those who did not survive. People didn’t expect the system to provide any kind of support for their emotional wounds. While we identified as Jews, due to prejudice and anti-Semitism, the younger ones did not have a clear idea of the Jewish tradition.
I remained unaware of my personal story till 1967, when the book 'Ir be Ginklo Kariai' ('Unarmed, Still They Fought') was published. This book it is about Lithuanian Gentiles who saved Jewish people during the Holocaust. There were two articles in this book about of my and brother's escape from the Ghetto written by my father. Until now I was never inclined to put down in writing what little I remember about my experiences as a child survivor. But I have been encouraged by Y. Zilberg into writing as much as I remember about those times. I should have asked more questions of my father and the people who knew my parents while they were alive. However I accept that I am fortunate to have lived, that I worked, raised a family, and contributed to the community in spite of my fragile childhood.
Melbourn, Australia 2008.
Rona Rozental-Zinger
From: Solomon Abramovich and Yakov Zilberg “Smuggled in Potato Sacks”, 2011
Before the German occupation my parents, Rone and Schmuel Rozental and my brother Leo, born in 1937, lived in Kaunas. My father was the Principal of the Yiddish primary Shalom Aleichem School. My mother studied in Strasbourg-France and in the University in Brussels. Since 1934 she was the Director of kindergarten teachers training college for early childhood. Some of my mother’s students were nuns.
My parents, like many other Jewish people had foreseen the approaching catastrophe, and applied for visas to immigrate to other countries. But they were not successful.
In August 1941 my parents together with my brother Leo, my mother’s parents Oscher and Gitel Schmuilov and my twenty two years old uncle Eli (Lusi) Schmuilov with his wife Chaja (nee' Glushakaite) were forced to move into the Ghetto.
My maternal grandparents were murdered after the 'Great Action'.
My parents and my uncle were active members of the Ghetto underground resistance movement. Lusi Shmuelov was one of the leaders of the Young Ghetto underground resistance fighters. He was denounced and arrested by Gestapo during a joint committee meeting of the Anti-Fascist Organization in March 1942. He was tortured and murdered in the Ninth Fort in October 1942.
Father was forging identity documents and also teaching at the Yiddish underground Ghetto school which was located in a stable. Education for Jewish children in the Ghetto was banned in 1942. Mother's role in underground organization was to rescue Jewish children. She used her pre-war contacts with some of her students-nuns and with their help she arranged hiding places for the children in a monastery, in Dr Baublys’ orphanage and by placing children with Christian families. She had green eyes and in order to look Aryan she dyed her hair blond. She was able to enter in and out the Ghetto without having to wear the yellow Star of David.
I was told that even the people who shared my parent’s room in the Ghetto did not know that my mother was pregnant, until her 9th month; she was hiding it even from her friends. She did that by wearing a tight corset. Germans issued an order making pregnancy among Jewish women illegal. I was told, that I was born on the coldest day, in 31st January, 1943.
Most of the time I was kept in a special hiding place behind a wardrobe, ‘malina', that my father made for us. There were two babies that had to be hidden: me and my cousin, uncle’s Eli's daughter Liusia Shmuilov, who too was born in the Ghetto. My brother had to care for both of us, he had to push the prams into the hiding place every time some suspicious sounds were heard and he had to keep us quiet. Father once remarked, that babies in the Ghetto never cried, as if they understood the dangers.
In August 1943 my father smuggled out my brother Leo in a sack of potatoes. He was hidden in a small village close to the IX Fort at a poor farmer Macijauskas family, who were recognized as Righteous among the nations by Yad Vashem. They hid my brother and four other adults in a dug out cellar under a farm oven until Kaunas was liberated. Later my brother was placed in the Jewish orphanage.
In November 1943, I was smuggled out of Kaunas Ghetto and hidden by Mr and Mrs Stanionis, who lived in Nemuno Street in Kaunas. I was given a shot of 'Luminal' which put me to sleep, wrapped up and Pese Karnauskaite (today Musel), an active member of the Young underground fighters, carried me out of the Ghetto, mingling with the departing night shift workers and passed me to the Stanionis.
My cousin Liusia was smuggled out in similar way in December 1943. She was hidden by Brone Miliene until Kovno liberation and than was reunited with her mother. Her mother escaped from the Ghetto in December 1943 and joint the partisans group, called ‘Death to occupants'.
The Stanionis couple had no children of their own. Mrs Stanionis used to get drunk often and to visit us with his drunken friends. Mrs Zosia Stanionionene was afraid that they could betray me and she realized that it wasn’t safe for me to stay in Kaunas, so she decided to take me to her mother in Zemaitija, a Western part of Lithuania.
They hid me right through the war and even for three more years after the liberation, until May 1949. They had me baptized and gave me a new name of Lily Stanionyte and treated me like their own daughter. We went to Church regularly and I was proudly wearing a cross. I still love organ liturgy and I visit churches, when I travel.
Zosia risked her life hiding a Jewish child and running from town to town from village to village to keep away from persecution and from the front line. We were in constant danger of death; from outside as well as from inside the family. Even after the liberation still a lot of persecutions took place, committed by the Nazi sympathizers who were hiding in the forests.
Zosia didn’t tell her family that I was Jewish but they suspected it. Her sister had a son, a Nazi collaborator, who left her and joined the German Army. She wanted Zosia to adopt her son instead of me, which would clear her name. She denounced me to the 'Lithuanian partisans' and one night they came looking for me at her mother’s place. Although I have very sketchy memories of those days, yet some events stand out very clearly. I remember that at my adoptive grandmother’s place in the country, I slept on the top of the farm stove because it stayed warm long after the fire had gone out. It was late in the evening when I was suddenly awakened by men in uniforms searching under the bed and in the cupboards, in the room that I was in. I had blonde hair but dark eyes not like my foster parents who had blue eyes. It had been drummed into me to keep my eyes shut among strangers, which became a habit of mine in times of distress or during some dangers.
I saw them searching when I opened my eyes and then quickly closed them. Because of my blond hair, they assumed that the child sleeping on top of the farm stove was not Jewish.
Soon after they left my room to search the rest of the house, Zosia grabbed me and ran to the other side, across the lake that was frozen and still covered with ice. It was early spring, the ice was breaking and we got very wet and cold as we were jumping from one piece of ice to the other. I became very sick but Zosia was afraid to take me to a hospital. Many years later she told me that we were hiding for three days in a cellar in the fields, and as result of that she suffered from rheumatism. We were very close to the German border and Lithuanian 'partisans' were still searching for Jews.
My parents were among thousands of Ghetto inmates deported to German concentration camps in July 1944. Mother perished in Stutthof just before the liberation in 1945. My father had been sent to Dachau where the American Army liberated him. He was barely alive and spent months recovering.
On his return to Lithuania, the Soviet officials accused him of spying for America and interrogated him. But he was released and even got a position in the Ministry of Education in Vilnius to supervise Yiddish schools. My father tried to reclaim me on his return but the court ordered that in the absence of my biological mother, I should stay with the family Stanionis who brought me up till then.
I recall just a sensation of rejection I felt towards my father when he was visiting me in Kaunas. He looked so old and frightening. I would accept the presents from him but called him 'Zid' (Bloody Jew) and run away. I remember that he gave me a beautiful German doll with big blue eyes that opened and shut. It was my first doll that could even cry. I never had one like that. All the kids in the neighbourhood wanted to play with this doll!
One day I decided to investigate how the doll could open her eyes? My dream then was to have blue eyes, just like my foster parents. I cut open the doll’s head and removed the eyes and their attachments. Zosia would sometimes leave me alone at home while she went out to buy milk. That is when I proceeded to cut my forehead to replace my brown eyes with the doll’s blue ones. On her return Zosia discover me bleeding a lot.
Once my father took me to visit my brother in the Jewish orphanage in Kaunas, I have never seen so many skinny, dark haired children and I didn’t believe that he was my brother.
Life was tough. There were problems with housing, problems with food. Everything was a problem.
Finally in May 1949 my father managed to kidnap me with the help of his two friends. They came in policemen uniforms, while Zosia was out shopping. I opened the door, one of them shut my mouth, carried me under his arm and ran quickly down the stairs and put me in a police car. Father and his friends managed to get the police car and the uniforms by getting two policemen drunk. They took me to my father’s former student place in Kaunas and then to Vilnius where he settled.
Father renamed me Rona Rozental, so I was given my mother’s name when I was six years old. He sent me to the Jewish Kindergarten, which I attended till the end of August 1949. I couldn’t speak a word of Yiddish. Children surrounded me asking me what my name was. I began to cry and told them that I have a new name, which is very difficult to remember and I am not allowed to use my previous one. That didn’t make sense with them; consequently nobody wanted to play with me.
Father often had nightmares. His screams would wake me up in the middle of the night, and he would explain to me that he dreamt that the Nazis with dogs were chasing him.
In autumn 1949 all Jewish schools and organizations were closed. Father lost his job in the Education Department. He had to take other jobs, where the pay was lower. He was not able to focus on anything other than the loss of his wife and his profession. He was sick a lot and was often hospitalized. I was very sensitive to his war experiences and asked him very few questions about the past. At the young age of seven I became his career and his housekeeper. He never remarried. I was raised without a mother and I know how tough life is. I was reunited with my father and an older brother, but we all suffered from emotional traumas after the many losses that we experienced and we never could achieve any family closeness.
I was a very quiet, withdrawn and secretive child. I grew up with guilt complex of being born during the war. I hardly had time to go out and have some fun. I too was sick a lot as a child, but I never complained, even when I should have, thinking that whatever the pain was that happened to me it would go away. I preferred to hide it from my father, I never asked for anything, never wanted to upset him.
Following my reunion with my father in Vilnius, I had totally blocked out memories of my early childhood and for many years they were locked away.
I have re-established the contact with Zosia only after 1967, and looked after her until she died in May 1974. She suffered badly from rheumatism and was bed ridden for many years. Mr Stanionis passed away in the early 1950.
I graduated from the University of Vilnius, with honors degrees in Mathematic in 1964 and worked as an IT consultant. I married in 1971 and I have a daughter and a son. I had to re-invent parenting, as I never had any example or guidance about how to raise my children.
In June1978 we left Lithuania and arrived to Australia 10th of January 1979. Nowadays I am retired and work as a volunteer Guide in the Melbourne Holocaust Centre. My brother and his wife (a child survivor from Kovno) live in Vilnius, Lithuania. Their son, daughter and granddaughter live in Israel.
My father passed away in Vilnius in April 1984. The Lithuanian President honored my mother with a ‘Rescue Cross’ in 1993.
I grew up in Lithuania under the Communist regime, with almost no Jewish atmosphere at home and uninformed about the long History of Jews in Lithuania. The Holocaust was ignored by the Soviet historians. Survivors had their memories of the Holocaust silenced for many years and hid them inside themselves. They were deprived of recognizing openly their losses and of honoring the memory of those who did not survive. People didn’t expect the system to provide any kind of support for their emotional wounds. While we identified as Jews, due to prejudice and anti-Semitism, the younger ones did not have a clear idea of the Jewish tradition.
I remained unaware of my personal story till 1967, when the book 'Ir be Ginklo Kariai' ('Unarmed, Still They Fought') was published. This book it is about Lithuanian Gentiles who saved Jewish people during the Holocaust. There were two articles in this book about of my and brother's escape from the Ghetto written by my father. Until now I was never inclined to put down in writing what little I remember about my experiences as a child survivor. But I have been encouraged by Y. Zilberg into writing as much as I remember about those times. I should have asked more questions of my father and the people who knew my parents while they were alive. However I accept that I am fortunate to have lived, that I worked, raised a family, and contributed to the community in spite of my fragile childhood.
Melbourn, Australia 2008.