rescued jewish children

My saviours To me, good is always something very concrete and linked to people’s names and faces, concrete images. But evil has no face. I cannot remember the faces of the Gestapo and KGB men at all; I really don’t remember them... I am forever saying and I never tire of repeating what I said during the first days of Sąjūdis: “Only a few men with automatic rifles are required to shoot thousands of unarmed people and they will lose nothing other than their soul, but saving one human being, one Jewish child, requires tremendous effort and extraordinary courage of many people.” Such people did exist. Such people were my saviours. Their goodness helped me stay human. These are the names of the people who greatly contributed to my survival. Ona and Juozas STRIMAIČIAI Pranas BAGDONAVIČIUS Stefanija LADIGIENĖ These people cared for me during the whole Nazi occupation, they provided me with shelter, with the warmth of a home and they restored my sense of security. In March 1944, I went to live with Stefanija Paliulytė-Ladigienė, the widow of the Lithuanian general Kazimieras Ladiga. Since she already had six children, I was welcomed as the seventh. I was introduced to all her children as their sister. The first evening, when we sat down at the table to eat our meagre wartime meal, I noticed that Mrs. Ladigienė gave me a larger share of the food than her own children. There is no way I could relate what it meant to me at that particular time… It seemed some sort of miracle. Later she took me to the room in which I was to sleep. It was the room of her son Linas. Once I was in bed, she came and kissed me, as she did all her children. Well, at this point I couldn’t contain myself and started sobbing uncontrollably. Alarmed, she asked me why I was sobbing and what was the matter... Then I asked her: “Aren’t you disgusted to kiss a Jewess?” After these words she too started crying, yet I had asked her very sincerely because it really seemed to me, that I was in some way disgusting. We carried on talking till four in the morning and from that day on, she became my second mother. Mrs. Ladigienė took the most incredible risks. She didn’t have a separate flat and there was an SS headquarters in the same house. Had I been caught Mrs. Ladigienė would have been executed in Paneriai with all her children. But her deed, which I would call heroism, was so natural, as if there could be no other way. I never felt that she was afraid of anything. She was very motherly, warm, and at the same time very principled and demanding, especially towards herself. She was artistic by nature, creative, deeply religious, Catholic and free of any sort of fanaticism or bigotry. If anybody hungry would come to the door, she would always feed him or her. Even if there was no food left for the next day, she would say that God would provide. And indeed, on the following day somebody would always come from the country and would bring flour, bacon or something of the sort. After the liberation, Mrs. Ladigienė was the first to take in, feed and clothe my aunt Ona Shtromaite, who was barely alive after returning from the Stutthof concentration camp. I lived in Mrs. Stefanija Ladigienė’s family until her arrest on 14 March 1946. She was sentenced by a three-man KGB ‘court’ and imprisoned in Siberia. Stefanija Ladigienė died in Vilnius, in my arms on 18 September 1967. I remember all the people who helped me survive the horrors of the Holocaust with love and gratitude. In addition to my main saviours there are also others: Juozas Strimaitis’ sister, a dentist (I do not remember her surname); Marija Meškauskienė; Marcelė Kubiliūtė, a nurse who had been an intelligence officer in the interwar years in Lithuania as I found out much later; Dr. Izidorius Rudaitis, the director of a nursery home on 16 Subačiaus Street in Vilnius; Feliksas Treigys, the director of Marijampolė gymnasium; Priest Skurkis, the dean of the St. Ignoto church in Vilnius. All of them risked their lives helping to save mine.