Rescued Jewish Children
Kama Ginkas
Geke Won’t Allow it
Kama Ginkas
From the 4th book Hands Bringing Life and Bread
I found myself in the ghetto when I was six weeks’ old. When I turned two, my parents and I escaped from the ghetto. The Lithuanians who were hiding us were taking a fatal risk: I was very curious and would run first to open the door, I couldn’t pronounce “r” and once I asked a German officer who came to their house “Vos?” which in Jewish meant “What?”.
It was almost the first phrase that I heard in my childhood when I was capable of understanding what was being said: “Geke lozt nit”. In Yiddish it meant “Geke won’t allow it”. Geke was a ghetto guard who wouldn’t allow [anything]. When I ate a fly or refused to behave, with exhausted adults sleeping aside, my mother would say: “Geke won’t allow it”. If I went close to the barbed-wire fence of the ghetto, I heard: “Geke won’t allow it”. If I wanted to see how German soldiers were eating pea-soup, I heard “Geke won’t allow it”. If I wanted to climb the roof, I was told: “Geke won’t allow it”. It was a prohibitive spell. It seems to me now that even later, during my whole life, this phrase followed me everywhere. Any time I tried to do something, I was always forbidden to do it: “Calm down, Kama, Geke won’t allow it”. In all languages: Lithuanian, Russian, English, Swedish and Finnish. I wanted to become an actor: “Geke won’t allow it”. I wanted to study directing: the same. I wanted to work in my favourite specialisation: “Geke won’t allow it”. I wanted to go abroad, like everybody else, I wanted to be happy, I wanted... “Geke won’t allow it”. Today I have many of the things I had wanted at some point but I had to overcome this intimidated “no”. Nevertheless, I think that probably every person should know that there are certain things in life which Geke won’t allow... You cannot be taller than you are, you cannot have a longer and healthier life. If you are born with dark hair you cannot be blond. If you are born Jewish, you cannot and you should not become a Lithuanian. You cannot be smarter, more talented and handsome than you are. You are like you are. And that’s enough.
I couldn’t say I remember much from the war time. Of course, I don’t. I spent my childhood and my youth listening to the stories retold by adults about the war and the occupation and how our family and friends escaped from the Kaunas Ghetto. People would often visit us: those who were rescued and those who rescued us. Most of our rescuers, not all of them (we didn’t know all of them and we have lost track of some of them) have become not only our close friends but our relatives. When I brought my young wife from Leningrad to introduce her to my parents, there was no question for me that I should also introduce her to Sofija Binkienė, an elderly woman by then, who had saved both me and my parents. Our life events became her life events and all of her family life events and challenges became ours. Several years later, Sofija Binkienė’s granddaughter was giving birth and she turned out to have a rhesus negative blood type. That was deathly dangerous for the child-bearer and she needed medicine. The people whom Binkienė had saved during the war managed to get the medicine in Israel. However, any contacts with Israel in the 1960s were not welcome. And so my father, a doctor, kept watch over the granddaughter in the hospital, assisting her in her childbirth. This was all natural...
The Binkis family was part of the intelligentsia, which included a writer, performing artists, and musicians. They lived in a private house in Kaunas. My parents and I hid there after we ran away from the ghetto.
The people who saved Jews did it for a variety of reasons. Some of them did it for money. Not in the direct sense of the word. At that time, money was not worth anything. They did it for valuable things. But the majority, and all of those whom I know, did it for noble reasons, as they say. Vladas Varčikas was a person like this, the husband of Sofija Binkienė’s daughter Lilijana. He was a hawk-nosed Lithuanian violinist who resembled a Jew. He would put on a yellow star, join the lines of Jews herded for labour or back to the ghetto, risked his life to get into the ghetto and would persuade the people in despair to run away from the ghetto saying that there were Lithuanians who do not shoot Jews but help save them. After the pogroms during the first days of war in Kaunas and the massacre in the garage of “Lietūkis”, such words were difficult to believe. Those who witnessed the event could not erase the indescribable horror from their mind, which is why when the Germans said they wanted to protect the Jews from the “just fury of the Lithuanian nation”, 99 per cent of the Jews took their belongings and children and moved into the ghetto. The barbed wire fence was like salvation. It was not very difficult to run away from there: a column of several hundred people was herded by a couple of policemen. You only had to to take off the yellow star and move to the sidewalk. But nobody dared to run. Where could they hide? They would be betrayed, informed on or “sold”. In the eyes of many people, Jews were responsible for the arrival of the Soviet government. Jews were always responsible for everything.
For two years my parents did not succumb to any of Varčikas’ persuasions. Leaving the ghetto meant imminent death. And in the ghetto at least... Yes, some people were taken somewhere. In the beginning, it wasn’t clear where to. Later there were rumours that they were taken to the 9th Fort and shot. They called them “actions”: the Intelligentsia’s Action, the Invalids’ and the Old People’s Action. Those that survived reasoned: war, hard times, and there was little use of the disabled and old people. Of course, that was horrible but you could understand it, it was war. The Germans were practical people: they would not exterminate young and healthy people who could be useful to the Wehrmacht and since I was young and healthy... I think that was their psychology. It was something along these lines that my father told me. How else could they survive if there was no hope left, something to believe in?
However there was a moment when it became clear to everyone. My grandmother, my mother’s brother, our neighbours and acquaintances had already been shot. They killed my grandfather from my father’s side in the Panevėžys ghetto. It became known to everyone what was going on. Kaunas is a big town, and first such actions were carried out in small towns. Rumours spread fast. After the Children’s Action was carried out in Šiauliai, it meant that a similar one will follow in Kaunas. My parents understood that we had to run away. There is an interesting detail : one rescuer suggested to my parents to hand me over to a childless German family who were ready to adopt me under one condition: they would leave for Germany and any contact with their son would be cut-off forever. My mother, who was a young and beautiful woman, replied: “And have him hate Jews when he grows up? Never! It’s better for him to receive the same fate as us.”
How did we run away? I vaguely remember a bag of potatoes which I was crammed into, and prior to that given sleeping pills because I was uncontrollable (a strange thing is it seems that the sleeping pills did not work). One version is that the bag with potatoes and me was thrown over the fence, and my parents left through the gates, giving a bribe to the guards. Another version is that they put the bag with potatoes into a pram and took me away...
As soon as we left the ghetto, my mother put a hat on with a thick veil. She was very beautiful, dark-haired, with big Jewish eyes and she could have hardly looked a Lithuanian despite her excellent command of Lithuanian. But everything ended happily. There were quite a few miracles in my life. Both then and later. My mother would always say that the happiest number for our family is 13. We left the ghetto on the 13th. It was in 1943, in autumn, maybe November, I don’t remember which month exactly.
When in April 2005 I was on tour with the play Rothschild’s Fiddle in Kaunas, my former classmates and course mates came to see it. Suddenly the door opens and a smiling man enters the room. Thinking that he is one of my classmates whom I cannot recognise, I happily smile at him. He asks me: “Do you know whom you are greeting?” I say “No”. He explained to me that it was his pram I was taken away from the ghetto in. What an encounter... He was one year old at the time and I was two. We stayed the night in their house after we left the ghetto. His mother had given my parents the pram in which I was taken away, and she organised our transfer over the guarded bridge in Vilijampolė, near the Kaunas Ghetto.
And there we were, at the place of the Binkis family. Later there were other “transfer points”. We did not stay long in any one place: a day or two, a week or a month. It would have been dangerous to stay longer.
Kama Ginkas
From the 4th book Hands Bringing Life and Bread
I found myself in the ghetto when I was six weeks’ old. When I turned two, my parents and I escaped from the ghetto. The Lithuanians who were hiding us were taking a fatal risk: I was very curious and would run first to open the door, I couldn’t pronounce “r” and once I asked a German officer who came to their house “Vos?” which in Jewish meant “What?”.
It was almost the first phrase that I heard in my childhood when I was capable of understanding what was being said: “Geke lozt nit”. In Yiddish it meant “Geke won’t allow it”. Geke was a ghetto guard who wouldn’t allow [anything]. When I ate a fly or refused to behave, with exhausted adults sleeping aside, my mother would say: “Geke won’t allow it”. If I went close to the barbed-wire fence of the ghetto, I heard: “Geke won’t allow it”. If I wanted to see how German soldiers were eating pea-soup, I heard “Geke won’t allow it”. If I wanted to climb the roof, I was told: “Geke won’t allow it”. It was a prohibitive spell. It seems to me now that even later, during my whole life, this phrase followed me everywhere. Any time I tried to do something, I was always forbidden to do it: “Calm down, Kama, Geke won’t allow it”. In all languages: Lithuanian, Russian, English, Swedish and Finnish. I wanted to become an actor: “Geke won’t allow it”. I wanted to study directing: the same. I wanted to work in my favourite specialisation: “Geke won’t allow it”. I wanted to go abroad, like everybody else, I wanted to be happy, I wanted... “Geke won’t allow it”. Today I have many of the things I had wanted at some point but I had to overcome this intimidated “no”. Nevertheless, I think that probably every person should know that there are certain things in life which Geke won’t allow... You cannot be taller than you are, you cannot have a longer and healthier life. If you are born with dark hair you cannot be blond. If you are born Jewish, you cannot and you should not become a Lithuanian. You cannot be smarter, more talented and handsome than you are. You are like you are. And that’s enough.
I couldn’t say I remember much from the war time. Of course, I don’t. I spent my childhood and my youth listening to the stories retold by adults about the war and the occupation and how our family and friends escaped from the Kaunas Ghetto. People would often visit us: those who were rescued and those who rescued us. Most of our rescuers, not all of them (we didn’t know all of them and we have lost track of some of them) have become not only our close friends but our relatives. When I brought my young wife from Leningrad to introduce her to my parents, there was no question for me that I should also introduce her to Sofija Binkienė, an elderly woman by then, who had saved both me and my parents. Our life events became her life events and all of her family life events and challenges became ours. Several years later, Sofija Binkienė’s granddaughter was giving birth and she turned out to have a rhesus negative blood type. That was deathly dangerous for the child-bearer and she needed medicine. The people whom Binkienė had saved during the war managed to get the medicine in Israel. However, any contacts with Israel in the 1960s were not welcome. And so my father, a doctor, kept watch over the granddaughter in the hospital, assisting her in her childbirth. This was all natural...
The Binkis family was part of the intelligentsia, which included a writer, performing artists, and musicians. They lived in a private house in Kaunas. My parents and I hid there after we ran away from the ghetto.
The people who saved Jews did it for a variety of reasons. Some of them did it for money. Not in the direct sense of the word. At that time, money was not worth anything. They did it for valuable things. But the majority, and all of those whom I know, did it for noble reasons, as they say. Vladas Varčikas was a person like this, the husband of Sofija Binkienė’s daughter Lilijana. He was a hawk-nosed Lithuanian violinist who resembled a Jew. He would put on a yellow star, join the lines of Jews herded for labour or back to the ghetto, risked his life to get into the ghetto and would persuade the people in despair to run away from the ghetto saying that there were Lithuanians who do not shoot Jews but help save them. After the pogroms during the first days of war in Kaunas and the massacre in the garage of “Lietūkis”, such words were difficult to believe. Those who witnessed the event could not erase the indescribable horror from their mind, which is why when the Germans said they wanted to protect the Jews from the “just fury of the Lithuanian nation”, 99 per cent of the Jews took their belongings and children and moved into the ghetto. The barbed wire fence was like salvation. It was not very difficult to run away from there: a column of several hundred people was herded by a couple of policemen. You only had to to take off the yellow star and move to the sidewalk. But nobody dared to run. Where could they hide? They would be betrayed, informed on or “sold”. In the eyes of many people, Jews were responsible for the arrival of the Soviet government. Jews were always responsible for everything.
For two years my parents did not succumb to any of Varčikas’ persuasions. Leaving the ghetto meant imminent death. And in the ghetto at least... Yes, some people were taken somewhere. In the beginning, it wasn’t clear where to. Later there were rumours that they were taken to the 9th Fort and shot. They called them “actions”: the Intelligentsia’s Action, the Invalids’ and the Old People’s Action. Those that survived reasoned: war, hard times, and there was little use of the disabled and old people. Of course, that was horrible but you could understand it, it was war. The Germans were practical people: they would not exterminate young and healthy people who could be useful to the Wehrmacht and since I was young and healthy... I think that was their psychology. It was something along these lines that my father told me. How else could they survive if there was no hope left, something to believe in?
However there was a moment when it became clear to everyone. My grandmother, my mother’s brother, our neighbours and acquaintances had already been shot. They killed my grandfather from my father’s side in the Panevėžys ghetto. It became known to everyone what was going on. Kaunas is a big town, and first such actions were carried out in small towns. Rumours spread fast. After the Children’s Action was carried out in Šiauliai, it meant that a similar one will follow in Kaunas. My parents understood that we had to run away. There is an interesting detail : one rescuer suggested to my parents to hand me over to a childless German family who were ready to adopt me under one condition: they would leave for Germany and any contact with their son would be cut-off forever. My mother, who was a young and beautiful woman, replied: “And have him hate Jews when he grows up? Never! It’s better for him to receive the same fate as us.”
How did we run away? I vaguely remember a bag of potatoes which I was crammed into, and prior to that given sleeping pills because I was uncontrollable (a strange thing is it seems that the sleeping pills did not work). One version is that the bag with potatoes and me was thrown over the fence, and my parents left through the gates, giving a bribe to the guards. Another version is that they put the bag with potatoes into a pram and took me away...
As soon as we left the ghetto, my mother put a hat on with a thick veil. She was very beautiful, dark-haired, with big Jewish eyes and she could have hardly looked a Lithuanian despite her excellent command of Lithuanian. But everything ended happily. There were quite a few miracles in my life. Both then and later. My mother would always say that the happiest number for our family is 13. We left the ghetto on the 13th. It was in 1943, in autumn, maybe November, I don’t remember which month exactly.
When in April 2005 I was on tour with the play Rothschild’s Fiddle in Kaunas, my former classmates and course mates came to see it. Suddenly the door opens and a smiling man enters the room. Thinking that he is one of my classmates whom I cannot recognise, I happily smile at him. He asks me: “Do you know whom you are greeting?” I say “No”. He explained to me that it was his pram I was taken away from the ghetto in. What an encounter... He was one year old at the time and I was two. We stayed the night in their house after we left the ghetto. His mother had given my parents the pram in which I was taken away, and she organised our transfer over the guarded bridge in Vilijampolė, near the Kaunas Ghetto.
And there we were, at the place of the Binkis family. Later there were other “transfer points”. We did not stay long in any one place: a day or two, a week or a month. It would have been dangerous to stay longer.
The Binkis family were fantastic people. On the Avenue of the Righteous in Jerusalem there is a tree planted by Sofija Binkienė herself and a memorial plate with all the names of the Binkis family engraved. A fantastic family and a fantastic story...
In a magical house in Žaliakalnis district lived a brilliant poet, Kazys Binkis, dying from heart disease, with his wife Sofija and two beautiful daughters, harpist Irena and performing artist Lilijana, with their husbands and small children. Sofija Binkienė at that time was a young and beautiful woman. And Jewish children and adults hiding among them, without a break, replacing one another.
I had whooping cough... They would tuck me in into one bed with Sofija’s newborn granddaughter, Iga (Sofija-Ligija). Sofija Binkienė looked for people who could get passports for Jews and found families who agreed to help them hide people. It was like a transfer centre, or staff, if you would like. They thought that the dying husband did not know what was going on in his house, yet when a ten or eleven year old girl who constantly lived with the Binkis family and was introduced to everyone as a distant relative from the village was playing Mozart or Sibelius on the piano, Kazys Binkis, who was lying in the next room, would say to his wife: “What kind of tales have you been telling me?...”
Aunt Zosia (that is how everybody called Sofija Binkienė) saved us because she was appalled by the fact that Lithuanians were taking part in the Jewish massacres. She thought it was her duty to prove that there are Lithuanians who behave otherwise...
I have to tell you about Broliukas. That was Bronius Gotautas, a monk, but everybody called him Broliukas. He denied being a monk, he never wore a monk’s clothes, and people said he did it to avoid putting blame on the monastery if he were caught. Broliukas would pass on to the Jews the counterfeited passports which were made by priests. He was illiterate, which is why he put passports for women into one pocket and passports for men into another one, so the people he delivered them could find the documents they required themselves. He was a fantastic person and he did it because of God. In the true sense. Finally they caught him, arrested him and somehow he found himself in Germany. In approximately 1950 my father suddenly received his letter via the Red Cross. Imagine Stalinist Kaunas and a letter from the American zone! Broliukas asked us to help him return to his homeland. This person had no idea what was going on here. My father was in despair. How could he explain to Broliukas that he should stay where he was and that he shouldn’t go back? Even if they did not shoot him in the Soviet Union or exiled him to Siberia (which was highly improbable), then he would start saving, for example, forest brothers. That was his vocation. When the Soviet army came in 1940, he hid the so-called Lithuanian nationalists. When the Germans came, he started saving Jews and Russian soldiers. I do not know exactly what my father did. Perhaps he did not reply to his letter. Maybe Broliukas thought my father was horribly ungrateful but that was how he saved Broliukas’ life.
Antanina... At that time her surname was Skačkauskaitė and later, after she got married, she became Vaičiūnienė. I got acquainted with her more than ten years ago, when I lived in Moscow. One day I received a letter from Kaunas. Written with familiar handwriting, in Lithuanian, with some mistakes. It sounded like this: “Dear Kamutis, I am sorry for approaching you, such a well known and famous person. Wasn’t it you, Kamutis, that little boy I would keep warm in my bed? I rescued you, and your father came to visit you. Don’t you remember how much you loved me, clinging to my skirt?! Even your daddy reproached me saying that I shouldn’t get so attached to the child. Isn’t it that you, such a famous director?”
It turned out that in a Kaunas newspaper she read something good about two directors: my wife Henrieta Janovskaja, and Kama Ginkas. She realised it was me and wrote to Moscow, to the МХАТ, where at the time I worked as a director. The next day, according to my wife (although I think it was on a third day), I was already in the Kaunas District looking for Vaičiūnienė’s house. Behind one of the fences there was a stout elderly woman, barefoot, up to the ankles in the soil, working in her garden. I will skip the moment of our meeting... In a small and shabby house with the smell of cats and old age, she hurries to treat me to some food and keeps taking out some documents from the chest verifying that she had truly saved me. Was it because some people did not believe her, or the Soviet government had gotten everyone used to having everything documented?... Before the war she was a nun, a sister of mercy. When the Soviets closed the monastery, the sisters started a secular life, and some of them got married. During the year when Antanina saved me, she worked in a home for mentally disabled children and hid Jewish children there. Every night, three children, five and sometimes ten children. It was another “transfer point” until a more reliable and safer place was found. They placed Jewish children together with ill children and wrote Typhus Abdominalis (typhoid fever) on the door, for example, to prevent the Germans, who were afraid of any kind of contagious diseases, from entering the wards. She was very scared and once she confessed to her mother: “I am hiding Jewish children. I could be killed for it. What should I do?” Her mother, a simple peasant woman, replied (as retold by Antanina): “Then you will know what you died for”. This elderly woman had a son. He was a priest and was engaged in similar activities, but in another district. After this first encounter I received letters from Antanina periodically and they would begin with the same words: “Is that really you, Kamutis? You have become such a well-known person!” And then she would add: “I know that now times are difficult in Russia. I can send you potatoes and my relatives from the village could give you bacon.” Sometimes, rarely, I would come and bring her money and once installed a telephone line in her house. I invited her with her daughter, a teacher, to come to Moscow but... she never had time... she had to take care of the garden...
A TV show called Пятое колесо on Leningrad television made a film about Antanina around 1992.
When I got into the ghetto as a small child, I of course started speaking Yiddish. I have to say that when they were saving us it caused a lot of problems. I was an extremely lively kid, I could not stand still and when there was a knock on the door, me, a dark-haired Jew who couldn’t pronounce “r” would run to it shouting “Vos?”. I was not supposed to do that because behind the door there could be a German officer or some unwelcomed neighbour. So Aunt Zosia started teaching me Lithuanian. My articulation improved, I forgot Yiddish and started speaking perfect Lithuanian (I still use every opportunity to speak the Lithuanian language).
At that time, one of the rescuers told me I had to tell everyone I was Kaziukas: “You are Kaziukas, a Lithuanian, Kaziukas, a Lithuanian.” I would take a huge bat and would repeat the words like a spell: “I am Kaziukas, a Lithuanian”. It sounded like I was a “hero of the Soviet Union”. When my father took me from the house where one could say I spent the last stage of my hiding, my father remembered that every night when he put me to bed I would say: “The Jews will come and cut you up.” I would warn him! I probably learned these words at one of the “transfer points”. He had to explain it to his child that Jews do not come and cut people up. At some point he chose the right moment and said: “You see, well, it somehow happened, by accident that... I am sorry... but your father is partly... Jewish”. What a shock! My father is Jewish! And then even more difficult... He had to explain to me that my mother... so it happened, that’s just the way it was... partly... Jewish. It was logical, but it didn’t mean under any circumstances that I also was Jewish. So he had to explain to me again, that, well, it happened by accident that I was also partly Jewish...
How did all that we had to live through during the war affect my parents’ future life?.. Of course, some things subsided, they couldn’t avoid being affected totally, yet they had no fear. My father said that he was not afraid of death because he had seen it many times. And I think that he truly had no fear. Neither did my mother. When all of the Jews at the end of the 1950s were exiled to Birobidzhan (I think they learned about it in Lithuania earlier because Lithuania was a territory occupied by the USSR), my mother said: “Well, we’ll go to Siberia. It can’t be worse than under Hitler.” I think that we had bundles with our belongings placed in the small corridor of our flat. We were, literary speaking, sitting on the bundles, ready to leave... My parents figured out the Soviet authorities very quickly. I was considered an anti-Soviet element already at school. Even the KGB had me listed as a member of a Lithuanian (!) nationalist group. Yet at the end of his life my father, who hated the Soviet government more than he loved it, would always say: “No matter how much injustice there was done, we must be grateful to the Soviets. We were saved by Soviet soldiers.” The biggest party which we always celebrated at home was 9 May. We considered this day our second birthday. For many years while I lived in Leningrad I sent my mother flowers via a courier on that day...
My mother used to say: “Kama, to Hitler’s disappointment you are alive. Hitler came to Lithuania to kill you but you are alive.” However, when I recently reminded my brother, who was born in 1945, of these words he disagreed with me: “Kama, you’re wrong, our mother was speaking about me, that I was born in the face of Hitler’s fury.” It’s funny and sad... Perhaps our mother was saying it about both of us. In the face of fury, regardless of anything... To live no matter what, contrary to common sense: I think that this is normal, that it befits a person. To live a life under the circumstances it offers I would say, is boring...
The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, 2009
In a magical house in Žaliakalnis district lived a brilliant poet, Kazys Binkis, dying from heart disease, with his wife Sofija and two beautiful daughters, harpist Irena and performing artist Lilijana, with their husbands and small children. Sofija Binkienė at that time was a young and beautiful woman. And Jewish children and adults hiding among them, without a break, replacing one another.
I had whooping cough... They would tuck me in into one bed with Sofija’s newborn granddaughter, Iga (Sofija-Ligija). Sofija Binkienė looked for people who could get passports for Jews and found families who agreed to help them hide people. It was like a transfer centre, or staff, if you would like. They thought that the dying husband did not know what was going on in his house, yet when a ten or eleven year old girl who constantly lived with the Binkis family and was introduced to everyone as a distant relative from the village was playing Mozart or Sibelius on the piano, Kazys Binkis, who was lying in the next room, would say to his wife: “What kind of tales have you been telling me?...”
Aunt Zosia (that is how everybody called Sofija Binkienė) saved us because she was appalled by the fact that Lithuanians were taking part in the Jewish massacres. She thought it was her duty to prove that there are Lithuanians who behave otherwise...
I have to tell you about Broliukas. That was Bronius Gotautas, a monk, but everybody called him Broliukas. He denied being a monk, he never wore a monk’s clothes, and people said he did it to avoid putting blame on the monastery if he were caught. Broliukas would pass on to the Jews the counterfeited passports which were made by priests. He was illiterate, which is why he put passports for women into one pocket and passports for men into another one, so the people he delivered them could find the documents they required themselves. He was a fantastic person and he did it because of God. In the true sense. Finally they caught him, arrested him and somehow he found himself in Germany. In approximately 1950 my father suddenly received his letter via the Red Cross. Imagine Stalinist Kaunas and a letter from the American zone! Broliukas asked us to help him return to his homeland. This person had no idea what was going on here. My father was in despair. How could he explain to Broliukas that he should stay where he was and that he shouldn’t go back? Even if they did not shoot him in the Soviet Union or exiled him to Siberia (which was highly improbable), then he would start saving, for example, forest brothers. That was his vocation. When the Soviet army came in 1940, he hid the so-called Lithuanian nationalists. When the Germans came, he started saving Jews and Russian soldiers. I do not know exactly what my father did. Perhaps he did not reply to his letter. Maybe Broliukas thought my father was horribly ungrateful but that was how he saved Broliukas’ life.
Antanina... At that time her surname was Skačkauskaitė and later, after she got married, she became Vaičiūnienė. I got acquainted with her more than ten years ago, when I lived in Moscow. One day I received a letter from Kaunas. Written with familiar handwriting, in Lithuanian, with some mistakes. It sounded like this: “Dear Kamutis, I am sorry for approaching you, such a well known and famous person. Wasn’t it you, Kamutis, that little boy I would keep warm in my bed? I rescued you, and your father came to visit you. Don’t you remember how much you loved me, clinging to my skirt?! Even your daddy reproached me saying that I shouldn’t get so attached to the child. Isn’t it that you, such a famous director?”
It turned out that in a Kaunas newspaper she read something good about two directors: my wife Henrieta Janovskaja, and Kama Ginkas. She realised it was me and wrote to Moscow, to the МХАТ, where at the time I worked as a director. The next day, according to my wife (although I think it was on a third day), I was already in the Kaunas District looking for Vaičiūnienė’s house. Behind one of the fences there was a stout elderly woman, barefoot, up to the ankles in the soil, working in her garden. I will skip the moment of our meeting... In a small and shabby house with the smell of cats and old age, she hurries to treat me to some food and keeps taking out some documents from the chest verifying that she had truly saved me. Was it because some people did not believe her, or the Soviet government had gotten everyone used to having everything documented?... Before the war she was a nun, a sister of mercy. When the Soviets closed the monastery, the sisters started a secular life, and some of them got married. During the year when Antanina saved me, she worked in a home for mentally disabled children and hid Jewish children there. Every night, three children, five and sometimes ten children. It was another “transfer point” until a more reliable and safer place was found. They placed Jewish children together with ill children and wrote Typhus Abdominalis (typhoid fever) on the door, for example, to prevent the Germans, who were afraid of any kind of contagious diseases, from entering the wards. She was very scared and once she confessed to her mother: “I am hiding Jewish children. I could be killed for it. What should I do?” Her mother, a simple peasant woman, replied (as retold by Antanina): “Then you will know what you died for”. This elderly woman had a son. He was a priest and was engaged in similar activities, but in another district. After this first encounter I received letters from Antanina periodically and they would begin with the same words: “Is that really you, Kamutis? You have become such a well-known person!” And then she would add: “I know that now times are difficult in Russia. I can send you potatoes and my relatives from the village could give you bacon.” Sometimes, rarely, I would come and bring her money and once installed a telephone line in her house. I invited her with her daughter, a teacher, to come to Moscow but... she never had time... she had to take care of the garden...
A TV show called Пятое колесо on Leningrad television made a film about Antanina around 1992.
When I got into the ghetto as a small child, I of course started speaking Yiddish. I have to say that when they were saving us it caused a lot of problems. I was an extremely lively kid, I could not stand still and when there was a knock on the door, me, a dark-haired Jew who couldn’t pronounce “r” would run to it shouting “Vos?”. I was not supposed to do that because behind the door there could be a German officer or some unwelcomed neighbour. So Aunt Zosia started teaching me Lithuanian. My articulation improved, I forgot Yiddish and started speaking perfect Lithuanian (I still use every opportunity to speak the Lithuanian language).
At that time, one of the rescuers told me I had to tell everyone I was Kaziukas: “You are Kaziukas, a Lithuanian, Kaziukas, a Lithuanian.” I would take a huge bat and would repeat the words like a spell: “I am Kaziukas, a Lithuanian”. It sounded like I was a “hero of the Soviet Union”. When my father took me from the house where one could say I spent the last stage of my hiding, my father remembered that every night when he put me to bed I would say: “The Jews will come and cut you up.” I would warn him! I probably learned these words at one of the “transfer points”. He had to explain it to his child that Jews do not come and cut people up. At some point he chose the right moment and said: “You see, well, it somehow happened, by accident that... I am sorry... but your father is partly... Jewish”. What a shock! My father is Jewish! And then even more difficult... He had to explain to me that my mother... so it happened, that’s just the way it was... partly... Jewish. It was logical, but it didn’t mean under any circumstances that I also was Jewish. So he had to explain to me again, that, well, it happened by accident that I was also partly Jewish...
How did all that we had to live through during the war affect my parents’ future life?.. Of course, some things subsided, they couldn’t avoid being affected totally, yet they had no fear. My father said that he was not afraid of death because he had seen it many times. And I think that he truly had no fear. Neither did my mother. When all of the Jews at the end of the 1950s were exiled to Birobidzhan (I think they learned about it in Lithuania earlier because Lithuania was a territory occupied by the USSR), my mother said: “Well, we’ll go to Siberia. It can’t be worse than under Hitler.” I think that we had bundles with our belongings placed in the small corridor of our flat. We were, literary speaking, sitting on the bundles, ready to leave... My parents figured out the Soviet authorities very quickly. I was considered an anti-Soviet element already at school. Even the KGB had me listed as a member of a Lithuanian (!) nationalist group. Yet at the end of his life my father, who hated the Soviet government more than he loved it, would always say: “No matter how much injustice there was done, we must be grateful to the Soviets. We were saved by Soviet soldiers.” The biggest party which we always celebrated at home was 9 May. We considered this day our second birthday. For many years while I lived in Leningrad I sent my mother flowers via a courier on that day...
My mother used to say: “Kama, to Hitler’s disappointment you are alive. Hitler came to Lithuania to kill you but you are alive.” However, when I recently reminded my brother, who was born in 1945, of these words he disagreed with me: “Kama, you’re wrong, our mother was speaking about me, that I was born in the face of Hitler’s fury.” It’s funny and sad... Perhaps our mother was saying it about both of us. In the face of fury, regardless of anything... To live no matter what, contrary to common sense: I think that this is normal, that it befits a person. To live a life under the circumstances it offers I would say, is boring...
The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, 2009