Rescued Jewish Children

Ilana Pagirskaitė-Rozentalienė

ILANA PAGIRSKAITĖ ROZENTALIENĖ

From “With a Needle in the Heart”, Memoirs of Former Prisoners of Ghettos and Concentration Camps.
Genocide and resistance research centre of Lithuania. Vilnius. 2003.


I was born on 16 January 1937 in Kaunas. My first reminiscences are of the summer of 1944 when my uncle brought me from the village where I was hidden to Kaunas, which wasliberated from Hitler's fascists. I only vaguely remember what came before that, but so tragically determined my future life. ...It was very hot and we were walking somewhere far and for a long time. I was whimsical... We lived in a very high room with several partitions. I vaguely remember my parents' faces. Relatives and acquaintances told me that they were beautiful. When I look at my father's photograph it seems to me that I remember him. He was the youngest child of the ten children of my grandmother Sore Pagirskiene. He was an engineer and had received his education in Germany. When it was announced in the ghetto that specialists with higher education were needed, my father David Pagirskis, without suspecting anything bad, volunteered to appear at the place where he was summoned. Together with 534 other specialists he was shot dead. This appalling massacre, which was the beginning of the savage treatment of the ghetto inhabitants, went down in the history of Kaunas Ghetto as the Intelligentsia’s Action. My grandmother Sorė Pagirskienė died during the Great Action on the 28th of October, 1941.
I remember having a sister. Then she disappeared. Later I found myself with strange people... I remember a constant sense of hunger in the ghetto, then in the village.
Later I learned from my relatives that when “actions” started in the ghetto, my mother started looking for shelter for her children. With the help of Hirsh (Cvi) Levin, a member of the Council of Elders, we were carried outside the ghetto territory. My sister Dalia who was two years old at that time, was put in the children's home in Čiobiškis; elderly childless peasants took her from there, and I was taken by Julija Bernotaitė who had worked as a domestic help in my grandmother's home before the war. Julija told everybody that I was her daughter. She had left her own daughter Regina with her friends Strumilas in Kaunas.
After the war my uncle and my aunt (my father's sister) found us and took us to Kaunas. The elderly peasants did not want to part with their nice, fair-haired “Maryte”; it was very hard to persuade them that the girl had to be raised by her relatives. The poor old people visited her several times.
We all lived together – my aunt and uncle and their daughter who was my age. Also my sister who spoke only Lithuanian, and Julija and her daughter Regina who was also my age. Regina and I attended a Jewish school. I still have the certificate of completion of the first form.
Another family appeared in the flat: another sister of my father's returning from evacuation – Tania, her husband, and two grown-up sons. After all the wanderings and hardships endured during the war, life in a five-room flat was a sheer luxury despite the fact that three families shared it.
Soon my uncle Epshtein received an appointment in Vilnius and we left – my uncle's family and I. My sister Dalia had become attached to aunt Tania and uncle Abrasha Judelevich, and they also loved her dearly because their own sons were already students. So we separated. Dalia was still small and did not know for a long time that we were full sisters. We used to spend our summers all together – in a summer-cottage in Palanga, though we lived in different places and under different conditions the rest of the time.
When I was sixteen and had to receive a passport, my uncle advised to me to take his name. It was 1953 when the “doctor's case” was being investigated, and the campaign against the “cosmopolitans without a homeland” was waged. My uncle explained to me that the Pagirskis' were well-known merchants in Lithuania who traded in ironware, and that was why the entire family could be deported once deportations started. I agreed and became Ilana Epshtein; I even made the name famous by becoming a chess champion of the Republic in 1962.
I graduated from Medical School and have worked as a physician all my life. My sister Dalia has lived in Israel since 1973.


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