The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (12 page)

Maryla Abramowicz-Wolska and her husband Feliks, both devout Catholics, took many Jews into their apartment, fed them and provided them with forged ‘Aryan’ documents. One of those whom they helped was the historian Dr Mark Dworzecki; another was the poet Shmerl Kaczerginski. For her work in saving Jewish lives, and in helping to cheat the Nazis of their aim of wiping out Vilna Jewry in its entirety, Maryla Abramowicz-Wolska was known as ‘The White Angel of the Vilna Ghetto’.
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WITH THE LIBERATION
of Vilna by the Red Army in July 1944, Pearl Good has written, ‘several hundred Jews hidden by Gentiles on the outskirts of the town returned to the city’. Among them was her future husband, Vova Gdud, who had found refuge with a non-Jewish family after escaping from the death pits at Ponar, where as many as a hundred thousand Jews were murdered by the Nazis between 1941 and 1944.
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The courage of a few non-Jews, each one outstanding in his or her different way, had enabled a few individual Jews to survive. But Vilna Jewry had been destroyed.

L
ITHUANIA’S INDEPENDENCE WAS
destroyed when it was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. Within a year it was overrun by the German armies that attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Of the hundred and thirty-five thousand Lithuanian Jews who came under German rule, only six thousand survived the war. More than fifty Lithuanian towns had established Jewish populations; none escaped the killing squads and their Lithuanian helpers. Nevertheless, by 1 January 2002 more than five hundred Lithuanians had been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
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They are also being commemorated by a series of volumes issued by the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum in today’s Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. The story of these Righteous, writes Emanuelis Zingeris in his introduction to the first volume, is ‘about the spiritual people of Lithuania who opposed the infernal laws of the time in the name of thousand-year-long justice’.
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Among the Lithuanian Christians who tried to help Jews was Bronius Gotautas, a monk in the city of Kaunas who changed the photograph on his own passport in order to save a Jewish doctor. In the village of Babrungas, a Lithuanian peasant woman, Julija Gadeikyte, and her brother Pranas hid six Jews in a hideout that they prepared for them underneath the hay in their barn. When it was safe for the Jews to come out for a while, Julija would enter the barn and quietly sing. Although it is possible that somebody in the village suspected that she and her brother were hiding Jews, nobody betrayed them.
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The first two Lithuanians to be recognized as Righteous by Yad Vashem were Julija Vitkauskiene and her son Arejas Vitkauskas. Asked to hide Jewish children from the Kovno ghetto, Julija, who was having difficulty in providing for her own son, agreed to take in a Jewish infant, and feed and house her, commenting: ‘What is life for, if it is not to help other people?’
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One of the Lithuanians chosen by Mordecai Paldiel for inclusion in the 1990
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust
was Ona Simaite. At the time of the German occupation she was a librarian at Vilna University. Using the pretext that she had to recover library books that had been loaned to Jewish students, she obtained permission to enter the ghetto, and went there every day, bringing in food and taking out valuable Jewish books, which she then hid in the university library. She also managed to smuggle a Jewish girl past the guards on the ghetto gate, and then to find her several hiding places, until she was accidentally discovered.

In the summer of 1944, Ona Simaite adopted a ten-year-old Jewish girl, registering her as a relative from another town which, she said, had been severely bombed. Enquiries were made by the authorities, who discovered that the story was false. Cruelly tortured, Ona Simaite revealed nothing about her many Jewish contacts, or about any of the hiding places of which she had first-hand knowledge. Sent to Dachau, she survived the war, though much weakened by her incarceration.
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In Lazdijai, a Lithuanian priest was asked for help by a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl, Guta Kaufman, whose family had been murdered during the slaughter of the town’s Jews. The girl had already been turned away by a former schoolfriend to whom she had turned for refuge. The priest took her in, and tried to persuade the schoolfriend to change her mind, but she would not. The priest then did what he could to help Guta, obtaining forged ‘Aryan’ documents for her, and in due course placing her in the home of Wanda Baldowska, an elderly Polish woman who, as a devout Catholic, regarded saving the Jewish girl as a religious imperative. Guta remained with Wanda until the area was liberated by the Red Army. With the aid of the priest’s housekeeper, Wanda supplied Guta’s needs out of her own funds. In the words of Yad Vashem: ‘She linked her fate with that of her Jewish charge, and cared for her with love and devotion.’
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On 5 November 1943 the SS searched the Shavli ghetto for children to send to their deaths. Seven-year-old Ruth Kron and her younger sister Tamara were among 575 children—as well as 249 sick and elderly Jews—who were rounded up that day for deportation. Ruth was able to escape deportation as a result of the intervention of the ghetto doctor, who had earlier successfully treated the SS Commandant—who, in return, allowed one of the 824 deportees to be spared.

A Lithuanian woman, Ona Ragauskis, who had recently lost her baby son to diphtheria, took Ruth Kron with her to her village ten miles from Shavli, where her husband Antanas was the schoolteacher. First, as the Canadian writer Keith Morgan has recorded, she had to ask her husband to agree to this. ‘I want to save her,’ Ona told her husband. ‘It is the right thing for Christians to do. I saw the hollowness in the eyes of the mothers who lost their children when the Germans came for them. I have lost a child and I know their pain.’ Having lost their baby son, she had only one remaining child, a two-year-old daughter, Grazinute. She continued: ‘But Antanas, you must know that if we take her now she could be with us for the rest of her life…we would have to feed her and educate her.’ Her husband replied: ‘I will love her as my own.’

Ona Ragauskis returned to Shavli, where Ruth Kron’s mother Gita begged her, ‘Please take my little girl. We don’t have much time.’ Ruth was then smuggled out of the ghetto. Fifty-seven years later, Ona Ragauskis recalled how, during the journey to Kuziai, she was so frightened the driver would betray them that she made him drop them off a mile from the village.

At the Ragauskis’ home, Ruth sat in a cupboard during the day so that none of the Lithuanian children would see her. By night, she could walk about and breathe the outside air. She slept in an outhouse at the back of the schoolhouse. Ona and Antanas Ragauskis fed her and did their utmost to keep up her spirits. Later, when it became too dangerous for the child to stay there, a priest, Father Kleiba, hid her in his home, where he was already sheltering a number of Jews.
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Lithuanian priests who helped save Jews, or protested against the killings, are remembered by survivors to this day. One of those survivors, Joseph A. Melamed, has written with deepest appreciation of the elderly Father Dambrauskas from Alsedziai, ‘who did everything in his power to save Jews and was even punished for this by his Bishop’. He also wrote of Father Bronius Paukstis from the Jesuit church in Kaunas who saved many Jews in that city; of Father Lapis from Siauliai (Shavli) who attempted unsuccessfully to help Jews there; and of Father Jonas Gylys, a parish priest in Varena, ‘who delivered sermons against killing Jews, and tried to comfort the Jews whom the Lithuanian murderers concentrated in a synagogue before their murder’.
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The largest number of Jews in Lithuania lived in Kaunas, known to the Jews by its pre-1914 Russian name, Kovno. Once the city’s thirty thousand Jews were confined in the ghetto, the only ones who left were those taken for execution at the nineteenth-century forts around the city, or those sent out each day to work in the nearby factories.

A Lithuanian medical doctor in Kaunas, Elena Kutorgene, helped not only those Jews who had been her patients before the war, but also many other Jews who turned to her. When, before the arrival of the Germans in the city, Lithuanian mobs rampaged through the streets, murdering Jews, she hid seven or eight Jews in her surgery for the night. During the short period after the creation of the Kovno ghetto, when it was still open, she went there daily with food and medicines. When the ghetto was closed, and non-Jews barred from entering, she went to the fence to hand over her packages. ‘The situation in the ghetto is horrible,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I simply cannot bear to live while knowing that right next to me people are enduring such suffering and being subjected to such terrible humiliation.’
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Also in Kaunas, a Lithuanian couple, Jonas and Joana Stankiewicz, gave sanctuary to a young Jewish child, Henia Wisgardisky, who had been hidden in the ghetto during the ‘Children’s Action’ of 1943, when the Germans embarked on the wholesale slaughter of the Jewish children in Kaunas, and then smuggled out. Before the war, Jonas Stankiewicz had been the foreman of the chemical factory owned by the young girl’s father. Henia survived the war, as did her parents, who were hidden by a Lithuanian potato farmer in his cellar.
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In the village of Padrabé, the Tomkievicz family gave shelter to ten-year-old Mulik Krol, while the Wiszumirsky family found a place in their home for his mother—who hoped that, by putting her son somewhere different from herself, he might have a better chance of surviving. ‘These people could not even risk mentioning to their neighbours that they were hiding a Jew: at that time even a next-door neighbour could be an informer. Therefore, the Tomkievicz and the Wiszumirsky families, whose farms were four kilometres apart, did not know anything about the other’s night-time visitors and parcels of food left at designated places.’
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It was not until 1992 that Mulik, then living in South Africa, began looking for his saviours in Padrabé. By that time, the parents of both families that had rescued Mulik and his mother were no longer alive. Jolanta Paskeviciene, a Lithuanian journalist, told Mulik’s story in an article in 2001: ‘Mulik felt that their children are like brothers and sisters to him. He and the Wiszumirskys’ elder son, Karol, used to tend cattle, they learned to ride a horse together, and tried to learn to swim. The Tomkieviczes hired him as a shepherd for several summers. Nobody suspected that the blond teenager was Jewish.’

The Tomkieviczes’ daughter Olga Gulbinovicz recalled, at the age of eighty: ‘Although almost half a century has passed since then, I still recall the awful, paralyzing fear that went on for several years. I cannot say even now which of the two feelings was stronger; the fear you would be turned in, and all your family would be shot dead; or the pity we felt for the innocent tortured children, the elderly, the sick and the women. I can remember very well how my parents got on with Mulik’s parents, who ran a shop in town. We always shopped there. We could also buy on credit or borrow money from them. How could we possibly refuse them help in such a situation? My mother loved Mulik as if he was her own child. She would come to wake him up in the morning, but didn’t have the heart to disturb the little shepherd’s sweet sleep. So she would take the herd out to pasture herself. When Sara, Mulik’s mother, was shot in the forest, we all mourned her for several days, and could not bring ourselves to break the news to the child who was now an orphan.’
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Those who hid Jews had to take extraordinary precautions. In the village of Parankova, fifteen miles from the town of Butrimonys, a farmer, Mikhail Shestakovsky, and his wife, Mikhilina, were among those noble souls who risked their lives and those of their family to hide Jews. ‘It was harvest time for potatoes,’ one of those in hiding there, Rivka Lozansky Bogomolnaya, later recalled. ‘They locked me in the house to help out. All the neighbours were busy with the potato gathering so it was quiet and nobody visited anyone. Since I wanted to make myself useful I tidied up and polished the house. I cleaned the windows, taking the opportunity to check if anyone was coming. I made the beds and did whatever I could. However, when Mikhilina came home and saw what I had done and the order I had made, she let out a scream. She feared it would be immediately noticeable that there were Jews hiding because in the village nobody cleaned the windows like that or made the beds like that. She crumpled the beds; it was harder to do anything about the windows.’

When Mikhail Shestakovsky heard ‘that runaway Jews were being sought in the barns he became very frightened. He didn’t tell us to leave, but consulted his family, including his brother Ignatzia, who had brought us, and his sister Genya. His youngest brother was very much afraid, and warned that if they were tired of living, they should at least think of saving their children. In response Mikhail and Ignatzia dug a pit under the house (beneath the workshop—he was a carpenter). He said that if any of the neighbours saw and asked, they should say it was for the potatoes. But if this happened we wouldn’t be able to hide there any longer.’

On one occasion, as Rivka Lozansky Bogomolnaya recalled, ‘our protectors wanted to prove to the neighbours that nobody was in hiding with them, so they took off for three days to visit Mikhilina’s brother. They brought a neighbour to stay in their house overnight. They left us a supply of bread and water, a jug of milk and a bucket with a cover for the necessary human functions. They covered the little pit with the lid, painted it with lime, and left. We were closed up for three days. It is very difficult to describe our suffering. It was dark and there was no air. In addition we couldn’t even go out once a day. In the house it was forever cold, so the neighbour and her children sat all day on the oven, which was right opposite the pit. It was a miracle though that though the Shestakovsky children, who were three and four years old, saw us crawl out of the pit, they never even cast their eyes towards the pit when strangers came into the house.’

The Shestakovsky family, like so many of the Righteous, was poor. ‘They would eat only twice a day—tea in the morning and in the evening a few boiled potatoes and onions (which were cooked together). They had two small children, so from their meagre food supply they had to manage to give us something too so that we wouldn’t die of hunger. Though we were full of worries we nevertheless wanted to eat.

‘Late at night when all the neighbours had long been asleep we would be let out for a bit of fresh air and for necessary bodily functions. All day long we suffered in the pit awaiting nightfall. Then we would be allowed to climb up on the stone oven to dry out from the dampness. One would stand guard at the window to make sure nobody was passing by looking for us, in which case we would have to sneak into the pit so as not to bring misfortune upon ourselves and, more importantly, on the householders.’
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