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.’13
Rivka Lozansky Bogomolnaya survived the war in hiding. Others whom she knew were less fortunate.
FIVE LITHUANIANS FROM a single family, Jaroslavas Rakevicius and his four sons, Ceslovas, Juozas, Zenonas and Algimatas, typified the bravery that could be shown when the will to save was strong. This one family saved thirty-five Jews, systematically smuggling them out of the Kovno ghetto and taking them into their own home in the village of Keidziai, more than fifty miles away. Among those whom this family saved was a young boy, Aaron Brik—later, as Aharon Barak, the President of Israel’s Supreme Court—who was taken out of the ghetto by Jaroslavas Rakevicius in a sack.14
In one of the factories in Kaunas, Johannes Bruess, the German director of the iron foundry, allowed one of his Jewish workers, Joseph Kagan, to build a hideout in the factory’s attic. The factory’s Lithuanian bookkeeper, Vytautas Garkauskas—who was himself hiding a Jewish child in his home—knew about the scheme and approved of it. But ‘the heart and soul of the scheme’, wrote Kagan’s wife Margaret, who was also hidden there, was the factory foreman Vytautas Rinkevicius.15 Joseph Kagan later noted that Bruess was a devout Jehovah’s Witness, Garkauskas a Roman Catholic, and Rinkevicius a Protestant.16
Rinkevicius made plans to hide not only the newly wed Joseph and Margaret, but also Joseph’s mother Mira, in a specially constructed refuge—little more than a wooden crate—in the attic. Rinkevicius’s wife Elia knew nothing of her husband’s plans to save three Jews. ‘I took Joseph’s unbounded enthusiasm for this wonderful man with a pinch of salt,’ Margaret Kagan later wrote; ‘thus when Joseph wangled for me to get assigned to his work brigade on a day pass, I went with some trepidation.’ It was not until the lunchtime break ‘that I was to get my first glimpse of Vytautas. Joseph pointed to a distant figure in a far corner of the foundry-yard. We were to go over and Joseph was to hand him the bundle of personal belongings we had smuggled out of the ghetto, while I stood on guard. The man we were approaching was tall and lean, wore blue coveralls and a beret, looked alert, yet reassuringly relaxed. He wore heavy rimmed spectacles and their thick lenses seemed to set him apart from our ugly world. From behind these lenses his eyes exuded calm, hope and confidence. When I got back to my mother in the ghetto that evening, I found it difficult to explain just why this man had made such a monumental impression on me; but I did manage to convey my deep-felt confidence in Vytautas’s integrity and goodwill. I sensed my mother breathe a sigh of relief. Once more I was to join Joseph in his workplace for a day and this time Joseph managed to take me up to the box in the loft, which was to be our home.’
Margaret Kagan later recalled how, on a prearranged signal from Rinkevicius ‘that the coast was clear, we tiptoed upstairs. A wood plank wall sectioned off the loft from its gable end to which there was access through a small, secretly hinged door. Within that gable end there stood a nearly completed crate-like wooden structure, approximately 6 × 5 ft, topped by a wooden roof slanting at the same angle as the loft. Inside it—two wood plank shelf-beds—the one along the 6ft wall to be Joseph’s and mine, the other, a few feet above and across—Joseph’s mother’s. It all looked both comforting and frightening. How long would the three of us have to be cooped up here, afraid to breathe or move? What were our chances of survival? Was the ghetto a safer place to stay in, after all?’
The day came when Margaret Kagan left the ghetto for the last time. ‘Vytautas and Joseph had done a wonderful job of completing and equipping our hideout. Its comforts exceeded all my expectations; hair mattressing plus sheets, blankets and pillows graced our plank beds; we had electricity; two bulbs—one inside plus another one outside our box, above an electric cooking ring, and a small electric heater. Soap and towels, next to a washstand with a bowl and bucket, a few knives, forks and spoons plus a couple of pots and pans, and even a radio—all bade us welcome.’
The three people whose lives Vytautas Rinkevicius was risking his own life to save spent their first night ‘very conscious of the fact that come day and the morning shift workers, we would have to lie low, stop moving around or making noise for fear of being discovered. Towards dawn we slept fitfully and when, eventually, we started hearing voices and clanking, we hardly dared breathe. It felt like an eternity until we heard the agreed knock on the trapdoor outside our hut. This was built into the ceiling of the canteen food store of which Vytautas was in charge. Ever so gingerly we tiptoed to that trapdoor, opened it gently and were much relieved to read in the eyes of Vytautas’s serious face that our illicit move had not been noticed. After a whispered exchange confirming that on no account were we to stir unless we heard the two plus one knock, Vytautas assured us that he would take every opportunity of visitin
g us, probably every few days. Then, to our surprise, a basket was hoisted up to us on a devil’s fork, containing a traditional welcome of bread and salt, plus a chunk of bacon meat—a great luxury at the time.’
That hideout was to protect Joseph and Margaret Kagan, and Joseph’s mother, for three hundred days, from the end of 1943 until late 1944.
Recalling the efforts that Vytautas Rinkevicius made on their behalf, Margaret Kagan noted that he was ‘far more successful in keeping his worries and problems from us than we were with ours. Slowly, very slowly, we did, however, manage to piece some of his together. For instance, we did, eventually, realize how difficult it had been to keep us as his secret in order not to inflict his worries on his wife. Apparently she had noticed that Vytautas now seemed preoccupied and absentminded more often than before; besides, valuable food items started going missing out of her icebox and pantry. This led her to start suspecting Vytautas of being involved with another woman. It was only when faced with this suspicion that Vytautas confessed to hiding us. Elia—a generous, kind-hearted person, as we were to find out—proved sympathetic to our plight, but questioned whether they, as parents, had the right to put the life of their own child at risk. Thus Vytautas had to continue carrying the additional burden of not being able to share many a dangerous moment either with us, or with his wife.
‘We had come to depend on Vytautas’s face lighting up our difficult existence. At the same time we worried ourselves sick about his safety and found it difficult to get reconciled to the fact that at any moment we could prove the involuntary cause of his undoing. So any day Vytautas did not materialize through our trapdoor would cause us double concern—one, we missed him, and two, was it a routine obstacle which had kept him away, or had some disaster befallen him?’
One particular February morning in 1944, Rinkevicius appeared at the trapdoor ‘looking tense, pale and crestfallen. Our whispered solicitous enquiries elicited only that he had had a bad night due to a stomach upset, but we remained unconvinced. Later the same day—another knock, a most unusual occurrence. Vytautas had decided on second thoughts that he had to warn us that Mr Garkauskas—and he knew about our hideout—had been arrested the previous night. It had been impossible to ascertain whether or not his arrest was in connection with us; yet, as there seemed to be no indication it was, we were not to worry. But we all knew what this meant and none of us could have got much rest that night.’
On the following morning, earlier than his usual time, ‘an exceptionally agitated Vytautas came to tell us that Mr Garkauskas had managed to smuggle a letter out of jail to tell us that his arrest was unconnected with us. Sadly, he had been denounced by a neighbour for harbouring a Jewish child and the inevitability of tragic consequences marred our own relief at not having come to the end of our road. As it happened Garkauskas managed to escape death; the child did not. Reconciling our double-edged emotions of horror and relief was hard. Our inner turmoil was inexpressible. Gloom and silence reigned in our hut.’
Margaret Kagan recalls wondering whether, had they been denounced, they could have escaped ‘through our unfinished emergency exit; and if so, how could we have destroyed the evidence of our hideout and Vytautas’s culpability. Yet—life, such as it was, continued. We were learning to read Vytautas’s deep set eyes, he—slowly, to share some of his worries. Half jokingly he would tell us about his recurring nightmares. One such was that as we were about to be discovered and with the sound of German jack-boots approaching he would shove all three of us under our plank bed and would then try, in vain, to squeeze himself in on top of us. Also, we would get special food treats more often than before. Now that Vytautas’s wife Elia was “in” on us, the family would happily deprive itself in order to share rare goodies with us.
‘Whenever a new threat of being discovered loomed up, such as an outsider discovering the fresh saw marks we had created in order to make a disused little gate into an emergency exit, or our parcel of refuse (excreta) landing on the roof, rather than on its designated resting ground, or a zealous meter reading reporting a suspicious increase in electric consumption, or indeed, the tragic Garkauskas episode, we would revert to discussing ways of leaving and somehow finding new hiding places. This not only to save our own necks, but also to get Vytautas out of the direct firing line of questioning and torture. But he would have none of it. Come what may, he would say, we were safer in our loft than at large, and he was ready and prepared to face any consequences.
‘I still cannot imagine how we could have coped without Vytautas’s extraordinary moral fortitude. For instance, one day my mother-in-law decided that she could not survive “buried alive”, as it were. In her claustrophobic delusion the ghetto became her “fata morgana”. It was Vytautas who, with the help of a letter from my mother living in the ghetto, dissuaded her from returning to the ghetto. We did all agree, though, that Mira, my mother-in-law, did need to get away in order not to crack up. Again, it fell to Vytautas to arrange for her to be given refuge for a short break, away from our hideout with another devoted family of Lithuanian friends—the Serapinases.’
Another Lithuanian couple, Antanas and Maria Macenavicius, had already taken in Margaret Kagan’s eleven-year-old brother Alik, and were also looking after a little Jewish girl.17
In the small town of Naumiestis, a Lithuanian woman, Apolonia Shaparis, took in a Jewish girl called Rachala, brought her up as her own daughter, and enabled her to survive the war. When the war ended, Apolonia Shaparis and her family, including Rachala (then named Halina), fled from Lithuania, eventually settling in the Baltic port of Slupsk (Stolp). There, at the end of 1946, by a miracle of perseverance, Rachala’s father located her and took her home.18
Fifty-five years after the end of the war, a member of the Shaparis family began her quest for the Jewish girl who had been sheltered by her grandparents. In a letter to the Hidden Child newsletter in New York, asking for information, she set down everything that she had learned from her family about the little fugitive child. ‘We believe the girl’s name is Rachala (Rachel) Goldberg. She was born around 1940 in the Suwalki region. Her father worked in the manufacture of textiles and her mother was a schoolteacher. They were taken to the Kaunas ghetto. In about 1943, the Nazis ordered the elimination of all Jewish children from the ghetto, and her father sought to hide her. My birth grandmother lived in Kaunas and apparently put bread on the fence for people walking to forced labour. The family asked her to hide Rachala. She agreed. The young girl was then taken in a sack by bus to Naumiestis. She spoke only Yiddish and a little Hebrew. Once in Naumiestis, she was renamed Halina and was raised by Apolonia Shaparis and her husband. The other children were told that she was their sister.’19
THE ‘CHILDREN’S ACTION’ in the Kovno ghetto, which Rachala Goldberg had escaped thanks to the willingness of a Lithuanian woman to take great risks, took two days to complete. Several thousand children were rounded up, driven away in trucks and shot. Only a tiny fragment survived, among them the five-year-old Zahar Kaplanas. This young boy was saved by a non-Jew, a Lithuanian, who smuggled him out of the ghetto in a sack. Later Kaplanas’s parents were both killed in the ghetto. Zahar survived the war.20
At the very moment of the slaughter of the Jewish children in Kaunas, a Lithuanian doctor, Petras Baublis, the head of the ‘Infants’ House’ in the city, risked his own life and the safety of his family by offering to smuggle Jewish children out of the ghetto and hide them in his institution. To ensure their safety, Dr Baublis, who had a number of close friends among the Lithuanian Roman Catholic priesthood, obtained blank birth certificate forms, which the priests then agreed to authenticate with church seals and signatures, stating that each was a Christian child.
Among the Jewish children saved by Dr Baublis was the two-year-old Ariela Abramovich, whose father later testified that he knew of at least seven other children similarly saved. Baublis also took in another Jewish child, Gitele Mylner, who had been born only a few months before the massacre. She had b
een handed to the doctor by her parents. Baublis gave her the name Berute Iovayshayte and a certificate stamped by the church authorities, stating that she was a Christian child.21
In January 1944, in the village of Lavorishkes, just outside Kaunas, Teresa Danilowicz found two exhausted strangers on her doorstep. Without her husband’s knowledge, she took Slioma and Tamara Goldstein in, fed them, and offered them shelter for the night in the family’s barn. On the following morning, the Goldsteins explained that they had nowhere else to go, knew no one with whom they could seek refuge. Teresa Danilowicz agreed to shelter them, still keeping this fact from her husband, who was not well, and who had already agreed to hide a Polish refugee. She did, however, share the secret with her daughters; and there the Goldsteins remained hidden for seven months, living in the attic above the stables. At night, they were allowed into the house to wash, and to warm themselves. They remained in hiding until liberation seven months later.22
ON 12 JULY 1944 the surviving eight thousand Jews in the Kovno ghetto were ordered to assemble, and were then taken by train to the concentration camp at Stutthof, near Danzig. Hundreds tried to evade being taken and hid, only to be dragged out of their hiding places by German soldiers and hostile Lithuanians. Many were murdered in the streets. In the midst of this carnage, Jan Pauvlavicius, a Lithuanian carpenter, who had already taken several Jews into hiding, including a four-year-old boy, dug an underground hiding place next to his cellar for yet more Jews. He equipped the cellar with two bunks, on which eight people could lie, and made a small opening to the vegetable garden above, to provide the hideout with air.
The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust Page 11