Chaja Atlas

Testimony of Chaja (Rogowski) Atlas, born in Radun, 1924, regarding her experiences in the Radun Ghetto and while hiding in the area From a well-to-do family; her father is a well-known philanthropist who owns properties and a dormitory for yeshiva students; Jewish life in a town that was famous because of the "Chafetz Chaim" Rabbi. Harsh economic blow to the family's livelihood during Soviet rule; fear of deportation to Siberia as "capitalists"; the family's move to Vilna; return to Radun with the entry of the Germans, 1941; deportation to the ghetto together with her mother and the rest of the children to a small apartment with five other families; ghetto life; leaving the ghetto to do forced labor; hiding during the "Aktions"; escaping from the ghetto before its liquidation; the fate of her mother and the rest of the family; the murder of her younger brother; alone in fields of grain, and at night, in a forest in the area of Bialystok with a pair of acquaintances; in hiding with a Polish man in exchange for payment; meeting her older brother who is a partisan, and the evasion of an attack by Nazi collaborators; hiding in a pit with a pair of friends for one and a half years; staying in the pit and surviving, thanks to a housewife who took care of their needs and brought them food; liberation, June 1944. Murder of one of her brothers in the Grodno Ghetto; her partisan brother survived; life after the war; aliya to Israel, 1957.