Ciblis Maria

Ciblis, Marijona Yunel, Anton Yunel, Anna On the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Marijona (Manya) Ciblis was a housekeeper for Meir and Tirtza Perelman, Jewish hairstylists in the city of Daugavpils. She had been working for the Perelmans since the early 1930s, after a disappointed love affair, which had produced a son who died shortly after birth. Consequently, Manya became very attached to the Perelmans’ young son, Saul, who was seven at the time of the invasion. Every month she spent a large part of her salary on gifts for the boy. Following the conquest of Daugavpils on June 29, 1941, the Germans and their local collaborators began abusing and murdering Jews. A month later the city’s Jews, including Tirtza and her two sons – Saul and Katriel, his older brother – were incarcerated in a ghetto. The father, Meir, was arrested together with his five brothers in the first week of the war, and two months later they were murdered. At the end of 1941, contact was renewed between Tirtza Perelman and Manya, her former housekeeper, who had continued to live in the Perelman residence at 48 Rigas Street. Manya then suggested that she save one of the children. Tirtza, faced with a wrenching dilemma, could not decide which of the two would be spared and asked Manya to make the choice. She chose Saul and took him to the Perelman family’s prewar home. Manya taught him to present himself as her son and call her mother. She also cautioned him not to look out the window. However, Saul did not heed her, and on one occasion when he was looking out the window he was recognized by the building’s concierge, who summoned the police. Manya and Saul were subjected to a series of interrogations, in which she insisted that Saul was her son. As proof, she showed the ID card of her real son, who had died in 1930. Manya, however, still feared that the authorities would discover Saul’s true identity. She therefore decided to move him to the family of Anton and AnnaYunel, who owned a farm near Medumi, in Daugavpils District. The Yunels had two grown sons, Donat and Leon, and Saul was presented as their relative and lived openly on the farm. However, here, too, the police became suspicious, and Anton Yunel was summoned for questioning. He decided to go to Wilno (today Vilnius) and obtain a copy of a birth certificate in the name of Jonas Ciblis, Manya’s late son, on the pretext that the original had been lost. The submission of this document to the police ended the matter, allowing Saul to live and work on the Yunels’ farm until the liberation in the summer of 1944. The Yunels then returned him to the Jewish community in Daugavpils. Manya Ciblis, who had hidden Saul until 1942, was a member of an underground group and was caught in the second half of 1942. After being detained in the Daugavpils prison, she was transferred to Riga, where she was executed only hours before the arrival of the Red Army and the city’s liberation on October 13, 1944. In May 1945, when Tirtza Perelman returned from the concentration camps in Germany, she could not believe that her young son had survived. The ties between the remnants of the Perelman family and Saul’s rescuers continued until 1972, when the family immigrated to Israel. These ties were renewed after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. On March 29, 2000, Yad Vashem recognized Marijona Ciblis and Anton and Anna Yunel as Righteous Among the Nations.