Landsbergienė Ona

Landsbergienė, Ona In early April 1944, shortly after the children’s Aktion in the Kaunas ghetto, Fruma Gurvich, a Jewish physician, began to seek shelter for her 16-year-old daughter Bella. She would join a group of laborers leaving the ghetto, slip into the city and begin knocking at the doors of Lithuanian prewar acquaintances. After enduring numerous humiliating experiences, Gurvich arrived at the eye clinic of Ona Landsbergienė, a doctor she had known slightly during her university studies. Landsbergienė expressed her willingness to help Gurvich and agreed to give her daughter shelter. Without consulting her husband and son, who were then at the family’s summer home in the country, Landsbergienė took Bella there. The Jewish teen worked at household tasks in their home, and was treated well by the Landsbergis family. But about a month later, when the Gestapo arrested Landsbergienė’s son on suspicion of engaging in resistance activity, it was too dangerous for Bella to stay there any longer. Bella returned to Kaunas, where she was reunited with her mother, who moved from one hiding place to another. Her mother then took Bella to a former colleague, Dr. Aleksander Ragaišienė-Bieliūnienė*, where she remained until the end of the German occupation. Bella (later Rozenberg) and her family eventually immigrated to Israel. On August 3, 1995, Yad Vashem recognized Ona Landsbergienė as Righteous Among the Nations.