Šimaitė Ona

Šimaitė, Ona Ona Šimaitė was born in the village of Akmenė in 1894. After studying in Moscow, she worked as a translator and librarian in Kaunas. In her youth, when Lithuania had been part of tsarist Russia, Šimaitė had been associated with the Socialist Revolutionaries (the S.Rs.), and in the period of Lithuania’s independence, was known in Kaunas for her liberal and democratic views. Šimaitė moved to Wilno (Vilnius) shortly before the war, when she accepted a position as a librarian at the university of Wilno, and became friendly with Jews on the staff. Shortly after the establishment of the ghetto, she came to the aid of the Jews as much as she could. She also served as a liason between the Jews in the ghettos of Kaunas and Wilno, bringing letters and messages back and forth. Šimaitė received a permit to enter the ghetto, using the excuse that many books remained in the ghetto that needed to be returned to the library. Her activity was concentrated in two main areas: she invested much effort in an attempt to preserve every vestige of Jewish culture, in particular the works of Jewish writers and poets, and she unhesitatingly initiated acts to rescue individual Jews. With the help of two friends, she developed a method of forging documents, which she provided to Jews. She also returned to Jews belongings they had left in the care of Lithuanian neighbors, which they could then use in exchange for food. She disregarded the fact that this angered many of these Lithuanians, who were reluctant to give up valuable goods and could have denounced her. In September 1943, on the eve of the liquidation of the ghetto, Šimaitė managed to smuggle an ill young woman, Tanya Sterntal, out of the ghetto, hid her in her home and nursed her back to health. She then found a hiding place for her in the library, where she stayed for three months. She was eventually caught and taken first to Kaiserwald camp and later to the camp of Stutthof. Šimaitė also took a ten-year-old Jewish girl out of the ghetto and, through an attorney, obtained papers certifying that she was her niece. In spring 1944, when the forgery was discovered, Šimaitė was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to death. Only after friends among the local intellectuals paid the Germans a large sum of money, was her sentence commuted, and she was sent to Dachau. Towards the end of the war, Šimaitė was moved to a camp in the south of France, where the Allies liberated her. After the war, she remained in France, worked as a librarian in Paris, and until her death in 1970, lived in abject poverty. On May 15, 1966, Yad Vashem recognized Ona Šimaitė as Righteous Among the Nations.