Baublys Petras

Baublys, Petras Dr. Petras Baublys, a pediatrician, was director of the Lopselis orphanage in Vilijampolė, a suburb of Kaunas. At the end of 1941, a number of women from the Kaunas ghetto, who were active in an underground organization, appealed to him to open the gates of the orphanage to Jewish children. The underground was supposed to remove the children from the ghetto, and Baublys was asked to provide them with false papers and to take them into the orphanage. Baublys, who even earlier had been thinking of helping Jewish children, agreed readily, and the women in the Jewish underground began transferring the children to his care. Although Baublys found it difficult to obtain the false papers despite the effort he invested in doing so, he decided, for purely humanitarian reasons, to take the children in anyway. A considerable number of the orphanage staff also cooperated in this rescue effort, in which the Lithuanian doctor succeeded in saving the lives of dozens of Jewish children, among them Yakov Goldschmidt (later Zoreff), Volodia Katz, Ahuva (Luba) Peres (later Gold), Masha Muller (later Hatskelzon), Alik Remigolski, Ruth Latzman (later Peer), Rina Zupovich (later Wolbe), Ariela Abramovich (later Sef), Tamara Ratner (later Levi), sisters Ariana and Rut Jed and others. On May 5, 1977, Yad Vashem recognized Dr. Petras Baublys as Righteous Among the Nations.