Kaušytė Elena

Kaušytė, Elena Elena Kaušytė, b.1909, was a pious Catholic who lived with her mother and younger sister in the village of Zakeliškiai, approximately 10 km from the town of Kelmė (Raseiniai District). Their house was small and old, and all their possessions were one cow, two pigs and some fruit trees growing in their tiny garden. Despite her poverty, Elena was always ready to help anyone in need. Three months after the Germans occupied the area on June 26, 1941, Elena welcomed into her home Ita and Bat-Sheva Krubelnik, teenage sisters, whose mother and younger siblings had been murdered on July 29 with the vast majority of Kelmė’s Jews. Ita and Bat-Sheva had been baptized by a priest in Kelmė, and they became used to their new Lithuanian names and already knew some prayers. Still it was extremely dangerous to shelter them, for people could easily recognize the girls from the once big Krubelnik family. But Elena believed in God and her faith helped her to overcome such fears and to withstand the hardships connected with feeding and caring for the girls. Apparently, some of Elena’s neighbors and acquaintances knew about her kind attitude towards Jews, so other persecuted Jewish girls and women were brought or sent to her home. Thus, an eight-year-old orphan Doba Shapira was hidden by Elena for several weeks, as well as the sisters Rivka and Frida Mendelovich, both in the 20s, and the 17-year-old Lea Kelz. They could not be sheltered altogether, so Elena transferred some of them to people she trusted. At a certain point, only Lea Kelz and Frida Mendelovich stayed on with her. One day in the spring of 1942, they were caught by the Lithuanian police near Elena’s house. and taken to jail. Elena pleaded with the policemen to free the girls, but was only beaten and cursed. She walked by foot to in the town of Raseiniai where the girls were imprisoned and tried to persuade the jail keeper that the girls were really Christians, but nothing helped. Lea and Frida were shotshortly after their arrest. Shocked but not discouraged, Elena continued to help the others until the end of the German occupation in October 1944. After the war, she moved to Kelmė and dedicated her life to caring for the needy. The girls she had helped – Bat-Sheva (later, Levitan), Ida (later, Markus) and Doba (later, Dora Shapira) immigrated to Israel. The fate of Rivka Mendelovich is unknown. On November 30, 2004, Yad Vashem recognized Elena Kaušytė as Righteous Among the Nations.