Perkone Elza

Perkone, Elza Lev Zeligman and Michle Kantor, residents of Liepaja, got married on April 3, 1941, shortly before the beginning of the German occupation. From December 1941, when the danger for Jews became acute, they started hiding with the help of their non-Jewish acquaintance. One day, Lev’s former colleague, a photographer by the name of Becalis, brought them to his friend, Elza Perkone, who had given her consent to shelter the Jews for a while. Elza had a private house with a yard. Behind a house stood a barn, one part of which served as a lavatory and another one as a woodshed. That woodshed became Lev and Michla’s living quarters for the following three and a half years. Their living conditions were hard: in the summer the Zeligmans suffered from flies and rats, in winter – from cold. Elsa, and sometimes the photographer Becalis supplied them with food. There was never enough food. The Zeligmans, instead of eating their meals immediately, divided them into parts, for they never knew when the next meal would arrive. Each of them had an ampoule with cyanide sewn in their clothes – they planned to use it in case they would be detected and arrested. Sometimes they would hear shouts in German, feet stamping and dogs’ barking, and would assume it was a round-up outside; once a number of bullets were fired into the barn wall. The bullets whistled over their heads but luckily did not tough the hiding Jews. On another occasion, Michle injured herself by stepping on a rusty nail. Without proper medicine the cut did not heal for many months; even after the war the pain came back once in a while. Constant stay in darkness influenced Lev’s eyesight badly. For almost three years the survivors hardly ever left the hiding place. Only when the approaching Red Army started bombing Liepaja they would appear in the yard, for they knew that everyone else went into hiding and nobody would see them. Elza steadfastly went through the hardships of hiding and sustaining two morepeople. She used to repeat to the Zeligmans: “You are my children and I will share your fate”. The survivors remembered these words all their lives. After the war Lev and Michle moved to Riga, raised two sons. They visited and sustained their rescuer until her death in the 1960-ies. On September 2, 2007 Yad Vashem recognized Elza Perkone as a Righteous Among the Nations.