Balodis Tekla

Balodis, Tekla Moshe-Rachmiel Ichlov was born in 1940 to a young couple. His parents Hirsh Ichlov and Sara Zelikovski lived in Daugavpils. Following the German occupation the family was interned in the ghetto, where Hirsh Ichlov perished in November 1941. One day at the end of April 1942 Sara hid her son in a potato sack and took him to her work place outside the ghetto. Tekla Balodis, who used to be Ichlovs’ before the war, was waiting for them there. She took the sack and headed back home. Being very cautious and not trusting her neighbors, she prepared a hiding place in advance under the chicken coop. Two-year-old Moshe-Rachmiel spent his days there and only at night was he allowed to crawl out. Tekla, who was a 36-year-old single woman with a bad leg, led a lonely life, did not welcome any visitors and never shared the information about the child she was caring for with anyone. All that certainly played its role in their survival. The only people who knew of Moshe-Rachmiel’s whereabouts were his Jewish relatives in the ghetto. Only one of them, his aunt Sonia Slowo, survived. Upon her return from the Nazi concentration camp to Latvia, she adopted the boy. In 1946 Sonia and her husband set off to Eretz Israel with Moshe-Rachmiel, but they were split up on the way, and the child arrived in Israel and was put in kibbutz Neve Eithan, without his adoptive parents. In 1956 Sonia Slowo visited him there. Only then, at the age of sixteen, did Moshe-Rachmiel find out for the first time the details of his parents’ fate and the circumstances of his own survival. In 1961 Morry (Moshe-Rachmiel) Ichlov immigrated to Australia. At the end of the 1980s he visited Latvia for the first time since leaving. By then, Tekla Balodis was no longer alive. On October 7, 2008, Yad Vashem recognized Tekla Balodis as a Righteous Among the Nations.