יעקב שוורצברג

Name of Interviewee: Yaacov Schwarzberg

Name of Interviewer: Judith Soloveitchik

Cassette Number: VT-1512

Date: March 31, 1997

Name of Typist: Cheryl Balshayi

Place Names:

Vilno

Panar

Kaunas

Berlin

Schlachtensee

Lampertheim

Bensheim

Reichenhall

New York

Wyeland

Q: We have here today with us Mr. Ya’acov Schwarzberg. How did you get to Yad Vashem to give testimony?

A: Interview testimony? I came here to look for, they called it “Reshimot” from Vilna ghetto. Like they had, what they call, the.....

Q: The lists of the people?

A: I would say the “Schindler Lists”, what they call that movie? So I was looking also for the Vilna ghetto and I came to Yad Vashem to look for those lists and then I came to talk to some people here and they asked me to give an interview. What happened to me as a child in Vilna, where I was born.

Q: So you were born 1934?

A: That’s right.

Q: In Vilna.

A: I was born 1934, September 20th, in Vilna.

Q: What can you tell me about your family, parents?

A: My parents were well-to-do before the war. We lived on “Chopina” 3, which was a nice building, good neighbourhood. They had a nice court there. I had a Polish governess - she took care of me. My language was Polish and I spoke Yiddish also at home. And my father had business there.

Q: What kind?

A: He had a transport business, expedition. He also was a supplier to the army - supplied food and equipment to the Polish army. It came from my grandfather’s grandfather. It was a business which my grandfather and my grand-grandfather also was in. For the Russian army and the Polish army, whoever was in occupation, my family supplied them with food and equipment - food for their horses, food for the soldiers, and equipment.

Q: So they were natives from Vilna, the parents?

A: My family, the way I understand, we were there at least three or four hundred years in Vilna. Generations and generations.

Q: Your mother’s side, too?

A: My mother’s side not as much as my father’s side. My mother’s side were also many generations, but they came from Kharkov which was in White Russia. My father’s family came from Leipzig, Germany, but that was many hundreds of years ago.

Q: So school, did you manage to begin school?

A: No. I went only to the kindergarten. When the war started I was six and a half years old, in 1941, and I wasn’t yet eligible to go to school, school-age. I was born in September and so I had to wait. The Germans came into Vilna in 1941 in end of June. Therefore we were driven into the ghetto before I had a chance to go to school.

Q: What kind of a kindergarten did you go to? Jewish or public?

A: No, I went to a Jewish kindergarten across the street from the building I lived in, on Chopina 3, which is across the street, as I remember. Had to cross the street with my mother holding my hand and I didn’t like that. I used to go across...I told her to leave my hand and go - that I remember.

Q: What kind of a home do you come from? Religious?

A: We came from a traditional home. Shabbat my father went to the “beit knesset”, to the synagogue, had “kiddush”. In the house we had “kasher”, kosher, and we lived in a very traditional home. Saturday, Shabbat, we didn’t work. Like I said before, they went to the synagogue. I learned also by a “rebbe”, a rabbi - a “melamed” they called it at that time - “chumash” which was before the starting of school.

Q: At home?

A: He came over to teach me at my home, yes. I didn’t go to “cheder”. We were well-to-do, so he came to teach me in the house. How to write and read in Yiddish and also in “chumash” and “aleph-bet” - like every child starts out.

Q: You are an only child?

A: I was the only child, yes.

Q: So your mother was also in the business?

A: My mother helped in the business, yes. She was active in the business. She was a bookkeeper and she helped my dad in the business. The whole family worked. And I stayed home with a governess.

Q: You had contact with neightbours, Jews and non-Jews?

A: I went downstairs and played with all the...in this court we lived, on Chopina 3, mostly, fifty or sixty percent of the people were Jewish, maybe more, so there were children there and we played downstairs with Jewish children. I had Jewish friends which I was born with, you know, in the same court. There was about eighty apartments there in that court, in those two buildings, so there was a lot of children there.

Q: Do you remember contact with non-Jews? Anti-semitism?

A: Yes, I remember that well because in 1941, when the Germans came in, I remember there used to be a Lithuanian that had a little girl that used to come to play in that courthouse, in that court there - not a courthouse, in the court. Outside, in the yard. And I played, also that little girl came. Her father was, like, doing some labour there for those people that lived in that building, and also the superintendant, he was helping the superintendant - he was Lithuanian - and I saw how he beat on a Jewish person. This was in 1941 when the Germans came in in that yard - how he ran up to him with another Lithuanian - and I remember this person because I know that I knew him from the little girl that I played with. And how he beat, the Lithuanian, how he beat on the Jewish elderly person that had a beard - I don’t know whether he was a rabbi or not - he beat him and hit him and dropped him on the floor and I thought to myself “Shema Yisrael”, I said to myself. How can that kind of thing happen? And I called out to him, he ignored me, he ignored me. I called out in Polish to him, “Why are you doing it?” And he ignored me. He made with his hand a motion and then they dragged that poor Jew away, half alive. He was bleeding from his mouth and from his ears. It was a terrible scene. That’s the first time I saw real anti-semitism, real...how a non-Jew, a Lithuanian was beating and torturing a Jew.

Q: Until then you didn’t feel anything?

A: Until then I didn’t feel any anti-semitism. I was maybe too small to feel it. I didn’t see it and I didn’t feel it.

Q: Also at home, it wasn’t a topic, not in front of you.

A: No, the Polish people were not anti-semitic in Vilna, which I thought, but I was wrong because after the war and during the war I saw how they were. They were also hating the Jews and they liked to see the Jews all get murdered and killed, so they can possess their belongings. They were cooperating willingly, especially the Lithuanians. Not as much as the Poles, but the Lithuanians were willingly cooperating with the Germans, since the German army entered Vilna in 1941, at the end of June, ‘41. As a child I didn’t remember dates afterwards. I only remembered winter, summer, spring and fall. That’s what I remembered, and I know it was summertime.

Q: Did your father have any position in the “kehilla” before the war?

A: No. He was a businessman. As a young person he played in the “Maccabi”, soccer, and that’s the only thing. He wasn’t active in any organizations in Vilna. The only organization he was active is in the “Maccabi” sport club, and also he belonged to a synagogue there where he went to pray on the High Holidays.

Q: Do you know which one?

A: I remember, I remember which one it was, yes. It’s not existing anymore, it’s not there. I remember my grandfather’s synagogue. He took me once during “Simchat Torah”. There was the “Chorsduul”, they call it, (?), where my grandfather from my mother’s side prayed, “davened”, and I remember that synagogue from then. He took me “Simchat Torahs”, “Hakofas”. That’s the only thing I remember from that time. Maybe it was 1940, something like that. Wasn’t in ‘41, wasn’t when the Russians were already in Vilna. The Russians came in to Vilna in 1940 I believe, ‘40 or ‘39 they came and they became a Lithuanian republic there. It was a mixed up thing that didn’t interest me that much.

Q: You didn’t feel it in your surroundings.

A: That’s right. I didn’t feel that much difference, but I knew there was war there. I remember my father in 1939 when he came back from the Polish army. You know, he was prisoner-of-war, how he came in. I remember that.

Q: They took him a prisoner?

A: Yes, he went to war in 1939. He was an officer in the Polish army. I don’t remember him going, but I remember him coming back. When he came back in his uniform, still uniform...when he came back from the war....he ran away from the camp a prisoner-of-war.

Q: He ran away?

A: That’s right. He escaped. He was captured in Ostrolenko. He told me that story, how he was captured and then how they treated the Jews in the prisoner-of-war, the Germans, how they made fun of them, of the Jews, how they separated them from the rest of the soldiers, how they took a tall Jew with a short Jew and made them run to amuse themselves. He knew that the Germans were out there to kill us, but not, let’s say, to annihilate all the Jews, like a mass murder, nobody believed it. He knew that we were going to go through hard times with the Germans, but nobody believed that such a thing could happen like what they did to us. Mass murder and all that.

Q: So nobody really thought of trying to escape?

A: Well, some people. My uncle, for instance, in 1941 he was a youngster of fifteen. He took his bike and he escaped to, he escaped to Russia, when the Germans were close to Vilna already.

Q: And he made it?

A: He made it there and he was in Russia there and in Siberia he was arrested - a whole story with him. And then he came back to Poland. Two of my uncles actually. One uncle escaped in 1939 through Baranovich. He was arrested there in Baranovich and he was deported from there to Siberia and that’s how he survived. My Uncle Yoseph. My Uncle Leon , Leib - he escaped from Vilna. He left his parents’ home. Just one uncle stayed with my grandfather and grandmother, which lived separate from us in a different neighbourhood, like I said before. He has a (?) there. They lived not too far from there.

Q: But your father didn’t think of...?

A: My father didn’t know ...he was thinking, but where to run, how to run, you know? We went to the train station, but the train stations were full. Hundereds were there, thousands. There was no way to run away. I don’t know. It was just like...closed up.

Q: That was already in ‘41?

A: This was in ‘41 before the Germans....when the war broke out between Germany and Russia. Actually, in 1939, as you know, the Germans and the Russians made a pact, the Molotov Pact, when they divided Poland between themselves, and that’s why Vilna became Russian at that time and then became Lithuanian. They put up a puppet government in Lithuania. And then they came back again. They saw that the Lithuanians were not that loyal, so they made some kind of provocation and they came back and they occupied Vilna again, the Russians, and then they had Russian rule there where all the rich people were deported out. They wanted to deport my grandfather, too, but he somehow got out of it. And my mother was supposed to get deported too, but we got out of it. Maybe it would have saved a lot of people’s lives, the deportations, but some people afterwards perished there in Siberia. Deported these rich people.

Q: They were all taken to Siberia?

A: They were moved out to Siberia and they were arrested in families and they exported them to Siberia. As they say, you know.

Q: But you felt already the war. Food - was there a shortage already?

A: I already felt shortages already in 1939. However, we used to go to Grandmother and my uncles used to bring us food. When my father went to war already in ‘39, there use to be shortage in food and supplies. However, when the Russians came back and occupied Vilna, food was available. Life returned to normal. The only thing, they confiscated everything. They confiscated my father’s trucks, everything. His business, and he had warehouses full of goods - they were all confiscated.

Q: You still went to the kindergarten till ‘41?

A: Yes. Still went to the kindergarten, but it was like...it wasn’t a steady thing. It was a couple of months, you know. I remember till 1940 I went to the kindergarten. In ‘41, I think, the kindergarten stopped. There was no more kindergarten there.

Q: So what would you do all day long?

A: Downstairs playing. Downstairs in the yard, with the other children, running around. Also the rabbi, the “melamed” stopped coming to us, you know. I stopped learning at that time already.

Q: But there weren’t any restrictions yet for the Jews?

A: No, there weren’t any restrictions that I knew about, but the commissars - some of the Jewish people were commissars there. They were helpers, you know, they were communists, and they used to help the Russians confiscate stores and goods and they used to inform on people there. That I remember.

Q: They came to your house?

A: No, they didn’t bother us for some reason, but they bothered a lot of people that I knew. Their stores were nationalized. They came inside and they nationalized the stores, took all the merchandise out. It wasn’t good sight.

Q: Do you remember what feeling you had at that time, seeing these things?

A: Actually I didn’t have that much of a feeling. I only heard the stories, you know, and I didn’t have contact with it, so it didn’t affect me. But I was affected by it later on, when I heard about it, when I grew up, after the war.

Q: After the war?

A: Yes. Why did they interfere, the Jewish communists, commissars? What did they have to do with all this? They shouldn’t have interfered and should have left things alone? Why did they cooperate with the Russians? I didn’t think there were that many, but there were a lot. And they weren’t the higher class people. They were the tailors, the cobblers, you know, which wanted to become rich, you know, without working hard, as they say. Get a lot of favours and other things - money and goods and good position without really working too hard for it. That’s it.

Q: Do you remember the day the Germans came in?

A: I remember the day when the Germans came in. I saw the Germans march in with their boots and I heard on the cobblestones how they marched and I saw and the fear came through me. I had some kind of fear. But I looked at it, you know, I wanted to see how it looks. It interested me. And I really saw. I saw a lot of prisoners-of-war, Russians going and singing and I thought maybe, I didn’t really understand what is happening. Or the Russians are still here, but nobody guarded them. They were walking, singing. I saw that the uniforms weren’t as clean, but, you know, actually I got confused a little bit when I saw them. I really did. But then I saw there what was happening, you know. They started getting shortages of food. The Lithuanians became organized squads in capturing Jews to work. They did it voluntarily. They helped the Germans. They actually did more of the capturing and torturing and running and all that and bringing the people to hard work, hard labour, where they took them to work. They captured them in the streets. Some of them were never saw them return. They took them and afterwards I found out about it. I didn’t know at that time. They were taken and shot, murdered in Panar, which was on the outskirts of Vilna, a forest with big holes there, you know, dug up, craters like, the size of craters, which were dug up there. Afterwards I found out that these craters were prepared by the Russian army to hide over there different equipment from the Germans, but no equipment was hidden there. The Germans used those big holes, these dug out holes, they used them to murder the Jews in and bury them there. They used to walk on the edge, they shot them, they fell in there into these big holes, these graves. Some were even buried alive. Some people that escaped from there came back to the ghetto and told the story. Not too many, but some did.

Q: So that was even before people were taken to the ghetto or once they were in the ghetto?

A: This, what I’m talking about, is afterwards, that I knew about it. I didn’t know what happened to those people at that time. They disappeared, they just disappeared. For instance, I’ll give you an example. A week after the Germans entered Vilna, which was already about July, my grandfather was taken. Some Lithuanian Gestapo came over to my grandfather with the Germans and they told my grandfather to get dressed, take some towel with him, soap, and a little suitcase and he was taken for interrogation and held as hostage because they wanted to hold some of the people for hostages in case there were Germans, resistance, the resistance would kill Germans, but actually nothing happened like that. They would make provocations. What I want to say is that my grandfather was taken and I never saw him again at that time. Not only he was taken, a lot of Jewish people - Jewish rabbis, dignitaries, elderly people and even, I think, non-Jews were taken and we never saw them again. We didn’t know what happened to them. We thought at first they were taken, held in jail, but actually, what we found out later on, that they were taken and murdered in Panar, killed these people. What they did, they did systematic murder. They killed first, they took the dignitaries, the heads of the “kehilla”, the heads of the society, from different organizations and they were taken and they were murdered. Also, the time between the Germans entered and before the ghetto, they had people wearing white stars on their clothes, and the yellow stars, and they were not allowed to be after six o’clock curfew and they were not supposed to walk on the sidewalk and they were not supposed to organize themselves, you know, to be more than ten people, five people together - I don’t know exactly the number. Actually no more than five people were not supposed to be together. If they were caught they were arrested and as we know today, as I knew now and today, and then I didn’t know it, but afterwards we knew it, that they were murdered, they were taken and murdered. Now before the ghetto they took out whole streets, a portion of Vilna and they took them straight to Panar. They did this systematically, they did this with the help of the Lithuanians. We couldn’t do nothing. Couldn’t organize ourselves. The Lithuanians were happy to do it, they were enjoying to kill and they took all the “rechush”, all the belongins, the apartments - everything they robbed and took away from the Jewish people and they killed them, too. The procedure went on and the same thing all the time, till September of 19...which is about a month and a half, two months after the Germans came in. Notices went out.

Q: Till that time you wouldn’t leave the apartment anymore?

A: I used to stay mosly in the house. They came to look for my father. They were “chapunes” they called them. They caught people. And I remember two Lithuanians walked into my apartment looking for my father. My father escaped through the window in the back. he jumped downstairs about a floor down. We lived the first floor, which is a floor down. From the back of the house they used to have an alley there with a big garden in the back, with a fruit garden, where they had apple trees and everything in the back, but they had an alleyway there. He jumped out through the window and the Lithuanians came right in and they saw my father’s watch; they took it away. It was laying there. And they looked for all kinds of things and they walked out. They told me, “Where’s my father?” I said, “I don’t know,” and they walked out from the apartment.

Q: Your mother wasn’t home then?

A: My mother wasn’t home. It was in the morning I remember. It was very difficult, but not yet like it was in the ghetto. We were still outside, we still lived, I wouldn’t say normal, but for me it wasn’t that terrible.

Q: And this Polish governess, probably she had to leave.

A: She left, she was gone. The governess left when the Russians came in 1941 or ‘40, I think, she was gone already. 1940 I think, we didn’t have her anymore. Governess. And we had a maid, too. My mother had a maid. She used to wash the clothes - cooking my mother did herself - wash clothes. You know, at that time you didn’t have a washing machine. All the ironing and all this, we had a maid and we had a governess that took care of me. But in 1940 all that stopped. No more.

Q: After that your father, he didn’t hide. He was lucky he could run away.

A: We’re talking about ‘40?

Q: ‘41 now. You’re saying now that they came to fetch your father.

A: Not only mine. They looked for men, they were catching men for taking them for work or whatever. They took the death, too. Sometimes they never returned, like I said to you. They used to call them “chapunes”. They grabbed the people off the street.

Q: Lithuanians?

A: Lithuanians did that. Lithuanians what they had armbands on them with the swastika, and they didn’t wear uniforms even. They did it voluntarily. They were volunteers to catch and bring the men, catch them on the street and bring them to hard work, labour, and also some time they took them to be shot, according to orders from the Germans I think it was. The Germans had plans how to do it. But mostly Lithuanians; not that many Pollacks. The Polish boys and children used identify Jews on the street, say, “Jude, Jid”. This was already afterwards, after the ghetto already, when the people were in the ghetto, when they were not allowed to be outside. They informed on Jews. But at that time, before the ghetto, between June and September, before we were driven to the ghetto, when all these decrees were out there against the Jews, the Lithuanians did the dirty work.

Q: So your father wouldn’t go in the street anymore?

A: He told me that he saved his life one time when he ran into the synagogue where he prayed and hid there. They were looking for him. People were afraid to go in the streets. You had to get food and this was difficult to obtain food because they couldn’t go and get the food. They couldn’t stay in the house, too. They came looking for people in the house, too. They were constantly chased and looked for. It was under terror we lived.

Q: For women, for your mother it wasn’t so dangerous?

A: The women they didn’t grab, so she is the one that brought the food actually. At that time, yes, she went to my grandmother there in the morning, where my grandfather and grandmother lived - they had a big courthouse, they had a big apartment, a yard there and she came over there, they had food storaged away in the basements. My grandparents did, so there was a lot of supplies there. They prepared themselves, so we used to get food from the grandparents. My uncle, the youngest uncle which ran away, he wasn’t there anymore, and so my mother had to go and bring the food. In 1939 he used to bring the food to us and the other uncles, but now only my mother did that. She went and brought food, whatever she could bring from my grandparents. They lived on “Basilianska” Street. I know where it is, but I don’t remember now. Exactly I don’t remember where it was. I didn’t visit there afterwards, after the war. I know that building, in 1944 we went by there with my father and that building was all burned down, bombed out, where they lived.

Q: So then came the decree to go into the ghetto?

A: The order and the decree came to go into...all the Jews were supposed to go to the ghetto, so we took, each one, I took a little pillowcase, put my belongings in there, and my father took a suitcase and my mother took some sheet and they put stuff in there and early in the morning and we marched to the ghetto with all the rest of the Jews. And we went to the ghetto. From the ghetto it was like, to me it was like a long walk, but actually it’s not that far away. And we walked and we came and we walked by a church, I remember that, on the righthand side. Big church, and the Poles were standing there and crossing themselves, because I looked, I was blonde and blue-eyed and looked very like a Gentile child and they crossed themselves over, you know, they made a cross sign and that I saw. I looked back like this and I saw that, with my little pillowcase that I had my belongings in there. And we walked into the ghetto. We walked into the ghetto, I remember, and we went into “Shpitalna” Street in the ghetto. That street was inside the ghetto, a couple of streets inside the ghetto, from the gate, the ghetto gate. And we went into an apartment there. There was about four families in each room, four or five families in each room, very crowded, very hungry, no facilites to wash, no facilities for toilet, very little food. I was constantly hungry. We were there for about two weeks, as I recall, and I remember from the other side there was a big yard there inside the house where we lived. There was outside a court, a yard, and I remember hearing the Germans from the other side - I didn’t know exactly what street it was, but it was the ghetto. That gate was outside the ghetto, the gate where you could see the outside of the ghetto. I walked over there and I saw the Germans march and sing their songs, you know, with their jackboots and all that, through that closed gates in there. That I remember very well. And my father went out to work. He worked on the train station.

Q: That was forced or he volunteered?

A: Forced labour. Everything was forced labour. Nobody volunteered for nothing there. They organized the police, the Jewish “Judenrat” organized police. I saw already policemen there in the ghetto. I didn’t have any contact with them at all, but they were there already. And my father, he went out to work, then he came back in the evening. My mother at that time didn’t work and I used to go outside and see what’s going on outside.

Q: You could walk around freely in the ghetto?

A: In the ghetto. There was already no catching, you know. Only Jews lived there. Very crowded, no hygiene. I don’t remember taking a bath even. Bad conditions. And then they came out that they were going to... they had two ghettos at that time. They had the first ghetto and the second ghetto, as I recall.

Q: Where were you?

A: We were in the first ghetto. And my father received a white “Schein”, a permit, a white permit that he is working. They had a yellow permit. My grandmother, who was also with us in the ghetto, my grandmother. My uncle, the oldest uncle, Eliahu - he perished before the entrance of the ghetto. We didn’t know actually what happened to him at that time. One of the streets, he went to visit a family there, which was taken directly to Panar, not to the ghetto. They were driven right to Panar, driven in trucks or by foot - I don’t know how he got there.

Q: And he happened to be there for a visit?

A: He went to visit and that street and he was taken there and he never entered the ghetto. Then at that time those people that had these yellow permits were told to leave the ghetto and go to the workplaces with their direct families, only their children and their wife, no other people - three to four people in a family. My grandmother didn’t have a “Schein” - they called it “Scheine” - didn’t have a permit. She wasn’t even written in our permit. So we decided not to leave, we decided to hide, to stay there. We hid ourselves in a cellar where they had a store upstairs.

Q: When was that?

A: This was in September, two weeks, I think, after we were in the ghetto. Yes. They made an “Aktion”. They wanted to clear Jews out of the ghetto, to thin them out.

Q: So they called you down to a certain place, or how did they do this “aktzia”?

A: They told the people that had these permits, yellow permits - they called them “Gelbe Scheinen” - to leave the ghetto, to go their workplace with their families.

Q: When did they give this “Scheine”?

A: They gave it on the workplaces. Each one that worked in a “Einhaut” they called it in German. They called it an “Einhaut”, a workplace, place where you worked, that place of work that employed you, that gave you those permits. I don’t know exactly. Through the “Judenrat” maybe. I don’t know really how they got the permits, but my father had a yellow “Schein”, yellow permit and we could have left the ghetto, but we couldn’t leave the ghetto because my grandmother was with us.

Q: Which grandmother was that? From your mother or your father?

A: My mother. My father’s mother, she passed away way before the war. She passed away in 1929 I think, or ‘28. Way before. And my grandfather also passed away, in 1932 I think he passed away. I was named after my grandfather - Yankel, “zichrono l’vracha”, “alav hashalom” - I was named after him. My name is also Yankel, Ya’acov. They weren’t alive, they died before that. So the only grandparents I knew was from my mother’s side - my grandmother Tzippe, “aleha hashalom”, and my grandfather Isaac, “alav hashalom”, “zichronam l’vracha”. That’s the only grandparents I knew. The other grandparents weren’t alive when I was born, so I’m talking about my grandmother from my mother’s side, Tzippe. And we stayed, we hid ourselves in the cellar in a store not too far way from that apartment where we lived, the house where we lived. And we were there and we heard the Lithuanians running around outside and hollering and capturing Jews inside the ghetto. Outside the hideout we heard it. And we were there a couple of hours. Towards the morning, we had a baby with us, a child, and he started crying very badly and they heard the crying and they opened it up, broke into the cellar and they took out maybe forty people.

Q: So many people were hiding there?

A: Yes. We were hiding inside, one on top of the other, hardly room to sit down. And we were driven from that area, from “Shpitalna” towards “Rodnitskagass”, and my father held my hand and we tried to escape from the group as we were walking. You couldn’t imagine how, when they broke in, how I felt, how my stomach went into my heart from fear because I knew that we were going to be done something with us, killed. We already knew that they were murdering us out, killing the Jewish people of Vilna. And the Lithuanians - this was like a haberdashery store. When they sold curtains also they had these little rings that they hung curtains on. My father had a handful of those rings in his hand and he says to the Lithuanian, “I’ll give you these gold rings, this gold. Let us go.” And the Lithuanian looked at these rings and then he saw they weren’t rings, it wasn’t gold and he took his bayonet and he made like that. We wanted already to leave the group in one of those little streets there. And we were walking towards the gate of the ghetto and then a German, I think it was Weiss - I don’t really remember the name well. A German - Muhrer or Weiss or something like that - and my father ran up to them and showed them that he has a yellow permit, that they were taking us, but he has a yellow permit. This means he had a permit to live. And then he looked at the permit - my father spoke German, somehow, somewhat. Yiddishe German, you know - and they let the whole group go. They told the Lithuanians, just before we went out through that gate, and they let the whole group go. The German made a motion with his hand and the Lithuanians let us all go.

Q: Before leaving the ghetto?

A: If we would have been across the gate, from the ghetto gate, we were taken to that, to the Gestapo. They let us go and we survived, with the grandmother. This was the first miracle that happened to me. Some miracles happened to my father beforehand, but never to me. To me it was like a miracle. And that’s what happened.

Q: So where did you go from there?

A: We went back to that apartment.

Q: To that apartment? All the families together?

A: All the families that were hidden there and the child that was crying and everybody. We were saved at that minute, for that time. We were saved. We went back to the apartment and then a couple of weeks went by again, I think, maybe less, and then they told us to go into the other ghetto.

Q: To the second ghetto?

A: To the second ghetto. The second ghetto they moved those people out, took them to death, to Panar, from the second ghetto. I think the second ghetto existed six weeks total time, six weeks. But we were taken to the second ghetto and we were there a couple of days and we were returned back to the new ghetto, to the first ghetto. We came to the first ghetto and we didn’t go back to that apartment on “Shpitalna”. we went to live on “Rodnitska”. We were assigned an apartment on “Rodnitskagass”, “Rodnitska Street”. And we lived there from ‘41 October, I think it was. It was the holidays then.

Q: Still as crowded as before?

A: Not as crowded, but also crowded, but more...we had already a toilet there. There was an apartment with several rooms, with one toilet, and each room lived three to four families, according to the size of the room. We lived in the living room and we had there four families, in that room there four families lived. And then my grandmother was there, too, with us. And we divided it up at nightl. We slept on the floor or we took apart closets and slept on the bottom of the closet, I remember. The apartment full of bugs, “Wanzen”. I remember couldn’t sleep at night, with the “Wanzen” crawled on the ceiling and they used to drop. The toilet there, you know, so people divided up the work - each one cleaned, washed the toilet everyday. Each family had to do it according to their time they had to do it. They divided it up between the families, which family had to wash which days. My grandmother did it, my mother did it. And my father and mother went out to work.

Q: Your mother, too?

A: Yes, my mother went out to work. She worked in a garden at that time.

Q: Outside the ghetto?

A: A couple of months in “Rodnitska” she didn’t, but afterwards, after I think she went to work in March of that year, 1942, she already went to work. And not (?) she stayed in the ghetto. I really don’t remember that time, exactly the times.

Q: What kind of a garden did they have in the ghetto?

A: Not in the ghetto. They went out to work slave labour outside the ghetto. The gentile people had gardens there, garden, fields, vegetables, and they worked there, slave labour. And my father worked on the train station, hard labour. You know, chopping wood, bringing water, taking out wounded from the trains, washing boxcars. Vilna was a transit station where they came from the front. They had to take the wounded out and they came to rest there in the train stations, so they had to do all kinds of labour. Bring potatoes. All kinds of hard labour work. Without getting paid nothing. You know, slave labour. Only a little food. They were happy to do it because they could get a little food and bring it into the ghetto. And this was risky, too. Sometimes they searched when they came back. They came in groups. See, individual people couldn’t walk from the workplace, from the “Einhaut”. They had to walk in groups and they had a “Kolonenführer”, one person was in charge, the brigadier they called him. Used to be in charge of the group and the group marched, you know, walked.

Q: This was a Jew who was in charge?

A: Yes, a Jew. One of the Jews was appointed. He wasn’t a kapo or nothing. He was appointed by...where they worked they had...the managers were Poles or Lithuanians there, in the train station there where they worked in those cellars.

Q: How were they treated at work?

A: Afterwards, you know, they knew each other. These people knew each other. They weren’t treated well, but they weren’t respectful towards them, if you think of it. They were told to work and they had to work, you know.

Q: But not beaten up?

A: They weren’t beaten, no. The Poles didn’t beat them or the Lithuanians didn’t beat them at that time. They were told to do certain jobs and they were doing it. They told the Jewish foreman, the brigadier and he gave the jobs to others. And each one did their work and at night, late at night - they left early in the morning and came late at night back to the ghetto. And they went through the gate, they were searched sometimes. It was dangerous. When they found food on them they used to get beaten up, they used to get straps with the hose, with a rubber hose. Sometimes, when the Gestapo was there, they were taken to Gestapo, interrogated and then shot, tortured and shot, so it was an ordeal. But from 1942 to’43, in ghetto was some kind of normal life as you can call it normal life. We went to school.

Q: What school?

A: Yes, I went to the first grade.

Q: That was official or hidden?

A: It was official, official school. I went to the first grade there. My grandmother, “zichrona l’vracha”, she hired a “melamed”, a rabbi. She worked also outside. She worked in the slaughterhouse, slave work, outside the ghetto, and she brought in food with her and she gave to this rabbi and he taught me how to read and write in Yiddish and “chumash” he taught me in the ghetto. She told me, “Maybe you’ll stay alive. So you’ll know.” They were education conscious, those people, the grandparents.

Q: What language was this school in?

A: In Yiddish.

Q: And a lot of children were there?

A: Children came and they brought some sandwiches with them, too. You know, in school, they would steal each other’s sandwiches. Some people had better food. Everybody was hungry. I was in the first grade, but we had one book for ten people. He used to give us to read, you know, a line and we used to pass the book around. No papers, no pencils, no books. One book. Everything we read, a sentence, in Yiddish. And they had a theatre, I remember theatre they had in Vilna. Where it was I remember too. And my grandmother used to give me money and I used to buy a ticket and I used to keep my ticket ahead, for six, seven weeks ahead. To me it was like a long time ahead. I used to put the ticket inside the coat which my father kept in case - a nice coat he had, a shabbas coat - that he kept, that maybe we need to sell it for food, so it hung there on the wall over the place where we slept and I used to put the ticket inside the pocket there, the inside pocket, so it would stay in a safe place. I used to get a ticket in the last rows, where I could only stand up and see. And I learned all those little songs in the ghetto, and theatre.

Q: And people would go to this theatre?

A: The theatre was full, it was full, it was really full of people. And we used to go out on the streets and I met some of my friends that I was born....this little friend I had, his father never came back from the war, the Polish war, the Polish-German war, and I met him in the ghetto. And his mother married over there one of the “Judenrat” Jews or she was a concubine there. I don’t know really. Anyway, I came over there to their apartment, the “Judenrat” there, where they lived, and they ate well. They used to offer me and I was very happy to come there. And then I used to run around with this little boy, Bobby they called him, as I remember. And I used to run around in the ghetto and we used to go see different things, you know, what people do. They even had, one time I remember in the ghetto, between 1942 and ‘43, they caught some thieves. They robbed Jewish people. The police caught them and they had over there what they called “Jotkevergass”, where they had the wholesale butchers’ stores in Vilna. In the ghetto the street was - “Jotkevergass”. Right there was also the “Katsovishe Shul” there. I remember that shul, too, because also that “melamed” that taught me took me for “hakofes” on “Simchas Torah” to that shul, so I remember that shul, too. I’m going to go back to these people that they were caught by the police robbing and I think they also murdered somebody there. Anyway, the kangaroo court, or whatever you call it there I the ghettoe condemned them to death and the Germans came to see the execution. The Germans, the Gestapo came into the ghetto - the Jewish “police” hung those people up, strung them up on meat hooks. I remember seeing that, how they strung them up and how they hung there for a couple of days. This was a scene I still remember.

Q: And your parents let you go and see?

A: My parents weren’t there. I was like a free bird there. My parents went out to work. There was orphans there also. I went stealing bread with the orphans. I wanted to be one of the boys. I was a thin little boy, so they had me one time climb up, they had a rain drainpipe, and I climbed up on it up to the first floor. Also in that area where the “Jotkevergasse” was, they had a warehouse there for bread. I climbed up and my head went through those bars, between the bars I was so thin. I went through the bars and I started throwing down bread to them and then the Jewish police, the “Yiddische politzanten”, the Jewish police caught me and with the other two or three children, we were caught. The bigger children ran away, they just took off, but me they caught and they caught three or four more. And they took us to the “Kommissariat” they called it. (end of side)

As I was telling you, when I was caught up there in the warehouse for the bread, when I went through those bars, that big boys that were in the group, you know, like a gang, we went to steal bread in the ghetto. To us it was like not stealing. It was surviving. Bread belonged to the ghetto.

Q: So you were caught?

A: I was caught and taken to the headquarters, police headquarters on “Ronitskaya” I think it was. We were four boys - we were caught, we put in a corner on a little stage, wooden stage, interrogation stage, and the person in charge, the policeman in charge, the “Yiddishe Politzei”, he decided to give us, each one, ten whips with a rubber hose. He said each person should whip the other. I was the third one in the row, or the second one. I was the second one in the row. And the first one got whipped, he cried and he left. He got his ten.

Q: So who whipped the first one?

A: Not me. I don’t know. The other boy. I didn’t. Then my turn came. When my turn came another boy whipped me and the policeman said, “Harder!” “Starker!” “Harder!” And he whipped me and then he asked me, “Did it hurt?” I said, “No.” I didn’t cry. When I said no, he said, “Give him some more.” Then I started crying. Understand? I was stupid, you know, a little bit. I was proud. At that time afterwards I felt maybe I was stupid, not proud. It was my personality like this. I said it didn’t hurt. And then he said, “Give him some more.” Anyway, I got more and then I started crying and they let us go and it’s lucky they let us go because if they wouldn’t let us go, the Gestapo would come and take us and we would have been sent to the headquarters Gestapo and from there we would have been killed for sure. That’s what happened to people who got caught in the ghetto doing some kind of a crime, which happened to a lot of people in the ghetto. If the Germans found out that you did some kind of a thing like that, steal, they would find an excuse to execute, to kill, to murder. Let’s go further.

Q: A few things I want to know. I wanted to ask you actually, the bread was distributed or sold?

A: The bread was supposed to be distributed, but they somehow sold the bread. Some of the bread was distributed, some were...the “Judenrat” was in charge with the Jewish police there and they had the administration and the supplies were partly sold, partly distributed and that’s what happened.

Q: What else was distributed on food?

A: Some kind of a....actually, I really don’t know it because I never received it. My parents did. I don’t really know what was actually distributed there.

Q: By the work they got?

A: I don’t really know. I know they brought in food. Where it came from, how it came? Some food, you know. When the ghetto was opened to people who leave to work, we had food. As soon as the ghetto was closed, I know we were hungry and had nothing to eat. I was hungry anyway. Some people stuck themselves with food. They had some ways to get food. But we somehow didn’t do it. As soon as the supplies ran short we were, I was really hungry. No bread, no nothing.

Q: From you say ‘42 it was a bit more calm in the ghetto? There were no “ratzias”?

A: From 1942 to ‘43, like I said, there was a theatre there and they had some plays there, all kinds of plays, they had ghetto songs. Even the Germans came to view it.

Q: No “ratzias”?

A: Here and there there were some people, like somebody was caught in the gate, bringing in something and the Gestapo was there, but not mass...

Q: No mass execution.

A: Mass execution, mass “aktziot” were not there. Was what they call a quiet period in the Vilna ghetto. That’s how I saw it and that’s how I felt.

Q: Did you know anything going on outside Vilna?

A: Well, I remember in 1943, I remember it was summer time. I don’t exactly know which month it was. Suddenly we got some people in the ghetto, they brought some people in the ghetto that lived across the street from the house that the gates where we were, the court where I lived inside, across “Rodnitska”. We lived 14, I think it was 16 or something like that. No, I think it was an odd number, 17 or something like that. I’m not sure what number. They had several hundred people there across and the Jewish police were watching over them. These people were brought from the surrounding areas from Vilna. They called them the “nitige”. They came from the country, surrounding towns, small towns and villages, that were brought into the ghetto. And they were there for several weeks. They had food with them. They were much better fed than we were, those people. They had more supplies. And the Jewish police, at that time they put on hats, like officer hats, they looked like German hats, and they gave them handguns and they rounded up those people, they took them and they told them they’re taking them to a different area, a camp, and with the help of the Jewish police, they were taken to Panar and killed and shot. These people. They were fooled by the ghetto, the administration. That I remember well. It was one of the dirty episodes that the Jewish police did in the Vilna ghetto. This was in the summertime of 1943.

Q: So they weren’t really helping the Jews too much, the “politzianten”?

A: When you live in the ghetto, at that time everybody wants to stay alive and they thought by being “polizianten”, by being police, first of all they had more food and they had better living quarters. They didn’t live as bad as we did. Better conditions, and they also had better food. They didn’t have to go out and work hard, slave labour, hard work. They did administrative work, they did police work there. They kept order in the ghetto. I don’t know if they helped the Germans or not, but in that instance, when they took these people that came in from the surrounding towns in the ghetto and they fooled then and they took them out like they were going to take them to a different area, different camp, and they brought them out there and helped the Gestapo take them to Panar. This episode I never forgave those police. I have still today a hate for those people. I really think they were suppposed to take revenge on because they weren’t a good example for our Jewish people. Maybe some of them were alright, some policemen, but I didn’t see that. Maybe I didn’t see the ones that were alright. I saw the ones that were bad there, near the gate there, that stayed by the gates, like Levass, one of them Auerbach I remember. Really bestial people, bad tempers, beat on the Jewish prisoners, those people of the ghetto.

Q: You as a child, besides the ones you stole the bread, you suffered from them too?

A: Not really. I didn’t personally suffer from them. Only that time I had a run-in with those police, but I saw what they did to the other people. The attitude they had and the stories I heard. And also those people that came in through gates with food there and they used to shake them down and of they found some food on them - I remember my mother was once caught with some kind of little change in her pocket. She was beaten with a hose over her back and behind. I remember she couldn’t sit down or lay down for a week or more. And one of the Jewish policemen did it because he felt that this way he could save her life, otherwise maybe the Gestapo that was right there would take her to the Gestapo headquarters and have her tortured and executed afterwards, killed, murdered. So I don’t know if it saved her life or it didn’t I know she came back and she was blue and green and white and everything and hurt badly. They found a little change in her pocket and a few radishes. So I really don’t have any sympathy for those people. That’s it. They didn’t bring any “kavod” as they say, any honour to our people, those “politzianten” in the ghetto. And I told you why they were “politzianten” I think.

Q: In such a situation everybody just cares for himself.

A: They care for themselves and I think ninety percent of those people in the ghetto cared. Each one wanted to save their own life. It was a situation, you know, “look out for yourself”.

Q: In the apartment you lived, you had problems in this respect?

A: I had two cousins and my mother’s sister, which was the same age as my mother. She didn’t have where to stay and we brought her into the room to live with us in that room and we had some problems with the rest of the people there, but after a day or two everything quietened down. There were sometimes here and there quarrels, but not serious. People learned to live with each other in these conditions. We had some nice people in that room. I remember Kowarski, the daughter and the mother. It was her apartment before the war, that was her original apartment. She lived in that area where the ghetto was. And she had supplies and everything and I remember when she gave me a little piece of bread with a garlic, onion. Nice person. I think her daughter survived, her older daughter survived. She had two daughters, actually. She had a younger daughter and an elder daughter. I remember her. And her elder daughter went to the partisans and to the forests and she survived.

And the ghetto life, like I said, with the theatre there, until 1943, they had like in July, in August ‘43 I think it was, they were looking for Wittenburg. He was the leader of the partisans. I forget how they call, the “PKO”. They had some kind of abbreviation. They were looking for him, the Gestapo, and the whole ghetto was looking for him because they said because of him they are going to liquidate the ghetto, if they don’t catch him, if he doesn’t give himself up. And then finally he gave up, he came out, without a struggle. He was dressed like a woman. He came out by himself, volunteered, and he was led out from the ghetto by the Gestapo and he was tortured and committed suicide, as I understand, later on. This happened in 1944, just before the liquidation of the ghetto, a couple of months before.

Then we had an incident also...if you want to know about resistance in the ghetto, partisans?

Q: What you know about. What you encountered.

A: I didn’t see any resistance at all from the partisans in the ghetto. I saw those people living in the ghetto, eating and sleeping there, without going out to work even. And they used to get supplied. I don’t know what they did in the ghetto, but the ghetto didn’t like them. We weren’t sympathetic to them, the partisans. They didn’t save any Jews, which I know about, in the ghetto, they didn’t have any resistance there. And also those partisans in the woods, organized, battalions - they didn’t come out also and didn’t attack any police outposts or take revenge on Poles or Lithuanians that did all this dirty work for the Germans. So actually I didn’t see anything what the partisans did in the ghetto and after the ghetto.

Q: But you knew who belonged to them?

A: I knew some of the people who belonged to them, young fellows, men and women. I don’t think they had any training, any military training whatsoever. Also they didn’t have any weapons that could do anything, like maybe pistol handguns. So I really don’t know because looking at this now I see....I am also looking after the ghetto. They didn’t do anything to resist, to make active resistance against the Germans, because we knew we were going to be killed anyway. But the Germans had a system where one who got caught resisting, they took the whole family and killed them, and with the family they took maybe fifty, a hundred people, so people were also afraid to endanger other people, the family, and other ghetto people. I actually didn’t see. The Germans walked around in the ghetto free, the SS, the Gestapo, Muhrer, Kittel, Weiss. Nobody came up and nobody did nothing to them. They could have run up, somebody, with a pistol and shot them. But like I said, maybe because they didn’t do it because they were afraid of the German revenge they would take on the families and other ghetto inmates. So let’s go further from that standpoint which I saw.

Then in 1944, in August, September, ‘44, they surrounded the ghetto with Lithuanian SS.

Q: ‘43.

A: In ‘43. ‘43 I’m talking about. They surrounded the ghetto and they started grabbing men, mostly men for Estonia, to work in labour camps in Estonia, concentration labour camps in Estonia. Certainly people didn’t want to go, so they hid themselves and my father also went into the hideout - “meline” they called it.

Q: He stopped going to work?

A: The ghetto was surrounded. Nobody went out to work. As soon as they surrounded the ghetto nobody could leave, go out or in. The German and the Lithuanian SS surrounded the ghetto. And the Jewish police did the rounding up, the “Yiddische Politzei” they called it. They gave them a quota, how many they needed - three thousand men, four thousand, I don’t remember exactly - and they started grabbing these men. I saw the episodes, how one of the neighbours, how they grabbed him, the Jewish police. They had pistols in their hands, they had pistols, the Jewish police. And how they pointed a pistol to his head, one of the people that lived in our apartment. He was taken and then his two sons were taken. By running around in the ghetto at that time, I saw where these hideouts were made, these “melines” were made, by going in different places, different areas, different apartments. I went in and I saw. Being a boy they didn’t think I saw and noticed me, and I saw different hideouts. There was one hideout that was in our yard there, which was another court “hoif” they call it. How would you call a “hoif” in English?

Q: A court.

A: A court, yes. And they went into that court and I used to go in there because the court went out to the outside ghetto, but they closed it there. The only way to go into that court was through our court, through our “hoif”. And I saw how they built a “meline” in a cellar there.

Q: Who built that?

A: The people that lived in that court. I saw the family, how they built it, and I knew there was a “meline” there. And at the time when the “aktzia” was on for Estonia, my father came at night back to the apartment and he says, “I don’t know where to hide,” so I took him over there. Going back at this I just remembered, going before Estonia, we didn’t know who they were grabbing. A day before we knew exactly they were grabbing men, we hid ourselves also in a hideout that I knew about, also on the other side of the court where we lived, where the cellars faced the outside of the ghetto. Anyway, I came and I took my parents over there, knowing where this hideout was, and we hid ourselves for that night and we were there and I remember there were candlelights inside that cellar and the candlelights - there was barely air there - the candlelights weren’t lit up, the fire went out from not enough air in the area. And all of a sudden a pipe burst, “bioov” they call it.

Q: From the sewage.

A: A sewage pipe busted, bursted out, and we were half in sewage. We were there until the morning and then we came out. We found out they were catching only men. We went back to the apartment and washed up a little bit, cleaned ourselves, and my father started hiding out in different places. Two days I didn’t see him and then one evening, he came at night, he came into the apartment and he said, “I don’t know already where to hide myself.” So I knew another hideout and in the middle of the night I took him over there. At three o’clock in the morning maybe, got up early, early so nobody could see because otherwise they rush into that place, other Jewish people, and they would discover it, the Jewish police would know where it was. I took him over there and it was like an apartment in the kitchen, it was like a cupboard there and through the cupboard they had a trapdoor downstairs and they went down a flight of steps, hidden steps, and then they went down other hidden steps into the cellar, and that’s where the hideout was and that’s where my father hid out for that Estonia. And I came with my mother there, towards the end we thought maybe they were going to grab also women, so a couple of days later, maybe a day or two later, my father sent somebody out to call us. In the middle of the night I also got up. This woman that her husband was there, she took us into the hiding place and we were there, I remember. They gave us to eat and water they put peas, hard peas - they put them in water so they would get softer and that’s what I ate.

Q: There were many other people in that hiding place, too?

A: Yes, I think there were about sixty people there in that big cellar. And then the “aktzia” went over, they got the quota of the men. The ghetto was still surrounded. There was no food. My father came out from that place. My two cousins were all hungry. He started looking for bread. He took me with him and we were in the ghetto looking for some bread and we found some people baking bread. We bought a loaf of bread - it was still hot. As we were running around in the ghetto, there was a little table outside standing there and there was a woman that my father knew and her boss - his name was Kollisch - and other people were surrounding that table and he was writing a list of people. He was looking for people that were mechanics to go to work in HKP, because what happened, this “Einhaut”, HKP, they had workers there, skilled workers, mechanics - all kinds of skilled workers - but a lot of them were taken away to Estonia, so they needed for that “Einhaut”, for this place, they needed mechanics. This Miaplaga, he was in charge, a German, Wehrmacht. I don’t know why he did it. Maybe he wanted to save Jews or they needed for the war effort to fix these trucks that came from the war, and they also changed the trucks on gasoline to coal, steam-run. They changed the motor there, they should run on coal, on steam. So my father came up there and a lot of people bought themselves into this place - they gave gold. I saw. And this young woman, she was a daughter of a partner of my father’s - Trakun - which was in this expedition business my father had. And he told her in Polish, “I am a mechanic. You know that I had trucks. I know how to fix trucks. I know mechanical work.” So she told this Mr. Kollisch, this Herr Kollisch, and he believed his secretary which was also his girlfriend, as I found out later, and they signed us up to go to HKP.

Q: You too?

A: My father, myself and my mother and that’s it. No cousins, no nothing. When we came back with the bread, the hot bread, my father gave some of the bread to my two cousins, the two boys - one was older than me, one was little younger - and we told my mother that we were going to go to HKP, to get the little belongings that we have together. And my mother at that time didn’t want to leave without her mother, without my grandmother, and I also didn’t want to go without my grandmother, but we couldn’t leave with my grandmother. Only my father, myself and my mother. So we got our belongings and this was the last truck out and we got on a truck in September, 1943, and we came to HKP. HKP had two big buildings there, large building blocks, six floors or five floors high. Six floors I think it was. Between the buildings was an area like a big yard. They unloaded us on and they started counting us and seeing who came, and also who didn’t come legal - some were hidden in the truck - they took them right back into the ghetto. They loaded them up and this is what happened. This Kollisch and his group, he had right away his helpers, Jewish police he had, some of the Jewish police, some called themselves partisans - they were resistance fighters, they were the administration of HKP. Actually working we had about a thousand people there. Maybe a hundred and fifty were actually mechanics.

We came and we were assigned a room on the last floor.

Q: You were probably one of the smallest there.

A: There was children maybe two or three years younger than me, too, there. We came to this HKP, the camp. They took us on a truck and it seemed to me a long drive, but it was really not that far away. We were taken to the HKP there. We got unloaded and they started counting us and checking out who came and we got assigned a room on the last floor, in the first entrance of the block from the right side. There were two blockes, one left side and one right side. And it was September, it was still warm. My father right away was taken, went to work in a different area as a mechanic, he worked there. And my mother and I, we were in the camp. And my mother was also working in a shop where they fixed German uniforms, fixed these uniforms for the Germans. Some people worked in carpenter shops, some people worked over there in cleaning in the camp. And they had also a brigadier, like they call brigadier a foreman, which was appointed by Kollisch, that took care of the work in the camp by itself. They made a latrine out there up on the hill, outside, because the toilet facilities were not there.

Now these two blocks were occupied beforehand, before we arrived there, they were occupied by women and children from prisoners-of-war, Russian prisoners-of-war, Russians that were caught, they didn’t escape, in 1941. And we found over there cooked soup still warm. They were just maybe a couple of hours before. An hour or two before we arrived they probably were taken and killed or something. I don’t know what happened to them. These people lived over there.

We were assigned to the last floor and the first entrance and there were no windows in that room. The windows were out, some windows were broken. My mother fell sick. Winter came around. We had to go outside for our daily things. We had to go and we went outside and I stood in line to get a little soup, little food in the cellars there where they fed us from their kitchen. And in charge were these Kollisch and his people and there was also a “politziant” or somebody took care of order. I stood hours and hours in line to get a little soup which was made out of potato peelings and horsemeat, maybe some there. And we would get some bread. Never an egg or butter, never. And that’s how we lived there. My father went out to work. He came back after six weeks.

Q: Six weeks you didn’t see him?

A: I didn’t see him for about six weeks. He went out to work and didn’t return. And then I stayed with my mother all the time.

Q: But what did you do all day long when your mother to work?

A: My mother, if she was sick, she was sick. I was running around the camp doing nothing, looking for food, looking for this, watching people build these hideouts.

Q: They were also preparing hideouts there?

A: Yes, yes, they were preparing hideouts there, too. I watched those things. Also looking, always for food looking. Where I heard some food was given out, I was there.

Q: Who was there in charge of you? Lithuanians or Germans?

A: The Lithuanians were the guards in the camp. They had strung up barbed wire. They had a wooden fence which the first one you couldn’t see nothing outside - they couldn’t see in, we couldn’t see out. The tall fence maybe three meters high, three and a half, and then they had barbed wire with these outposts where they had these, they called them “botjanas”. Tall outposts where they had lights there.

Q: A watchtower.

A: Watchtowers. And they had between the wooden fence and the barbed wire fence was about two meter area, two and a half meters, three meters, and walking over there there they had police - not police. Guards. Lithuanian guards.

Q: Germans you didn’t see there?

A: Germans used to come in. Golaschake which was from the SS, he came in.

Q: What was his name?

A: His name was Golaschake. We gave him a name, Golaschake, because he had a bald head and a big a neck, so they called him a name, the inmates. In the main gate I saw Germans, but the Lithuanians were the main guards there. They didn’t interfere into the administration of the camp. The administration of the camp was done by the Jewish people there, by the Jewish administration, by Kollisch and his people. And some were so-called partisans, which I didn’t see any resistance there, too. They only ate and drank there and had a good time with the women there, with the young girls. I saw it as a child. They didn’t realize I saw it. So they drank and ate our food that we were supplied and we had to buy it back from them later on. My father used to come back afterwards, after the six weeks he came back every week to take to the bath, an excuse to take a bath for Sunday - not Saturday. Sunday. And he brought food with him at that time, that he found outside. And he also went out there and tried to buy food from those people, from the “magazine” there, which was the warehouses there they had. They had a cooperative, they called it themselves, where they had the food and they sold it back to us. Some people had money, had gold coins. They bought it. I remember my father had a suit. He “hucked” it in for that food, for some food there. His suit.

Q: So this Kollisch didn’t really help?

A: He was also like...Gans was in the ghetto, but he was the administrator. He didn’t cooperate with the Germans, if you think. The administration, his administration was in the camp.

And my mother became very sick with asthma and I had to....there waws no toillet there, I told you, in those apartment houses. The toilets were broken. The toilet was outside on a hill. You had to walk about a hundred yards or so. Up on a hill, they build a toilet there from wood. A lot of toilet seats. So I used to take my mother’s “zerachim shela”, as they would say, and take it downstairs, bring water up - we didn’t have no running water from the, they called it a well, there. A well where you brought the bucket down and you brought it back up. They had a well like that and they also had a well with a pump and brought water up with a pump. Half a bucket I could take. I couldn’t take anymore. The bucket is not plastic. They were made out of tin. This was life day to day there in the “lager”. No school. I didn’t go to school there. I don’t remember school at that time, that from September to March, ‘44, September ‘43 to March ‘44. It was a struggle. We lived up on the last floor. Then my father got in the end of the winter....it wasn’t the end of the winter. It was in January. It was so cold and so bad conditions in that room there and my mother was so sick, they gave us another room on the first floor in the next building, on the other entrance from the other building, which had a stove in there and was warmer and we were in a small room. We were there with another family.

Q: In one room?

A: We lived, a room the width of this room here, about three meters wide, about five meters long, four meters long.

Q: And you had beds in there, or what?

A: Four meters long. About twelve square meters, maybe less. And we had a window there, we had a kitchen there in the beginning, a stove. One family lived on the left side and we lived on the right side. If you walked in through the door we lived on the left side and another family lived - father, his son and a daughter-in-law, and we three. Conditions were already a little better.

Q: Beds you had there or just mattresses?

A: We had wooden beds, beds that the Russians left. The Russian women and children, they left there.

Q: Blankets?

A: We had a little bit of blankets. We did have. Some of the blankets were left over from the Russians there. We had blankets, old, very bad blankets, and we had a sheet there. Not too much , maybe two sheets, a couple of pillowcases and one bed.. My mother and my father slept in one bed and I slept on the other side there, in the beginning, on a little bed. So we lived over there. They changed us the apartment from the one on the last floor where it was very cold and water was freezing there. I remember the walls would full of water, ice - that’s how cold it was. And we came to this room, it was already better. It’s warm there. We used that stove to cook on, also to warm up the place. And then my father came every week, like I told you, to take a bath there. We had a bath there, they made a bath in that camp, like a public bath, and they had hot water. I remember the steam coming out from the sewage pipes, from the traps. Then the same routine - go get food from the kitchens they had there, stand in line, argue. There were a lot of things happened there. One time I stood almost the whole day waiting for soup, then he told me there was nothing there left. From frustration I attacked that person. To me he looked like a big man. He was also a young fellow, maybe twenty years old, eighteen years old. I attacked him and I grabbed him and I was small, so I grabbed his leg like a wild animal and I scratched him up, his face and everything. And then he couldn’t get rid of me, he couldn’t shake me off from how angry I was. And he tried to beat me and he couldn’t get rid of me. Then another one ran up and tore me off, and I told him, “After the war I’ll catch you. I;m going to get even with you.” My father came back and my father could beat him up, but if he beat him up, he probably....

Q: Just get into trouble.

A: Big trouble. Somehow we got over that.

Q: And your mother recovered?

A: My mother got better, much better, and she started working again in the shop, fixing uniforms for the Germans. Slave work.

Q: Did you hear anything what’s going outisde? That a camp like Auschwitz exists?

A: No. I didn’t know nothing about Auschwitz. I knew that the ghetto Vilna was liquidated. At that time we were there in the camp HKP. This was wintertime. They caught a woman and man outside the ghetto. They sat in the public park and somebody, a Pole or somebody informed that they are Jews, they pointed on them, and they brought them back into the camp. This was, I think, in December or October. I’m not sure what month it was. 1943.

Q: How did they get out of the camp?

A: They were hidden outside the ghetto and they left their hideout somehow. I don’t know. Anyway, they brought them back into the camp. The German Kittel - I remember that German there - made all the people go downstairs. I told my mother we’re not going down. I hid my mother under the bed - that’s when we lived in the other block yet.

Q: In the first block, on the top floor.

A: Top floor. And I put her under the bed and her asthma, you heard the breathing. I said, “You stay there. I’ll go outside and see what’s going on.” They had these men lined up in rows in that square where I told you where that memorial is, and they had a hanging post made up of two posts and a crossbar, just strung up a rope, and they called out a couple of people from the group that were outside, the prisoners there, and they told them to take him and hang him, to hang this person. I knew he had a nickname, “Pajarnik”. Somehow, I don’t know why, he had that nickname. And the woman was there too, standing there with a child, with her child. I don’t think they were related. I thought at that time they were man and wife, but I found out later they weren’t related. I saw it all from the top floor - I went into a different room - from the window. Another room, not in the room where we were living. Another room which was not occupied. And I looked through the window there and I saw the whole episode, how they called out those people, two men, to hang him up and they hung up and rope broke. According to international law he should be a free man, the rope breaks. They hung him up again, the rope broke again. The rope probably was old and dry. And then the Germans made a motion that they should kneel, the woman and the child, and both Germans ran up with a pistol, took out their pistols and they shot them right behind the ear. I saw that with my own eyes. And then they were told, two men were taken out, a couple of men, from the group there and they dug up a hole. The hole was, I think, where they dug up and they dragged them over there near the fence and they buried them, the man, the woman and the child, into the same hole, the same ditch. I remember I looked through the window and they put on powder, kind of, what they call Lye, to kill the smell or to destroy the body, I don’t know, a disinfectant powder and then they told them to bury them. I saw that with my own eyes from the top floor there, from the window.

Q: How could you take this as a child?

A: I don’t know. I saw these things like I saw....I had to see it. I don’t know why I had to see it. I wanted to see it. It didn’t bother me. It affected me somehow, I had fear inside, but I could look at it. I could look at it actually. After that, people were scared to go outside the “lager”, the camp because they knew they were going to get caught. They had an example there. They were brought back and hung and shot. That time also we had some people that were caught in the ghetto. In the ghetto they had hideouts and people hid themselves by the liquidation of the ghetto. They liquidated the ghetto a week after HKP.

Q: You were taken to HKP.

A: They liquidated the ghetto. My grandmother died there in the ghetto already. I don’t really know what happened to the Jews, how they liquidated and what the procedures were. I don’t really know, but I know one thing. That afterwards, a month afterward, they were discovered in the ghetto and some of them were taken back to us, to the camp, they were led into the camp, so we knew what went outside, through the stories. We knew actually what happened.

Q: I just remembered something I wanted to ask you. When you were still in the ghetto, were there ones that were caught, partisans which were hanged in the ghetto?

A: I don’t know. I didn’t hear about it. I heard there was a resistance there - Glatsman or something like that, from the Betar movement. That he and a group of people were in a fierce battle, but I really don’t know because I didn’t see it and I didn’t hear about it. I told you before. I didn’t see any resistance at all, anything in the Vilna ghetto from the partisans. Also, I didn’t think they attacked any outposts or any units inside Vilna. It was difficult too to do that. And if the partisans went into the woods, they had to take orders from the Russian commanders, so they weren’t interested in risking partisans’ lives to save Jews. They did other work. They blew up trains, they blew up pylons, telephone, telegraph posts, stuff like that. They did sabotage, but they didn’t go out there to try and save Jews.

We’ll go back to the camp?

As I said, when I saw this horrible hanging, what happened, how they hung them first and then shot the man and the woman and the child. I actually saw the blood coming out from there, from the shot, and I saw how he went up to shoot them, how he did it with happiness. Not that he didn’t want to do it. He did it with zest and gusto, to do it. He ran up and shot them, told them to kneel and they killed them right there.

As I was saying, my father came every week afterwards and we lived in the other side of the block, on the first floor where the conditions were much better. Was warm in there. He used to come for Sunday and Monday went back to work. He worked with Germans there, in these repair shops, which is outside the camp.

Q: Outside the camp?

A: Yes. Repair shops were made out of corrugated tin. They worked outside, there was no heat. There were very bad conditions. They repaired and they overhauled trucks and also overhauled them to use coal instead of gas. At first he didn’t know how to do it. My father told me that he worked with a group of men there and he said he found a German manual. He read German and according to the manual he did the....because who thought about changing from gas to coal? This was something we didn’t expect, he didn’t expect it. He learned to do it and they got real good at it, proficient.

Q: But how were his conditions there?

A: Conditions were, they got fed, but the work conditions were bad. They worked very long hours and difficult. The Germans were very strict with them. One time in his area where he worked, the German found a match. He forced my father to pick it up with his mouth, the match, and he kicked him every time he didn’t pick it up. They were sub-humans, treated like sub-humans. But they worked and they had barracks where they slept there, they had a kitchen. And they organized themselves. They were cultural people. They knew how to organize and all these mechanics, all these professionals, you know, some were mechanics, some were other trades they had, to repair cars and trucks. Too much I didn’t know about it myself. What did my father tell me? He used to tell me about it. I knew the conditions were bad there. Sometimes he used to send food, send the truck driver - a German used to come to the camp with a truck - and sometimes he used to send...sometimes a German that he fixed his truck well. You know, the trucks were not SS, the trucks were Wehrmacht. So he gave him a tip, he gave him something like some honey sometimes he sent back.

Q: Some extra food.

A: A “manashke” they called it, a “manashke” of honey. Sometimes he sent cheese, sometimes bread to us in the camp. And I used to wait for that truck when it used to come from the workplace. They called it...I’ll remember in a mintue how they called it. “Panzerkaserne” they called it. From “Panzerkaserne” they worked there, and they used to give him a tip, the Germans, like human to human, and he sent the extra food to us through that German driver. The German driver looked like the dad of my neighbour, my little friend that we lived wall to wall. This German looked like his father and I used to look at him and I used to say maybe that’s his father. Imagine like that. Bobby’s father. But of course it wasn’t. It was a German. But he was very familiar to me, and a nice German, too, this German here. Anyway, he came back on Sunday to the camp, every Sunday, and he was supposed to leave on Monday morning six o’clock with the first truck. And he didn’t leave with the first truck, he left with the second truck. He said, “I’m going to go wait till the second truck.” Between the six and seven o’clock in the morning, the SS surrounded, the Lithuanian SS, and Gestapo went inside in the camp and started grabbing. We didn’t know who they were grabbing at first. So my father took me - I was still sleeping in my nightgown, we were in nightgowns - and he didn’t know what to do with me. Then they found out they were grabbing children, so he took me to the attic, five floors up. Over there was an attic with a tin roof which was about three meters from the floor, with an opening in the tin roof, a square opening with a wooden frame. The floor was sand and there were beams there, wooden beams, wide beams, big, large beams. (end of side)

Q: So you went up to the attic?

A: When my father took me up to the attic in my nightgown we didn’t exactly know who the Germans were catching, grabbing, who they wanted. And then people started talking and we found out that they are catching children. It’s a “kinderaktzia”, they call it. To take the children that are in the camp, that are not working, and execute them, kill them.

Q: There were still a lot of children around at that time?

A: Yes. There were approximately two hundred children in that camp at that time. That’s what I think. I’m not sure, that figure, but at least two hundred children were in that camp. And he took me up to the attic - from the first floor where we lived to the attic was about five floors up. The attic was sand in there with beams, crossbeams, big, heavy crossbeams. I’m not going to go into the measurements because that’s not relevant here. At first he actually didn’t know what to do, where to hide me because he was always working outside the camp, in the garages, which was called “Panzerkaserne” and those people that lived in camp, they made hideouts, that worked and lived in the camps they prepared hideouts. But since my father wasn’t there most of the time - he came back once a week on Sunday - he had no chance to build a hideout and he didn’t know what to do with me or where to hide me. That’s why he took me up to the attic.

Q: That means they were reckoning with such a thing happening?

A: Always. They had experience from the ghetto. The Jews already knew, the “Juden” there in the camp, the Jewish people - they already knew you couldn’t trust the Germans, you don’t know what could happen. All of a sudden they can start liquidating, catching people, grabbing people. In the camp there was around one thousand two hundred to one thousand five hundred people in that camp. Most of these people were working in the camp. My mother, too, was working in the workshop, repairing uniforms, German uniforms. My father was a mechanic, became a mechanic actually. I told already what happened. And he was repairing and overhauling trucks that came from the front. They also changed the trucks to diesel engines from gasoline because of the shortage of gasoline and the Germans made the diesel engine with coal operated, wood and coal operated. They would have a boiler on the truck and they started out with gasoline start, with a carburetor, and then they would change over to....it was a procedure that my father explained to me, but I actually really didn’t care about how it worked.

Q: You were at that time nine, ten years old?

A: Yes, I was about nine years old then. And so when he took me up to the attic, he didn’t know what to do. He actually was lost. So he tried to put me between those beams. The beams were at least a half a meter, fifty or sixty centimeters high, and they were about forty or fifty centimeters wide, maybe more, maybe sixty or seventy centimeters. Heavy beams. And he put me between two beams and he put all kinds of stuff on top of me, junk that was in the attic, and he covered me with all that junk. As he left I got up. I said, “I can’t stay here. I will not be able to lay down here, lay between these two beams so long.” I didn’t know how long I had to live there, to be there, but I decided to get up and I got up and then he looked up, he didn’t know what to do. Then he saw this opening in the roof which was a tin roof a little more than three meters high from the floor. It covered the attic. And there was another boy there with a father. he told him, “Let’s put the two boys up on the roof.” And the other father said, from that little boy about my age, he didn’t like the idea and he said, “They’ll catch them up there.” Don’t forget, this was in the beginning of March, this was cold in Vilna.

Q: March of the year ‘44?

A: 1944. It was really cold. So he found a little blanket, old blanket in the attic, he put his boots on me, and in my nightgown, and he took me by my legs, my feet, and he lifted me up and he stood up on something there in the attic and he lifted me up so I caught myself on the frame. There was a little frame opening to the roof on top, maybe eighty by eighty or a meter by a meter. And I pulled myself up and I went up on the roof. He threw me a blanket and I went behind a chimney there on the roof. It was very cold and I covered myself with the blanket. I felt my feet were frozen, after fifteen, twenty minutes on the roof. There was a chimney, a broken chimney, and it started to get a little sunny already, but it was very cold because I remember I wanted to see how cold it was, I spit and it froze instantly. I remember that distinctly. And I was laying there and I heard these screams and cries. I didn’t see nothing, but I heard, I heard these screams and cries and hollers and the Germans were screaming and the children were crying and the mothers. All this was a mixture, like it was echoes, acoustic echoes that I heard on the roof. I was on the roof there till it got dark already. But what happened, as I was laying on the roof my blanket slipped, so I went down to get it and it was steep, very steep. It’s not a flat roof. It’s a tin roof and it was steep. Very slopey. It’s a big roof, it’s not a small roof. It’s a big, large roof. And I saw across, far away, after the camp, after the perimeter of the camp, after the fence - I actually didn’t see the fence, but it’s way out because I was way high there on the top floor, on the roof of this building - and I saw a couple of kilometers out and I saw children playing hopscotch in the sun, Polish children, free, playing in the sun. After awhile they saw something move, probably saw me there because I went to get the blanket, and they started pointing so I quickly went back underneath. I sat down right next to the broken chimney and I covered myself and I was asking G-d to save me. I was saying, “Gotteneu” in Yiddish. I should be saved. I started imagining all kinds of things as I was laying there.

Q: You didn’t have anything, nothing to eat, nothing to drink?

A: Nothing, nothing, no food.

Q: From early morning?

A: Like it was maybe seven o’clock in the morning till afternoon. All this I heard those screams and the hollering. It was terrible what I heard. And the air was clean and the sun was bright and it was a crisp, cold frost. I didn’t have no desire to eat or drink. My heart was in my stomach from fear. I was very scared. And all the time I asked G-d to save me, (Yiddish) “Dear G-d, let me live, help me.” I remember this, it’s very touchy, as you see.

And then I stopped hearing the noises, the screaming, and I saw, from far out I saw maybe twelve or fifteen trucks were going across the bridge and I knew these trucks are from the camp, a convoy of trucks that were leaving the camp. Actually I didn’t see the gate from the camp because I was way up there and I didn’t go to the edge because I would fall down, so I was in the middle of the roof, where the chimneys were. So I saw around me, far out, but not close around. And I decided, my feet were so cold, I didn’t feel my feet already, so I decided to take the blanket, and there was a nail in that opening and I attached the blanket to the nail and I slipped myself down maybe two meters and then I jumped the rest and I remember I didn’t even feel my feet when I jumped, they were so frozen. I went down, I hid myself in a corner.

Q: On that attic?

A: On that attic, in the corner of the attic. I came down from the roof because I saw that the “aktzia” was over and I decided to go down because no sense being up there, it was cold. And I thought I was safe already to come down. As I hid myself in the corner of the attic, not too far from that opening, it was dark already in the attic, nothing, can’t see nothing. And there was an entrance like regular entrance steps going up and then there was a door there. I was on the wall, in the corner of the wall, the wall from the outside and one from the staircase. And my father opened the door, he went in, he looked up, and he saw the blanket hanging from that opening on the nail. So he dropped on his knees and he picked up his hands. It was very scary, you know, dramatic. And I said in Yiddish, “Tate!” He shook in surprise and then he took me right away and he said, “You go back on the roof. I’ll put you back on the roof.” And again he picked me up by my feet and put me back on the roof and put the blankets and he said, “I’ll come back, I’ll bring you food. You stay on the roof. Too dangerous for you to come down because a lot of people lost their children and they’ll be jealous,” and he didn’t want to take a chance. So he put me back on the roof and I was out on the roof there a couple more hours. Then he came back with some food, water and he had a big coat on him and he brought some sweater and I had his boots, he was bare-footed. Then he came back, he had some shoes already. As I recall, he gave me some water to drink and a piece of bread and I ate, I drank. I drank first and then I ate. He took me into the big coat he had, like a poncho, like a Sherlock Holmes coat, something like that.

Q: A lining from inside, a warm lining from inside?

A: No, a big coat, like Sherlock Holmes, with the hood. He had a coat like that. Big, white coat. Being in the camp he was thin. Nobody was fat over there. I was always hungry. I was also nothing, only bones and skin, nothing. So he put me in front of him - I held by his neck - he covered me with the coat and he brought me down to the first floor. On the first floor he took me to a neighbour a couple of rooms after we lived. We lived on the first floor and on the first floor each apartment was one room, one-room apartment. But this man, he had a two-room apartment. He was like a supervisor. Not a kapo. He was a work manager or foreman in the camp, working with people there. He had a couple of hundred people working with him. This man - I don’t remember his name - he had also two children and they had a hideout, they made a hideout, that foreman, and he let my father, he took me over there. My father wasn’t working with him, my father worked outside the camp. For some reason he helped my father, he let my father put me in one of those windows. They took out the blocks from inside...the wall was about eighty centimeters wide, so they took out the blocks, little, square blocks, they took them out. Bricks, they took the bricks out from inside and they left only...the window was about eighty centimeters wide and they had a window seal on it from wood, and the window seal was two parts - one was forty centimeters and the other one about that, where you could separate them. So they took this one window seal out, they took all these bricks out and only the outside wall was left and the inside wall was left and the side, of course. This wall, the outside wall was eighty centimeters wide or more maybe - it’s an old, old building - and they put me in that hollow place that was where bricks were taken out and the first time since I was in that camp, maybe several months, the woman made me an egg, they call it in Yiddish a “feinkochen”, scrambled eggs, and she gave me with butter, bread and butter - I haven’t seen that for months - with some warm tea to drink. And I was there in that window for the whole night, by the neighbour. In the meantime, my father and a relative of my mother that worked in this camp - he worked with this relative. It was a cousin of my mother’s. He worked with this foreman and he did these windows for him. So he also made a window like that for me, a hideout. It took him the whole night almost to do it and they brought me at night from that room there, that small apartment to our room where we lived.

Q: So how was it covered from on top?

A: On top was a window seal, board.

Q: A wooden board?

A: A wooden board. It was there before. Maybe ten centimeters wide, or eight, that board. And when I went in they just moved back and I went inside there. There was just enough room for me to bend over, like it was about eighty centimeters high, maybe less. I couldn’t stand up there, I had to be bent over when I sat there. And I was hidden there in that hideout, in this window. I was there for almost four months.

Q: Day and night?

A: At night I used to come out. In the beginning, no. In our room, our room was a small room. It’s a little wider than this and maybe twice as long as this room here. Little wider. And we had our bed on this side, my bed and my father’s and mother’s, and in the entrance was one door, one window there, only one window - it’s a big window - and there was another family on the righthand side. He was a lawyer, an advocate, an older person, and his son and his wife. I remember both of them were called “Lala”. That I do remember. And they spoke only in Polish. They were assimilated Jews. These people knew that I was safe, and my cousin, my mother’s cousin. Nobody else knew that I survived, that I am alive.

Q: So what would you do, sitting in that hole all day long?

A: And I was sitting in that hole, in there. I would make my things there, what I had to do. They would put a pot in there, my mother put a pot in there. She went to work, she left me there closed, and I would sit there and the only thing I saw outside was the little cracks in the bricks in the outside wall, little cracks, little pinpoint cracks. And birds would sit on the other side. This was a rough wall, from the other side, too Old building with bricks. Some bricks were sticking out, so birds sat there. And I thought to myself, I want to be a bird. I want to fly away, I want to be free. I had always thoughts. I was sitting there, I couldn’t read nothing, I couldn’t see nothing, and I sat there and I moved this way and I moved that way, and always imagination. I was imagining different things when I was a child. We used to go to the “datcha” in Vilna and how enjoyed myself when I was little, how I went to swim, I went to the kindergarten, my friends. All this went through, my history as a child, all these incidents. In the ghetto what happened and what I saw in the ghetto. All these little incidents were all in my head, dreaming and thinking. And I was there like this for four months I there. And later on, about the last month, had a little more courage, they took me out, they let me stay out.

Q: In the room?

A: In the room. I even ventured out into the hallway. The Russian front was already close. That was the situation.

Q: So officially you weren’t there, so....

A: Legally I wasn’t in camp. I was actually taken away with the rest of the children. Some mothers - the way I heard from my parents and other people said - some mothers would take the children, you know, when the “aktion” was going on, when the Lithuanian SS and the Germans were catching the children and looking for them and bringing them down, throwing them into the truck, some mothers would go with the children and some mothers would just take their children’s hands and break them up and leave them there and go. There was this kind of mothers and that kind of mothers. I couldn’t understand how a mother could leave her child. My mother wouldn’t. It bothered me. Some of the children I remember, I knew. The last month, like I was talking about, the last month when we ventured out already, they made a “kindermaline” in that HKP, in our building. There were two buildings there, two large buildings. Each one was five floors. They called them the “Gillige Haeuser”. That’s where the camp was.

Q: That was the last “ratzia” they made?

A: This was the last “aktzia” before the liquidation of the camp. They caught people there, they caught people there, but individuals, but no “aktzia”, no taking people to death in a mass. In the last month or so, before the liquidation of the camp, they made, on the third or the fourth floor they made a “kindermaline”, the people, some people there. A hideout. They called it a “kindermaline” because we used to go up there - the children that survived in that building - we used to go up there and stay in that room and study and read a little bit and somebody from the grownups would come and teach us Yiddish. How did they make the “maline”? How did they do it? This was the last room on the corridor, the last room, and there was another room there. The last room where the windows were and on the end was another room that went to the end of the building, on the right side, on that fourth floor. And they bricked in that room, the entrance. The room next to it, which was the end room, was also closed up and they put a stove, a big brick stove in the entrance to that room. The door they bricked up. So they had one room and another room.

Q: So how did you get into that room?

A: Okay, from the room that was next to it. They had a big stove and through the cooker, where they had the stove, they had on top, they had what they called a “range” like, where they had different places to cook with wood - there as also a chimney there. That’s where the chimney was for that room. Each room had that kind of situation. And the entrance to the room was through this...called it a “duhofke” in Yiddish.

Q: A fireplace.

A: It’s not a fireplace. Where they bake, the bake area. The fireplace was there. There was like one, two, three, four, or five, or six cooking places, where they cooked, like a range, and they had what they called the baking area. They called it in Yiddish “duhofke”. And through this “duhofke” was the entrance into that room. You had to crawl inside. This is how you had to go inside to that room, they called it the “kindermaline”. The children that survived, maybe fifteen children survived in that building, approximately, they would come up there in the morning and they would play there. We also ventured back up on the roof, too. Some of the kids, boys, ventured up on the roof to see how the roof looked. So we went up to the roof several times with other boys.

Q: You were not afraid of being caught?

A: It was already like the last month already. We already dared to go out there. There was another four, five boys from the same family - the three sisters, one had two boys, and I met them now in Israel. I didn’t see them the whole time. I knew they were there. Aaron Einat and Kramer and his brother. Anyway, I just met Einat’s brother - they weren’t called Einat. There was three sisters and they had these boys. They had no husbands. And they were also in HKP. And they came from the same area where my father was born, ...(?) in Vilna, so my father knew the mothers. Besides going to this “kindermaline” we went up to the attic and we were looking down to see what’s going on there. It was already summertime. This was already in June or something like that or May. This happened in the beginning of March, so it was about three months later. And was all nice bloom, we looked at the trees, we looked at the grass, down from the attic. Not from the roof anymore. We were in the attic. And as the entrance to the attic you have a door, right? And you have a small attic. From this attic to the other attic they had like a doorway, a staircase with a door and there the small attic. Where I hid that time, when I went down from the roof, when I slid down with that blanket. We opened up some bricks in the corner and between the two attics were also an opening, like a “halal” they call it. How do they call an opening like that? A void like that. In Hebrew they call it “halal”. Enough space. You couldn’t even stand up there because you would touch right away the roof.

Q: The ceiling.

A: The ceiling of the roof. The roof was made out of tin and they had a beam there going across, higher up. So you could only crawl there or stand up. We kids would get along alright there, but a grownup was very difficult. And we cut through - I didn’t. The other two boys three boys cut with a saw, they cut through these big, fat beams and they cut it through so we could go through on top, higher. And this was a hideout. In case they came looking for us or somebody, we would run inside there when we were playing in the attic.

Q: Did they ever come?

A: Nobody came, no. Nobody came looking for us or trying to catch us. This was evident that it was to the end already. People got used to they lost their children, those parents. The envy wasn’t there, the jealousy anymore, I think. They decided this is the “goral”, this is their luck, bad luck as they say, and this is it. Who survived, survived. Time heals.

Q: This other boy who was hiding with you first time you were the attic, he survived?

A: Yes. That was in the attic?

Q: Yes.

A: They all survived. I’ll tell you about how it happened.

Q: That first one, I mean, the first time your father took you up, you said there was another father with a boy.

A: No, I don’t know what happned to him. I don’t really know what happened to him. I think he didn’t survive. I think they took that little boy away. I doubt that he survived. Anyway, I’ll go back to this.

And that’s how we spent out days. And then there was a little bit more food already towards the end. The Russian front was getting closer. Some people had radios. Not in the camp, but they heard. They went outside to work and they heard the Russians were already close by, not too far, two, three hundred kilometers from Vilna. They knew the end was going to come soon. So one day the Germans and the Lithuanians that were there - the Lithuanians, they are the guards. There was a fence. Did I tell you what kind of fence was around the camp? Well, before the “kinderaktzia” we were free out there and we were playing in snow on sleds, going down, in that camp. The toilet was a public toilet way up on the hill. They built a public toilet. Had to go about four hundred meters to the toilet there, public toilet. This was way up there. I don’t know if I told also the incident when they caught those people and hung them. Did I tell you that? Anyway, let’s go back now to this area.

The actual life towards the end was much more open and also, the last month of the camp or so, we got another member in our room. Outside the camp they caught a Jewish person that converted to Christianity and he lived with his wife outside and somebody probably informed on him and they threw him into the camp. And he was also a lawyer, a friend of these people that were with us in the room. And I heard them talk when they were talking there, that finally he came and he is free now, this person that they caught. He wasn’t an old person, was in the fifties, something like that, maybe less. He converted way back, maybe thirty years before, twenty-five years. He became a goy, a Christian, and his wife used to come to the camp gates, try to put some food inside for him. In Polish they said that he is finally free. Whatever happens happens, but he is finally free here in the camp, in the slave labour camp. He cleaned the streets with this other lawyer. The other lawyer said he is cleaning the streets and all that. He doesn’t want to be in any authority because when the liberation comes he doesn’t want to suffer any persecution by the liberators, that he was a collaborator, so he cleaned streets. He swept the streets and cleaned and that’s what his job was.

I’ll go back again to the story about the last month or so. Do you have any questions?

Q: Did you have any special incident? You wanted to talk about the fence.

A: Yes, I want to tell you how the fence looked. The fence around the camp was made out of boards, wood boards, wooden fence. It was about three meters, maybe higher. Maybe higher than three meters. And they had another fence made out of barbed wire, which was also...

Q: Outside this wooden...?

A: Was inside. There was the wooden fence one, what I saw, and then another fence about three meters further up, was another fence three, three and a half, four meters. Was another fence made of barbed wire. So they had that wodden fence - nobody could see in or out - and the other fence was a barbed wire fence - you couldn’t go through it. They had guards between this fence, the outside wooden fence, board fence to the barbed wire fence, they had pillars, you know, watchtowers around, every thirty, forty meters a watchtower, with search lights, and inside you had guards walking and were guards up on top.

Q: These were Lithuanians?

A: Lithuanians, mostly Lithuanians. Some had dogs, some without dogs. They were mixed. Mostly Lithuanian guards. And in charge were some German sergeants. That’s what they had. There was another boy that used to be with me - this was all before the “kinderaktzia” I’m talking about. He knew a little bit of Lithuanian, this boy. His father also was a mechanic working with my father. He was about the same age, but he was smaller than me and he talked to those guards. They liked him for some reason, they talked to him, to this little boy. And I never had any chance to talk to them. I wasn’t scared, but I didn’t care talking to them.

Q: So what were the children there doing all day long? Just playing? Before the “kinderaktzia”.

A: They had like a one-room school - like they had when they made that “kindermaline” - in one building and they had another one in the other building. We used to learn a little bit of writing, a little bit reading in Yiddish. HaRav Farber, “zichrono l’vracha”, he was also there. He worked with my father. We learned a little bit “chumash” with some religious people what teach little children “chumash”, the boys. That’s it. That was the essence, the main thing what we were doing. And we were outside playing afterwards, outside running around. Too much wasn’t to do there. The parents were working, my mother was working in what they called the “warstadt”, where they fixed uniforms.

Q: You said before they hanged people?

A: They caught some people outside the camp in the main street in Vilna.

Q: Who had escaped?

A: They didn’t escape. They were probably, after liquidation of the ghetto, they were hiding out somewhere and they came out. I actually didn’t know where....but they brought them back to the camp. They caught them, they caught the mother and little daughter and another person. I don’t know if he was related or...they called him the “pajarnik” I remember. The SS came, that was the SS Muhrer, and another one was there. I remember that name Muhrer, Kittel. There was also Kittel there.

Q: And Weiss.

A: And Weiss, right. That’s right. That’s the story probably. They told all the people to come down. They made like an “appell” and they took all the people downstairs, but I never went down. My father gave me instructions never to come down. I hid my mother underneath the bed. She had asthma and she breathed very heavy. I think I told you already that story. When I saw when they hung those people and then they fell down from the rope. They tried to hang the first man, they picked two people out from the group and they were supposed to hang him, from the group that was standing there, Jewish people. I think I told you that. If I mentioned Muhrer and Weiss and Kittel.

Q: So they brought them in from outside into the camp?

A: Into the camp and they showed what happened to people that are caught outside. Probably one of the Polish or Lithuanian recognized that they were Jewish. Even a boy would call “Jzidh” and the Gestapo would take him right away.

Q: From the camp itself nobody escaped?

A: That was easy to go out of the camp, but where could they go? What can I tell you? I met here a woman after I came to Israel - and this was in 1970 - that was a partisan. Her name Zelda Traya. I’ll go back to the story from the camp. This woman told me that she made rendezvous - you know what that means?

Q: She arranged to meet.

A: Arranged to meet people from the camp that should go out to the partisans, young men and women, they wouldn’t show up, they wouldn’t go out. And she risked her life to come out, to go through enemy territory. She was like a guide to take them to the woods, to the partisan “atrad” they call it. Battalions. And they for some reason didn’t go outside. It was very easy to go outside the camp because trucks were going always in and out. Always could go out. People were scared to go out. People were scared to go to the partisans because the young people knew that they had to fight in the partisans and were liable to get killed and they had more confidence staying in the camp. Most of these young people, they were the policemen there, they were in charge of guarding, they worked in the kitchen, in the warehouses. They were one of the administration of Kollisch and his group. They lived well - didn’t do nothing and they ate and drank , so why go out? Why go risk life? Zelda Traya told me that. I didn’t know it beforehand. And some of them had pistols, but they just....Was very easy to go outside the camp. Wasn’t difficult at all.

What else would you like to know?

Q: If you still have some more to add from the time in the camp?

A: Yes, I could tell you more. What I could tell you about the camp and the life inside the camp, that everyone was out for themselves. People who had made hideouts, they didn’t want other people to know about it. And if they knew about it they had to pay money to go inside there. As a boy I saw all these hideouts when they were working on them. Running around there, you know. I knew exactly how to go inside, but I knew there was a hideout there because you just couldn’t hide this from people inside living there.

I’ll go back now, continue with my story here. Then the Germans decided that they were going to evacuate the camp, they called it. Evacuate the people. My dad, my mother and all the other people knew that this....and I myself, I knew this was no evacuation. This is taking us to be murdered, somewhere in Panar or whatever they would do it. So we decided we’re not going nowhere. We’re going to hide inside. The front was very close already. This is in June. It was very close already. The Russians were already a hundred kilometers from Vilna. They were already past Minsk which was the front from the Russian side. And the Germans were already hastily trying to pack up, so they decided to evacuate. We were not going to evacuate, but Kollisch and his group - he had about two hundred, maybe four hundred people. This Kollisch who was the head of the camp, the director of the camp, the Jewish director, and all his people that were with him, Kollisch. They loaded them up on trucks. They were supposed to evacuate them further up, away, toward Germany, because they were productive. And some of those guys, people, men, had pistols with them, and they also evacuated. What they did with them? That I found out afterwards, a couple of weeks afterwards. They were all shot in Panar, with their pistols and all.

Q: With this Kollisch together?

A: With Kollisch and all these people were shot, taken over there to Panar and they were shot, murdered there. Now what we did, I knew there was a hideout in the cellar where the partisans were digging a tunnel, so I took my mother and I went down there. My father, he stayed up, he didn’t go down. My father was a very capable man. He was also an officer in the Polish army. He was very capable. It was also luck, but he had a good head on his shoulders, he knew exactly what to do and he stood up. He didn’t go down to that tunnel. I and my mother went down to that tunnel. There were already people there, sitting there under candlelight. The air was very thick, there was no breathing there. There was water there, but who wanted to drink or wanted to eat? I wasn’t hungry or thirsty. And we were there for about four or five hours and the candles started dimming from not enough air and my mother, with her asthma, couldn’t breathe. This was already getting dark. This was the first day when they were liquidating the camp, where Kollisch and his group went on the trucks and left. And they started looking for the people, who was still there.

Q: That was already the Germans?

A: Germans, Lithuanians. And we were in that tunnel and my mother said she couldn’t breathe, so I decided to take my mother out of there, so I went outside. How was this tunnel made? In the cellar they had a cement floor and they made it so the cement floor moves on wheels and there is an opening, enough for people to go down with a ladder. They were supposed to dig about four hundred meters from that spot, underneath the gates of the camp. They were stuck there. Maybe they had to dig maybe another fifty meters over there. Now how did I know there was a tunnel there? They used to take the sand out and they used to deposit it outside and I used to see always higher and higher sand, so one day I decided to see where they were digging, so I knew there was a tunnel there, so they had to let us in. There also had to pay money to go in or you had to be one of them, one of the group.

Q: Where were they piling up this sand? On the outside?

A: On the outside.

Q: Of the camp?

A: Yes, outside the camp. Outside. There were like steps going up.

Q: And nobody noticed that they were working there?

A: They piled up slowly sand. There was sand there. They piled it up slowly. The Lithuanians didn’t go. They were watching them around the watchtowers. They didn’t go and look. Nobody informed. They took the sand out in buckets, little bags. Far out. It’s a big area. There is enough place to put a lot of sand there. There it was steep. There was no problem getting rid of the sand. I took my mother out and...I don’t know whether we saw my father or not. My father was looking, he was outside, seeing what the situation was, what was happening. And this was getting dark, so I took my mother up to the “kindermaline”. There were windows there and we went into the “kindermaline” through this “cooker”, this stove. Went into the “kindermaline”, we sat there and we were there, and I didn’t know where my father was. And I sat there with my mother. Everybody was sitting down. There was a big shelf with bread near the window, big shelf, loaded with square breads. I remember the breads well.

Q: You had prepared that?

A: Plenty of bread there. And also the toilet was like a closed little area with curtains, closed in curtains, and they had a big bucket there and that’s where everybody went. The place was packed, full of people, women, children, men, all laying there on the floor. It was hot, the window was open. Nobody was outside already. They started catching people, taking them away. And then I was sitting there and my mother was in that little room and I was sitting in the big room, waiting to see what happened to my father. This was already a lot of hours, was the middle of the night already, my father banged on that little place and they put a pillow against it, so they wouldn’t hear, against the outside. They had the little door closed up and they put a pillow there. And he went inside that - he knew the place, he knew how to get there, he knew it, and he banged there and they opened up and they said, “Who is it?” “Schwarzberg.” He went in. I saw my father, I was very happy to see him, felt very, very relieved. And then we were sitting in that room, in that “kindermaline”, with all these people. Was hot in there. And all of a sudden this shelf with the bread fell down and made a big “boom”, fell down. They started shooting into the window from the outside, the SS there, the Germans, with the Lithuanians started shooting into the window. The window was way over, the window was on top. It wasn’t a window on the bottom. It was a top window, like a top, sliding window, or open window, but it wasn’t on the bottom, you know, where you could look down. Going to see through the window you had to get up on a ladder. My father was sitting there with another mechanic that I saw that his little boy was talking to the Lithuanian guards, he worked with him together and he told my father, “Let’s go out from there, not panic. I know a way to go through the...there’s a workshop downstairs.” Where they have workshops there. “I know how to get there and through a window and go into a garden and then escape, but don’t take nobody else,” he told my father. “Don’t take nobody else.” His son and his wife. My mother was sitting in another room with another young woman, so my father says, “Go tell your mother that we’re going to leave here. Slowly, not to panic, because if you start panic through this entrance, people get killed, choked to death.” So I went to my mother and I told her, “You come out after me. We’re going to leave.” And that young woman, about nineteen, twenty years old, she went with my mother, too, and we went all out. We went through this stove outside and we went through the corridor. This was on the fourth floor. I wanted to mention to you that each floor was about three and a half meters high. Almost like two floors here. They had one floor and then the next floor and in the middle they had like a toilet there. It was very high between floors. I’d say the five-story building there must have looked to me like a ten-story building. It was high and the ceilings were very high. So we went out into the corridor and this man, with his son used to talk to the Lithuanians, got very angry at my father. “Why this woman is also going?” So my father told him, “She went with my wife.” Anyway, he gave him a slap from anger. I remember that. He gave him a slap. And my mother wanted to go to the toilet, so she went one of those rooms to go into the toilet there. She went into the room and I stood there by the door, that we shouldn’t get lost. This was dark, in the middle of the night. And he and my father was also there in the corridor. My father, when he got slapped he became, I don’t know, he didn’t do nothing to him back because what’s going to argue with him here. But he was hurt, frustrated. And then all of a sudden we turn around, he is gone with this young woman, his wife - the mechanic - and his child. They’re gone. About five, ten minutes later we hear machine gun fire. When they went through downstairs, they got caught and shot on the spot, these people, when they tried to get from the building to the workplaces. I said to my father, “Look,” I said to him,” let’s go downstairs.” So we started going downstairs - I was without shoes. When I left this “kindermaline” I had wooden shoes on. They called it “kloompas”. And I took the shoes off and I didn’t have any shoes, I was barefoot. (end of side)

Q: You wanted to go back still to tell me a story.

A: Before the “kinderaktzia”, right after we came from the ghetto to the camp, HKP. In that camp there was the Opeskin brothers and one was a Yiddish writer - “Jung Vilna” they called him. My father also graduated from “Haral Gymnasium” , which is also Yiddish. His brother, younger brother, this Opeskin - I don’t remember their first names - they used to come to my father’s room where we lived in our apartment, our quarters. When my father came from work at night on Sunday, they used to come over and sit and they talked about “Yiddische” things and they decided they were going to have a play, a Yiddish play. What was the play about? This was a play where you had a ringmaster and he had dolls. There were live children that played for the puppets. They played out puppets. They asked me also to join and I was bashful, I didn’t want to join, but the whole play and everything was organized by my father and this Opeskin, mostly by him. He wrote the play. And his brother used to sit there also and complain on this work foreman, how he treated him bad, the one that hid me in the window, what I stayed in his window, in this place. Anyway, they were sitting for many hours, for me a long time, and they wrote this play and they had like a stage there and the children - some children were very talented with a ringmaster, was a boy about sixteen, seventeen years old. I think he survived, that boy. He had like a big cylinder hat and he was the ringmaster. All about these puppets and dolls. Everybody was invited and also the Germans. Some Germans came to see it. They saw how many children there were there. Was a mistake. My father was the “conferencier”, master of ceremonies. He made some jokes. He knew how to speak well in Yiddish and he used to introduce everybody and all that. That’s what I wanted to say. These deep thinkers, these Opeskin brothers, especially the one of them was an author in Yiddish. And that’s what I wanted to tell, how the Germans knew how many children were there. They knew by figures, but they saw the amount of children that were there, and I think because of that they diecided to make this “kinderaktzia”.

Q: This play was shortly before?

A: Way before, way before the “kinderaktzia”.

Q: Way before?

A: Yes, maybe two months before. So I’ll go back now. I want to go back to this incident, to what happened when he slapped my father, this mechanic that worked with my father. He wasn’t very popular there at work. He was an arrogant man. That’s why my father told me nobody liked him. I remembered his name, but now I don’t. When my father was alive we talked about it. He was very forlorn when he slapped him, hit him, like where did it come from when he got slapped? And then they took off. And then we heard those shots and they were killed. And we started looking for a place to hide after we left the “kindermaline” and my father was angry with my mother, why she all of a sudden had to go, and then I watched she didn’t get lost. I didn’t think about them taking off. Anyway, I remembered there was a hideout, one of the hideouts, but I didn’t know how to get inside that hideout. I remembered there was a hideout on the third floor and I led my parents to that hideout. Also a big stove, but this stove was really big, tall, it’s a big stove, about two meters high, to warm up the room. Like I told you, between floors they had like another, like they had toilets there, restrooms, so they bricked up those restrooms - they weren’t working anyway. They were out of order. Small, not a big area, about four meters by three meters. The entrance to that restroom which was also a hideout, it had a window, a top window - not a low window, on top like a toilet would have. The windows were on the top with hinges, opened up like that. We found how to get inside. We took out some wood on top of the stove and we went down to this hideout. We came into the hideout, the people didn’t like it.

Q: There were already people there?

A: There were people and they were sitting on the floor. They didn’t much care about that that we came there. How dare we come inside? And the owner of this hideout, he got so upset that he started screaming, he went out of his mind. And he started screaming he is going to negotiate with the Germans that he is going to give himself up, like he is fighting a battle here and he is going to go and give himself up. He hung out a white thing through the window and he’s got money, he screamed, and he’s going to pay them. And we went out from this hideout. This hideout was already given away. They started shooting into the window. We left the hideout back through the stove and some people went down easily, but there was an old mother there, his mother, or older person - she jumped down and she broke her leg, so they put her in a bed there and she survived, she survived the whole thing. And they went to the hallway and he started screaming he’s giving up. In the hallway were windows and the windows didn’t have glass, they had cardboard and plywood - plywood, not cardboard. He went out and a bullet grazed him, grazed his head and he became out of his mind. He went down there and I don’t know what happened to those people. I guess they were gone. So we decided what to do. This was already daytime in the hallway on the third floor and there was one fellow there with a pistol by the window and I said to him, “Why don’t you shoot down?” And he gave me a cussout and waved me off, I should go away. Cussed me out, you know how they say. And so I went to my parents and we were thinking to go downstairs, but we didn’t know what to do. Then all of a sudden I said to my father, “Let’s go back to the attic.” And we went up to the attic. This was already the second or third day of this, inside the building, where they’re trying to catch us all the time. They were afraid to go up at night because they knew some people had weapons, but in the daytime the Lithuanians went up. This was Lithuanian and my father told me it was also Estonian SS. Not too many, maybe two dozen the whole thing. We went back up to the attic. Then we took out the little bricks in the corner, we went in and there was laying there a man wounded in the leg, somebody that my father knew. So he moved over and we went inside. Who do we find inside? All these little boys that I played with them in the attic, with their mothers, the three sisters. They were there. And it was hot over there because the tin roof was right over it and this was in June, very hot, very hot. And we went underneath there and I lay down and my father, he was bigger so he burned his head, he had a bald head, so he burned it. Then I fell asleep from being weak, hot and then a few hours later I got up. There was noise outside, but I didn’t hear what was going on in the attic. They told me afterwards, my mother and father told me that there was a young woman, a German took her up into the attic or caught her there and she was begging him for her life. She was begging him for her life. And what happened I don’t know. Anyway, we were there for that day and another night and then the morning already, and one of the boys wanted water. There was not water there. “Wasser” in Yiddish. So he took a bucket and....I didn’t meet the other one yet. He lives in Beersheba, I found out. I have to talk to him. He took a bucket - he was a red-headed boy, little bigger than me - and he took a bucket and he went out, not from this side of the roof, he went out on the other side of the attic. This place there, this hideout was between the two attics, two entrances to the attics. And he took a bucket and went looking for water. And then he came back about ten minutes later without water and he said, “I saw Germans there looking and I didn’t want to run back. They would have caught us all.” And he came back without water. So my father gave him to drink some urine. He drank urine and he said, “It’s salty, it’s no good.” It was not funny, but that is how it was. Then a couple of hours later we heard a lot of noise on the attic. People were hollering and my father went out to see what was going on, reconnaisance as you say, to see that was happening, and he saw the Polish population came into the camp to grab things, to rob. They already went inside. The guards probably took off already because this was already very close to liberation. First of all I went to the “kindermaline” from the attic. I wanted to get my shoes. When I went into the room to go through the stove I saw, on the lefthand side, I thought I saw a boy that I knew him. His mother held him in her arms and I thought he was alive and I called his name and he was shot. The boy was shot right through the mother and they were sitting on the floor. That picture will never leave my eyes.

Q: The mother also was shot?

A: Both of them were laying like this, both dead. Maybe a couple of hours before, maybe a day before. They were still....not smelling, nothing. Maybe a few hours before or the night before, but they were dead. I didn’t even check if they were dead. They looked alive. The eyes were open. And I went inside the hideout - there was nothing there, just some thrown things on the floor - and I couldn’t find my shoes. I went looking for my shoes. The only thing I found was a brush that you shave with, a brush that you use for soap to shave. A brush like that. And that’s the only thing I saw there. I remember that brush. And I went outside and I joined my parents and we went down to our room to get some clothes, but everything was open. These Polish people who were living around that area already took everything. Because my father was trying to hide in there, he told us that when we were in the “kindermaline” he tried to hide a few hours there and he went inside there and he tried to hide and he left the window seal open, so they already knew to open up window seals and they started grabbing and robbing stuff, whatever belongings we had. We had nothing, nothing left. And the only thing we had were the clothes on our backs. And now I had no shoes, I was bare-footed. Also at that time, another woman that lived next to our room on the first floor, she went looking for her clothes. Everybody that had a surviving child, they made that kind of window, hiding. And she had over there her fur coat and also because my father left that thing, there was no fur coat left. And she had a boy that was a very peculiar boy. He had a big head and he wasn’t that smart. He was, I think, retarded a little bit. Anyway, he starts hollering “Mommy!”, sceaming “Mommy!”, so my father took him and we started going out from the camp. My father knew the way there, how to get there, how to go. There was a river there, small river - they called it the “Villiya”, “Vilenka” - and we went with this. We started going towards...I actually didn’t know the direction we were going.

But I wanted to mention a little bit beforehand, I’d like to mention something that I just remembered. The day before, or the same day that they said everybody has to evacuate, they’re going to evacuate us, my father had me by the hand, we already went outside, nobody was worried about seeing me, and he tried to talk to me, talk me into it, that I should go to...my grandparents had people working for them before the war. They were Baptists, not Catholics. Russian. And they lived not too far away from where I was born, on “Chopina 3”. So he tried to talk to me and tell me how to go there. I was already a boy of nine years old. I wasn’t a small boy. And he tried to explain to me because he said to me, “This is the situation. We are not going to survive here,” he says. “Maybe you will survive by yourself. You look like a Gentile boy. You’re blonde. You go to those people there. I can trust them. They’re not going to give you to the Germans. They’ll hide you. Another few weeks, another month, don’t know exactly, there will be liberation. You’ll stay alive. Who knows if we’re going to survive here?” I was reluctant, very reluctant to go. Because I was already three years, since 1941, I was Yiddish-spekaing. I didn’t know how to speak Polish well. I didn’t have confidence. He talked me into it, I listened. He took me by my hand and there was a guard, a German guard at the gate that he knew him, he was a driver, this guard, and he said in German, “Let this boy out.” All of a sudden another mother ran up with a child, one of those sisters with one of those boys. The German at first said they’re going to let him out, they’re going to shoot him outside. My father told him, “I’d rather see him get shot outside. Let him out. Let him go through the gate.” And this mother started running, too, so he says, “Laus! Nobody is going out.” That was it. He didn’t let me out. My potluck was sealed right there. If I wouldn’t tell them where the hideout was, then they wouldn’t survive.

So I was going to say what happened now when we left the attic. We started going out of the camp and this boy was screaming “Mommy!” “Mother!”

Q: And where was his mother?

A: She went looking for that fur coat. And as we were going he was screaming, “Mother!” And then people heard him. We were walking and then she caught up to us, about an hour later she caught up with us. She asked about the boy, he was screaming “Mommy!” And she took him and she started kissing my father - he saved the boy. She loved that little boy more. She had a daughter, too, but the daughter they took her away in the “kinderaktzia”. This boy stayed alive. The boy was telling me he had a father in Israel, Palestine, and he is going to join him. To me, Palestine was like heaven. I was talking about Palestine, Israel. It wasn’t that time Israel. It was “Palestina”. She said, “I owe you one. I’m going to take you to a place where I know some gentiles. They have a big farm. They’ll hide us.” And we went that direction with that woman, with her child. We couldn’t walk on that main road, so we walked near the river, the narrow river there. As we walked there were bushes, a lot of bushes, trees, so they couldn’t see us. We walked through there, alongside the river, and then we stopped, and then I saw in a hut, a small, little hut made out of camouflage trees and all that, growth, I saw this man that was trying to shoot down....I told him to shoot with a pistol. I saw him with his wife there - Yankele der Furman they called him. And again he cussed me out. He starts, “Go! Go from here!” With a Jewish “klala”. Anyway, I went along and then we went into the river. We washed and we spent an hour there washing and all that and then we moved on, always under cover, never walking on the main road, little side road. And we came up, after a few hours walking we came up on this farm. We came up on that farm there and she went to see the owner of the farm. She knew him probably before the war, or she gave him some gold pieces. Anyway, she came back to us - we were waiting - and they told us that there is no room for us there. She can stay, but we have to go on, so we moved on. My father knew these roads real well because he was born right there in this area. And we walked, always walking through the woods and always not on the main roads. Finally we hit the main road and my mother went begging for food for me. My mother also didn’t look Jewish, but my father looked typical Jewish. He had a nose like a Jew, this Jewish nose, so he hid in a cornfield. And I went with my mother asking for bread in Polish and they gave us this dried bread called “saharras”, like toasted bread, but it was dried. When I ate my father put his hand underneath there, I came back to my father, and he caught the crumbs. That’s how hungry we were. Then we went on, but all of a sudden we saw a patrol of Germans with dogs moving on, so my father ran into a field again and my mother also and I kept walking.

Q: Alone?

A: I kept walking. If I hollered they would get suspicious. I kept walking. I wanted to drink. There was like a well there, that you take a bucket, you put it down there and you turn, with a handle you take the bucket out. And the German was right around there with the dogs, and I walked right up to the well and drank water. You know where my heart was then? You can imagine, right? But I looked very...I had long blonde hair because I didn’t take a haircut for a long time. Real light hair. I looked exactly like one of those...except I wasn’t sunburned. If they looked at me well, I wasn’t sunburned at all, I was white and bare-footed and torn clothes, old clothes. Like one of those peasant boys. Then I drank and then I came back. I didn’t take nothing for my father or mother and I went back and we started walking. My mother said to my father, “There is a woman. She has two cows and she has a farm.” She remembered the two cows. And they worked also for my grandparents. The woman was called Sabatova. And we walked through woods and we ate berries, that’s what we ate, and we never walked on the main road until we came upon a valley and we didn’t go down to the area where they lived, the little village, little hamlet, and we made it around. Like I said, my father knew tactics, he knew how to act in a war. And then they saw a little girl about eleven years old, twelve years old in a pasture with two cows, so my mother walked up to her and said, “Your mother is called Sabatova?” She said, “Yes.” By incident we came, but my mother knew, not exactly, but she knew where it was. This was in (?)...they called that area. She went to call her mother and the mother came, saw us. She crossed herself, she couldn’t believe that we are alive, and she said, “I can’t bring you over here to me because I have Germans always moving around. I’ll take you to my brother, but you have to wait till it’s dark.” It got dark, we made a cross all the way around. We didn’t go straight to the village because a lot of Polish refugees from Vilna ran from the bombing. They bombed Vilna. They ran over there to hide from the bombs, whole families. But also it was dangerous. The Polish could point to us that we’re Jewish and who knows? But the Germans were on the run. This was already close. In the evening we went up to his...and we stayed on the attic by the brother of Sabatova. We stayed there in the attic and we had to be very quiet. I brought them the food, they gave me food and I brought up food up there and I tried not to make any noise at all. And I was the person that went down to bring food, to go get water and go back up there. Nobody’s looking and then...I wasn’t in the attic with my mother and father. I was out there, like the rest of the people. Some of the refugees, some Polish boys - Polish came back to me, like I remembered, because when I was a boy, from childhood I had a nanny, Polish nanny, so the first language I spoke Polish. I had exactly that accent, the Polish accent, and suddenly it came all that back to me. I spoke Polish like I was born with it. I came down. She milked the cows and she put it through a cloth, and then she gave me to drink warm and I didn’t drink milk, years I didn’t see a glass of milk. I got fresh air, I got brown a little from the sun. And then I used to take the cows with this little girl, we used to take them to pasture because the farmers, they lived together and they had their land was out, away. It’s not like American farmers. They lived in a little hamlet, several families, and the land was out. We went and we took the cows to pasture. And I saw from far out how they bomb, the bombs are falling, from far out. And every night we would bring the cows back. We would take them to water, get a drink, and then we’d take the cows back to this hamlet, drive the cows back, a couple of days like that, maybe a week. And then all of a sudden the man said that the front is already very close and he can’t keep us up in the attic. He told us to hide in a Turkish bath he had. We went into the Turkish bath there and then from there we started walking away from there into the fields and the woods. And the Polish were there and they were talking politics, the Poles, farmers. We heard them. My father knew how to use a boat. We went across this little river to the other side and we saw the Russians, the first time I saw on horses, with these submachine guns we saw Russian soldiers. And they asked us for some directions. We saw them. We kept away from the crowd always. This was reconnaisance, about eight or nine horsemen. They were checking the area out and they were very scared. They were very scared. They didn’t know what was going on. My father gave them the directions, where they were supposed to be. They looked at the map. What can you tell by fields? And then the Germans were leaving and the Russians were coming in. A day later they were there already, the Russian rear came in already. And they had a whole battalion bivouaced in the area, camped out, and we came up there and they gave me some...the Russians were very kind people, the army. The army people were very kind. The came up there and we told them we’re Jewish. The first thing they asked, how we survived. They couldn’t believe how we survived. And from their kitchen they gave me some of...like a partridge to eat. The Russians were right there already. So we were there another day or two and the Russians were there, we were liberated already. We started walking back to Vilna and we walked through...my father, where he was born on, “takol”. His mother’s father’s house was burned down. His father and mother were my grandparents, “zichronam l’vracha”, G-d bless their souls, were already passed away long ago. They passed away before the war, way before. Actually, I am named after my grandfather, Ya’acov, Yankel. My grandmother, also “zichron l’vracha”, passed away in 1927, I think, but there was a house there and it was burned down, everything was burned down. And we walked into a....there was a Polish person, a rich person that was in charge of my father when he was working at slave work on the station, “Saladuche”, this person. And we went in, he gave my father some food. Maybe he was scared. And we went and got some food and we walked out. When we came back and we walked like this for the rest of the day and we came in to Vilna and the partisans were in Vilna, a the partisan battalions, Jewish partisan battalions, they were in Vilna. We tried to go in and have some food from them, but since we weren’t one of them no food was available. We stayed in the courtyard there, where they were camped out - they had a house. We were there three or four hours, five hours, half a day. I saw these young fellows, guards, Jewish partisan guards, sixteen, seventeen-year-old. The youngest were the guards. And we went into this garden and we were waiting, maybe they will give us some food, but I didn’t see any food from them. In the garden there were fruits there, not like grapes, but bigger than grapes. “Egrest”. It’s like big, big grapes. And I ate some of them. And then we decided to go where we lived before the war and we went over there to “Chopina 3”. The streets were all, glass was broken, bombed out. We came to that courtyard. The first building had underneath the building a tunnel. Inside there was a big courtyard. We went to our apartment and in the apartment were living Polish people, so my mother said, “Leave them alone. Don’t start with them,” to my father, because we had no weapons, we had nothing to do, to fight in case they decided to kill us because we came back to get the apartment. We went to a different apartment which was in another entrance, and the Lithuanians were living there and there was all left over like they left a couple of hours before, they escaped. My mother said, “Let’s not touch nothing here.” And we went to a different apartment on the last floor on the front entrance. This was the back building and this was the front building, to the street. We went to an apartment, there was nothing there, on the last floor, on the fourth floor, and other people came there and we started looking for food around the neighbourhood. We found a little food there and more Jewish people moved in with us - two women, the sisters, they came to live. We had one room, then another person, an older person, Yona, he got a room. That’s it. Yona, these two sisters and we had a room. It was a modern apartment. It had a toilet, it had a bathtub, but no running water. The water we had to bring it from the well in the courtyard. My father tried to get a job, so he went back to work in a workplace called “Zagodyorno”, which was a transport outfit that was in charge of bringing...he was in charge of the transport part, but this was a unit that was in charge of bringing wheat and food. “Zierno” means in Russian “wheat” and stuff like that, corn. For the population. “Zagodyorno”, from the Lithuanian Republic. Things got better already. he started working, my dad. It was summertime. He got stamps to get food. Also to eat in a restaurant - he was some kind of in charge there of the transport department. And he started travelling in Lithuania. He was in charge of bringing trucks, in his line of work. To get trains for loading wheat and corn and stuff like that. All over Lithuania. We needed these carloads, boxcars and trucks for this transporting of grain. This was his job. And we lived there and I started going to school. There was a Jewish school opened up, far away from my house, from the place I was living, but still could walk. I started going to the first grade at nine years old. Whatever I knew. The school was not too far from the river. There was a small river and a big river that went through Vilna, the big river. It was right near the river. And they called it the “Hinternat”. They called it the “Yiddische Schule” and they taught there Yiddish and they taught Lithuanian. In the third grade they started teaching Russian, but I was only in the first grade. And I went to school there. I came back home and then we used to...at that time boys were playing. The gentile children, they hated Jews, but I was very brave. I wasn’t scared of nothing and I found myself a sword that I carried with me and I found a lot of grenades, but my father told me not to touch them. Bullets, a pistol that I brought into the house. My father was busy working and I was playing in that courtyard there, also in the garden, in the back of the other house. We were playing war. I had a slingshot. Boys aren’t scared of anything, very brave. And that’s how we lived for a few months and then it started getting cold. We started buying wood and all that, but beforehand, the first three weeks that we lived in this apartment, all of a sudden - the first two or three weeks, maybe two weeks - all of a sudden at night was an air raid, terible air raid and everything got lit up. We lived in “Chopina” Street which was not far away from the train station and I heard only these bombs fall, whistling. The Russians were not prepared for that kind of an air raid. They didn’t have any anti-aircraft power. Whatever they had was very limited and they were bombing, very terrible bombing. We went down from the apartment. The whole house was shaking. We went out from that apartment, went downstairs and I hid myself underneath the staircase, again begging G-d, “HaShem”, that he should save me. This is how terrible this thing was. We tried to go across to the other building where in the back was a garden and was a bunker there underneath the ground. We couldn’t get through because of that terrible bombing. After a few hours we did get through and we went to that bunker there in the garden and we hid there, but it died down. Going back, there was a building there in the corner of that garden that was only a hole in the ground, big, big crater. There was a public toilet made out of bricks, real heavy bricks - gone, like nothing was there. And in the neighbouring courthouse was also a tunnel like that to go through and we went through there and I saw bodies there. They were killed by the force of the bombs, by the air blast. That’s how terrible this bombing was. We went outside on the streets. They were trying to dig up people. They only shot down two planes that I saw. Two planes were shot down and the charred, burned bodies of the pilots were right there. This was right after the second day. Of course no window was left in that apartment where we lived. And then my father went to work again and food was scarce. We put windows already into there because these two women had friends that they were KGB men, NKVD men. Jewish people. And they started putting windows in, then they put also windows also in our...We started buying wood, preparing for the winter. My mother bought potatoes from a gentile person, a Polish person, on the third floor. We were up on the fourth floor....and there was this evening and my father went out to get these potatotes into these Polish people and half an hour, an hour, he’s not coming back. What happened here? So I told my mother, “Let’s go down and see what happened to my father?” We went down there. There is a KGB man, an NKVD man, sitting in the door and everybody coming inside that aparment don’t go out. When we walked in they left, the people left. This was the way they caught people because these people were doing business, smugglers. We bought potatoes from them, that’s all we did. And I thought they were black marketeers. Then they take you for questioning. Don’t matter what job you have, what position you have, they didn’t let you go. And I made a big fuss, “What do you mean, you’re going to keep me over here? I want my mother to show me where my clothes are, where my food is.” So my father went with me. He told the guard he is going to come back. He came up there and this Yona was there. He says, “I was detained and they let me go.” My father showed me where he hid some money in the toilet, where the water goes down, the water box, where the water goes down to flush the toilet. So he showed me, on top there he hid some money, and he showed this Yona, too. So you don’t know what happens, how many days you’ll be out there, questioning. Anyway, they took my mother and father away and I was left alone. A week went by, two weeks went by, and I was begging these women, these two sisters - they had these policemen, the friends, they worked for the NKVD - they should intervene. Nobody wanted to intervene. Afraid. So this man Yona, he was drinking all the time, he came back at night. Nobody was taking care of me, so I went down to the Polish - “Kajmej” they called him. He was the superintendent of this building before the war. I knew him. And he gave me some food and then I made friends with a Polish boy and I went with him and I got some food. And Yona would bring me some food sometimes. And then I had the money and I went and bought myself food. Then Yona decided he can’t keep me. Already three weeks went by and my parents are not out. Who know what happened? And I knew that boy, from the potatoes they had a son. He said he knows where my mother is through the window. She’ll come out and talk to me from jail, she was detained in jail. He took me over there and I saw from far away my mother, but I couldn’t talk. It was like two, three hundred meters. They wouldn’t let me close. All of a sudden I was left alone here, nobody. So I lived in this apartment and I warmed myself with the wood and one day I was trying to...they had a block where they chopped wood in the kitchen, so I went down with the axe to chop a piece of wood and as I went down, the back door which was hinged in, a big blast. I came down with the axe. A big explosion and the door was ripped open again and the window was broken, all the windows. What happened? I went downstairs. I saw the Russian officers in the army - they were running like they were drugged, like drugged rats, shooting in the air and running. And I was looking. I didn’t know what happened. What happened actually there? On the train station two trains met head on with ammunition and they exploded. And everything about two miles around, three miles around heard that blast. Yona came back and he says to me, “Everything is broken here. Windows are out. How are you going to stay here?” I went and sold the wood to these two. They gave me the money for the wood. I sold them the wood and I took the few things that I had and Yona took me to friends of theirs which were bakers.They were baking bread so they had a big stove and it was warm. And then they decided they can’t keep me and they took me to an orphanage. That same school where I went, they had an orphanage there. They took me to the orphanage there and I was there in the orphanage, called “Hinternat” in Yiddish. I was lost, I didn’t know how to get contact with my parents. The only thing I did is come over there and scream for my mother through that window. This was not too far away from that orphanage. I was in the orphanage for a couple of days. In the orphanage were two of my cousins there, their father left them there. In a nearby town he was left only with these two children - one is a little older than me, a girl. They were my aunt’s children. They lived from “Nimanjin”. It’s a small town near Vilna, about twenty-five kilometers from Vilna. And he was there, this Esar, and her name was Yentl. Now that she is in Israel they call her Yehudith. She is bashful to be called “Yentl”. Esar was in charge. His father would bring him once a month food, but I had my money so I went into the marketplace and I bought myself tangerines, a bag full of tangerines with all the money I had. I saw tangerines being sold - this was wintertime - so I bought myself tangerines and I ate them up, before I got to the orphange I ate them all up. Only brought one or two back, so I gave it to them. And I was so dirty with lice. Only once a week they took us to the bath, to take a bath, to the public bath, the children. And I was sleeping there in these two-tier beds. I was on the top tier and they talked about if you looked at the moon, you become a lunatic. You know, children talk like that. And I was crying at night. I was by myself. But somehow people live. In the daytime I went to school and we were fed by the “Hinternat”, by the orphanage authorities there. Then, all of a sudden after the first bath I take, about ten days after I’m in that orphanage, my mother’s cousin shows up with a car - nobody visited me. Shlomo, my uncle, the father of the two cousins, he didn’t show up yet. He used to come once a month. Shows up a car and comes inside. Who is this? This is my mother’s cousin that lived in Lithuania in Kaunas, Kovna. He heard that I was here, that my parents were detained, and until they get freed, he took me with him. He had one of those cars with the boiler on, where you put wood in there. A car like that he had and we drove and he took me and I was so happy that I went already, somebody came and took me. This cousin, his name was Mula Lubetsky. He was a big engineer, very known engineer in Vilna. He was a captain or major in the Russian army and was construction engineer. Where they built that bridge across, was bombed down in Vilna, they called it the “Gruene Bridge”, he built a wooden bridge. That was his first job. After the liberation we met him very shortly and then he went to Kaunas, to the Lithuanian city of Kaunas. He was over there in charge of a big construction firm that belonged to the government and he took me and we drove, it looked to me the whole day. Very slow because the roads were all bombed out. He took me over there and he brough me to a big house with a villa, with a bathtub, warm water, good food. And he had a woman living there who was also a distant relative of his cousin, was another cousin. Her name was Lisa, this woman Lisa, and she lost her children and her husband, everybody. She survived. She took care of me like a mother.

Q: So how long did it take till your parents got out?

A: And I lived there and I went to school, to a Lithuanian school, Yiddish Lithuanian school. It was different from Vilna, different mentality. They were more communist-oriented and very nationalistic, which we there in Vilna weren’t. We were awaiting the time to leave, to get out, when we could leave the Soviet Union, to liberate us again, from the liberators. We wanted to get liberated from the liberators.

I lived there with my cousin for about five months and I didn’t know what happened. Nobody went to intervene. Because my family name is “S”, till they got to the letter “S” there were so many people, it took five months or four months. Actually they kept them four months there, or five months, but they came to get me a month later because he had no living quarters to take me. He had to get first an apartment. Anyway, I was there in Kaunas. Life was very nice there, but it was very sad for me because every night I went to sleep I was crying. I went to the school which was Lithuanian Kaunas Jews. I felt they were like, called them “Litvishe hazerim”. They were very selfish people, not kind people. Very nationalistic, too. If you didn’t speak Lithuanian well, you weren’t in. And I spoke Polish well because I came from a Polish background. Also Lithuanian, but Polish. I lived like this, went to school and Mula did the homework with me, taught me Lithuanian. And he had a wife. She wasn’t Jewish. She was an opera singer and every weekend she used to go and perform for hospitals, for troops, charity work, all kind of stuff like that. I used to hear her sing. (end of side)

Q: So you were saying five months you were in Kovna by this cousin?

A: Yes, I was five to six months, I think. My father came back to take me back and I was angry at my father. I said, “Where were you? I heard you were already free for six weeks.” He said, “I had nowhere to take you. How can I come?” He came and took me back and we moved to a different area where the people were all government workers, military people, and they didn’t do these things like what they did here. The Russians wanted to take this population, move it over, bring more Russian population in that are loyal to the regime. But we lived in an area also we had only one room.

Q: And your father continued with the old job?

A: And he didn’t go back to work, so they gave him even a better job when he came back, gave him higher pay and a good job. He had a very honourable job. He was in charge of the transport, but he was the “Nachalnik”, the manager of the shooting match, as they say. Anyway, we lived in that area, not too far from that Jewish school - I could continue going to school there. We lived in the apartment - we had one room. And we used to receive also a package once a month from the government also and they included, in the package was liquors and chocolates. The liquors we used to sell. We weren’t drinking, but the chocolates I ate. Other good stuff. Because with the pay you couldn’t buy much and then he had also stamps to go eat in restaurants so I used to go eat in those restaurants. And I went to the movies there. It was like a normal life. The war was over already. 1945. My father went to work everyday and I went to school everyday and my mother didn’t work. All kinds of stuff there. I used to walk around with my slingshot - there were prisoners-of-war there working, cleaning up the debris and building, and I used to tease them, call them names in German and shoot stones at them with the slingshot. That was how life went by. Then, as you understand, we weren’t intending to stay there in Vilna. We were intending to move on. Our goal was to come to Israel or to a western country. Vilna was soaked with blood, with bad memories, anti-semitism, no matter what. We decided that that was not our place to stay and we had to go from there. So a law came out that all Polish citizens that were citizens of Poland before the war in 1939 could leave for Polan - whoever desired, and they would leave legally. So my father registered, although he registered in secret because he had a big position, and he got these evacuation papers from Vilna and we one day left the apartment there. He came first and told his boss - his name was Ivanov. I went with him - that we are leaving. He said, “Where are you leaving?” “For Poland.” He says, “You’re not leaving for Poland. You’re going to Israel.” This Ivanov said, because he had to return his...he had a pistol and his weapons that he carried with him for self protection - he used to travel a lot. We went on a transport. It was one day and we got into the trucks that took us over there and we loaded up on this.... the boxcars were not passenger cars. They were hauling everything, but not passengers. Without seats or nothing. We went in one of those boxcars and we were going, we went to Poland.

In Poland we travelled for about two weeks, three weeks it took us to travel; the train was going slow, not too fast. And I remember distinctly now. When we left Vilna, we went by Panar, where the Jews were slaughtered there and all the Christian Pollacks were crossing themselves over as we went through there. The Pollacks did that. For us it was sad that whole families were murdered there. We were glad to leave Vilna, leave the Soviet Union, and we wanted to go, be free people. We travelled and we came to Lodz. We arrived at Lodz and we had to find living quarters, so we found living quarters with people from Vilna who had left beforehand, a couple of months before. We stayed with them a couple of weeks and then we found another apartment. Anyway, we decided we are not going to stay in Lodz either, so we went to Stettin. In Stettin my father did some black market business. Like the money-changers they have here, they had over there. This was a port city. This was a German city before, but it became Poland, port city. In Stettin we lived in a pension because my father was earning real good from this business. We ate well. His partner came, a religious Jew, with his family - they survived with two daughters. We lived in this pension for a few months and my father and this man, Schneider, they were doing business changing money. They had all kind of monies there. They had zloti, they had marks, they had this kind of marks. I used to go sometime with my father - I didn’t go to school - keep the money from the side, you know, help him out. He earned a lot of money from this. We also ran into a bank that was bombed out. We found some money there, old marks. We got so much money we stacked it in suitcases. We decided that we are not staying in Stettin either. We decided we are going to go further out, we’re going to go to Berlin. From Berlin we wanted to go to the American zone. That’s the only way to go through Stettin. My father hired a truck, paid top dollar, top money for each person, and we had this suitcase full of money, we had food, we had everything. We had good sardines there and bread and butter and cheese in kitbags. Duffle bags and a couple of suitcases. The money was there and the only money they put in my coat was the few, they had a few golden pieces that they had. They put it on me, in the lining in my sleeves. My mother sewed it in. But the other money, they had it on them. As we took this truck with other people escaping to the west, wanted to go to the west, we were caught by the Russian patrol. Seems like we paid a lot of money, but he got caught and they took all the stuff off the truck. So my father told me, “Go make pee-pee.” I should go make pee-pee. So I went and there were trucks, where the border is. There was a big area of trucks, broken trucks, equipment, big. And then this checkpost, where they had these pillboxes and all that, with those guards sitting there. And I went behind the trucks there and he made me with my hand I should stay there, so I stood there and he said my mother was going to see what is the matter with me. In the meantime we left everything and my father’s partner, he stayed behind with other families there, with another ten people maybe. And then my father went looking for my mother. Then Schneider’s wife, she went looking, and her older daughter went also, and we escaped. We left everything there, the food, the money, everything, because we knew food and money is not important. First of all we have to escape and we left everything there and we escaped. We started walking towards Berlin. They had some money that they had and we came upon a patrol again. We were walking, the roads were broken, ditches from shells, exploding bombs. The roads were terrible. And we hit upon a Polish patrol. This was a small patrol that was a border patrol. And one of those soldiers there was with my father in the army, in the Polish army in 1939 and he recognized him and he stood there and he said, “Poruznik is a lieutenant,” you know, in Polish. And he recognized him and he said, “Can you arrange something?” He says, “Yes.” He stopped a truck and we got on the truck. The Russian driver, a truck with tires. We went up on the truck there. This was cold, this was in December, wans’t warm, but we were used to already troubles and problems. We went up on the truck there and my father and my mother and I and this Mrs. Schneider. Her daughter went into the cabin with the driver and an officer. And we were driving along and my father paid the officer with some kind of money he had there in his pocket. He started touching this daughter. The daughter was about sixteen, seventeen years old. The father saw that. And they had a puncture, a blowout tire. We went into a small town like he is going to change a tire and we went into a restaurant there, on the way to Berlin. This is called Bernau, I think. I’m not sure now. We escaped from this driver and we told them we were coming right back, but we already weren’t coming back. And we went into this restaurant and this Mrs. Schneider, she had a terrible accent, like Jewish, Polish with a heavy Jewish accent. I told her to keep quiet, not to open up her mouth. She spoke French, too. That was a restaurant, there were some officers there - this was dangerous times. And he looked, who is this woman? I went immediately outside from this restaurant and then she walked out, too, and we started walking toward the train station and we got on the train. Very, very difficult. It was packed, but we were used to packed and all this. My mother and father and this Mrs. Schneider and her daughter got into the train and I was squeezed out, so I jumped on top. I had to go because otherwise they would leave me there. I jumped on top of the people, climbed up and I got into the train. The doors squeezed together. It was like a subway train, and it brought us to Berlin. We went out in Berlin and it was evening already. A whole day it took us to get there. It’s a long way from Stettin to Berlin, is about four hundred kilometers. Anyway, it took from the morning until the evening and we got into the Berlin area. We went outside and my father spoke German. He asked where is the place where the Jewish people are staying, where the Jewish “Gemeinde” is. How do you say “Gemeinde” in English?

Q: Community.

A: Community. Not community. It’s not community. Anyway, and the German showed us the way...”Funf Mimeten laufen” We came there. The conditions were very bad there. A lot of packed people escaping from all over Poland and the east, coming over there, in the Russian sector. A couple of days we were there and the conditions were no good. We were looking for food. My father and I took me to food-looking. We found a restaurant where we could eat, but how to pay them? With stamps we had to pay them. Marks. A stamp is also a mark. So we didn’t have stamps, so then we’re eating there and he says, “I’ve got marks, but not the marks you need.” Anyway, we ate already so....then we came back to the place...This was like where the Berlin wall was. This was the place where the Reichstag was, in that area. Not Potsdammerplatz. I’ll think about the name. In Berlin there, big, big area. Square area. We were on Oranienburgerstrasse - I remember that - in Berlin, the place where they had the sanctuary for the Jewish people, the Jewish community. We went looking...maybe Brandenburger...there were trolley cars there, big area. This was still Berlin in 1945, December, ‘45. And then we came back to this Brandenburgerstrasse and you hear people telling. How did we know Brandenburger?... mouth to ear - you stay here, you come. There is lodging quarters, there is a Jewish community there. In Poland we still knew.

There was a rumour going on that the Russian authorities were going to move us out, back to take us back where we came from. Each one to his...we came from Vilna. Whatever he came back, they are going to send you back. Overnight nobody was there, not a soul was left in that Brandenburgerstrasse. And we all, about five hundred people, we all went to Wannsee. We heard that there are places there like villas there, where an villa was there in Wannsee, so all these people moved into this big villa - on the floor, in the attic, on the grounds, everywhere. My father went - he knew a little bit of English, too, but German well - and he went - in the American sector this was, in Wannsee - and he went to the governor there, General Clay, General Lucius Clay, and this General Clay organized and gave us a place to stay for refugees - we escaped from the Russian sector - and they gave us a place, a camp, a Luftwaffe camp, Schlachtensee. We all moved into these barracks. We set up schools, hospitals. There was a committee set up - my father wasn’t the leader then. Another person was the leader in that camp, but after a few months my father was elected leader. They had elections.

Q: And it was set up just when you came there? It wasn’t existing yet when you came? You really opened it up?

A: No, this General Clay gave orders to open up this camp for these refugees that came from the east, the Jewish refugees, and we moved into these barracks. Each family moved into a room, a barrack. And we moved into...we were disinfected by the UNWRA, the refugee organization, and the Joint came in later on, Joint Distribution Committee from America. And they sent in a chaplain and they sent in food and it was a (?) there in Schlachtensee.

Q: How many were you there approximately?

A: From the original five hundred they got a thousand, then thousand five hundred, till we got to be about ten thousand people there.

Q: You started off with five hundred?

A: It started off with five hundred. And then they opened up another camp. In this refugee camp they had self-government. They had Hebrew schools from the first grade up, they had an open university, they had a hospital, they had a court, they had a rabbinate. Everything, and they set up synagogues. Everything was like small little country. And we lived in this camp. And we had our policemen - Jewish policemen weren’t like the policemen in the ghetto. These policemen were keeping order, they were by the gates, that other people shouldn’t come in there. They issued us permits - index they called it - each one with a name. They issued us living quarters, they issued us blankets. They had what they called a work department, labour department, they had a housing department. It was like a small government and my father was elected president of the camp afterwards, a couple of months after it was created. We had over there, the “bricha” came in, also the Jewish Brigade soldiers came there to us, and a lot of Russian soldiers and officers changed their clothes. My closet, on top there was a closet full of uniforms, different things. They came in to escape the Russians and they came to escape to the west or mostly for Israel. The thing was, Israel was the place to go. And we had a radio station there - everything Zionist, everything was Israel. They sent “shlichim” from Israel, they sent these Brigade people, from the Jewish Brigade, they were there. And also they had the “Shomer Hatzair” there, they had “Betar” there, they had “Noar Halutzim Meuhad”, parties.

Q: And where did you belong?

A: “Noar Halutzim Meuhad”, “Nocham”. The most popular party was the “Shomer HaTzair”. They had dances, they had more food. I don’t know why, but they were very popular. And “Nocham” was in the middle, like “Betar” was popular from the other side. “Betar” had these brown shirts they put on, military more. Why I didn’t like the “Shomer HaTzair” - most of my friends were “Shomer HaTzair” - why I didn’t like and why I didn’t like “Betar”? Because both extremes to me. Those had Stalin up there and Lenin and the red flag and these were these uniforms - they reminded me, those uniforms, like the “Hitlerjugend”. It didn’t fit me. I was in the “Nocham”, “Mapai”. It was not “Mapam”, it was like “Noar Halutzim Meuhad”. I went to school there, everything in Hebrew. We learned “Toldot HaAretz”, history, “teva” - everything we learned in Hebrew and we started speaking Hebrew in school and I learned how to read Hebrew and write Hebrew and then we had “Tanach” and then I used to go to the “cheder” there.

Q: There was also?

A: A “cheder” there. A “melamed” I had because I was close up already, I was already eleven, twelve years old. My parents wanted me to know how to “daven”, how to pray, so I learned “chumash”, a little “gemorra”, from the beginning. Mostly what a boy learns. They had a court there. They had all kinds of problems with the survivors. They were very hard to handle. My father made very many speeches every week, moral speeches, talked to them moral, to the heart, to keep them straight because the people were “hefker” they say. How would you say “hefker” in English? They were loose people already, no morals, no scruples, very little scruples.

Q: They felt like after the war, what they went through, everything...

A: Whatever they went through, they wanted to live a good time, they wanted to have good life. Black markets. With the German women they surrounded themselves. They went out with the “frauleins”. I was a boy then, it didn’t matter to me, but I could tell. Not too many morals there or ethics.

Q: So your father was very, very busy there?

A: He was very busy. He had to keep order and they had a lot of respect for him. He was also the judge, the main judge. And they had some people that were “kapos” there and they gave them to court and they had courts there and my father had a secretary, Frume, and she used to take notes - everything in Yiddish.

Q: And your mother was involved too?

A: My mother was sick. She was hit by a car in the beginning. In 1946 she went out to shop and she was hit by a car and she was in the hospital for a year. Everything was broken on her, and then she became pregnant. My mother had to have the baby, but the baby was very big and the baby didn’t survive. Right there, in 1947. So it was a disappointment to me because I was looking forward to having a brother or sister. And she got very sick and she had to have penicillin. She had an infection after the birth. The way my father told me, it was a matter of choosing my mother or the baby and he chose my mother to stay alive, so this is what it was.

Anyway, to go back further, this camp was very Zionistic-oriented. Everything - they had shows in Hebrew, they had theatre in Yiddish, the songs were in Hebrew, they had camps out, they had summer camps - everything was in Hebrew. Like I said before, there were all these Zionist organizations and everyone was trying to keep order there. It was very difficult. My father used to talk to the heart, to the soul. He was straight, he gave an example. I showed you the thing. They called him “Mother” and “Solomon”. You remember the article I showed you? So this was true. He had to be a mother and Solomon there. (not clear). And they had a fight between the Litvaks and the Polish in the beginning, the “Galitzianer”. The Litvaks had an argument and then he said, “We are all brothers.” He talked to their soul, to their spirit, to their conscience. And they had a paper there - came out once a week - a newspaper.

Q: Was there contact with the Germans?

A: We lived autonomy in this Schlachtensee. The Germans came in to work. Manual labour they did there. Cleaning up. They brought in maids to clean to up afterwards. The Jews were making money on the black market.

Q: So what were the Jews mainly doing? How were they living?

A: Black marketing. That’s what was their business. There were jobs in the camp like administration, teachers, doctors, nurses, but most of the manual labour was done by the Germans. This was like a casbah. They did everything outside the camp. They came to the camp, some were caught. You read in the article. They were caught by the authorities for balck marketing. My father had to intervene for them. Was our people. To take them out from jail. We had a murder there also.

Q: Yes?

A: Yes, a murder in a cafe. They got drunk there and one stabbed the other.

Q: In the camp?

A: In camp, yes, and they sentenced him to death, so my father said, “We can’t hang a Jewish person here.” We gave him over to the American authorities and the American authorities went and deported him to Poland back. Moishe the murderer. They called him Moishe. So we couldn’t hang no Jewish person there after the war. He killed, cold-bloodedly. Stabbed another Jew and killed him in a struggle, a fight over a woman or something. I don’t even remember what. He said he did it, there was witnesses. There was nothing more to prove there. He was put in jail and then he was given over to the American authorities. The American authorities didn’t want to bother with him. They went and deported him to Poland. And Polish were killing a Jew whatever - excuse me for saying this. What do they care about Jewish lives? So they let him go. After the camp was already....the Russians over there, they made a blockade in 1948 and all the food had to be flown in. They had it on TV not long ago. So the American authorties decided to take us over to the western zone, to western Germany. Not in Berlin, because they had to feed us and anyway we were going to go from there.

Q: So what year was that? So you were in Schlachtensee until when?

A: 1948. I’ll go back telling you more about Schlachtensee. Then there was a congress in 1947. You know the congress in Basel in 1947? They decided to have a Jewish state? And my father was elected from the whole Berlin - three camps were there in Berlin at that time. Approximately thirty thousand Jews were there. They decided that he was going to be the representative from all the parties. We were also thinking of going to Israel. Then he came to Basel and he met some Israelis that were from Vilna, from different places, and one of them was a “bulnik”, from kibbutzim here around, and he said to him, “Maybe it’s better for you,” for my mother, “that you’re not going to come at these hard times to live in Israel,” with her going through all this with asthma and having this birth and all that. It would be better if go to a western country. So my father came back from the Zionist congress and we were issued a certificate, a legal certificate, with a place to live in Deganya Aleph. We were given a certificate and we didn’t take it. We went and registered for America. Nobody knew about it because he was the president of the Jewish people there, the “Yiddische Menschen”. They were oriented for Israel, the state of Israel. We had parades and we had bicycles decorated and we had marching with flags, there in the camp. And in school, Herzl was there, Weizmann was hung up there. What my father in the congress saw that discouraged him to go to Israel is the bickering. He came and told me the bickering from Ben-Gurion with Weizmann, and all these parties, there is too much bickering. And they didn’t care about the “She’erit haplita”. They didn’t care what happened to us, the survivors. All they cared is about what’s good for them there, to be in power. Especially Ben-Gurion and his people. We had emissaries come over, like Zrubovel. Ever heard of him? With a beard. He came to our camp. And we had Shertok come one time, Sharett. Ben-Gurion I never saw in person. Only thing I saw him is in America. We were indoctrinated to go to Israel. I was too. I was always dreaming to go, but my parents took me to America, so I went to America.

Now I’ll go back.

Q: So he came back from Switzerland and decided...?

A: He came back from Switzerland, from Basel, and decided, he told my mother, (Yiddish) “We’re not going to Israel. We’re going to America.” The bickering and the fighting discouraged him too and also the advice he got from some of the Israelis, from the people that lived here in Israel, in Palestine at that time. He was actually talked out of it.

Q: It must have been a very big disappointment.

A: It was a big disappointment for him to see all this...he thought it was different. He thought it was more idealistic, more caring, and he saw this wasn’t that. So why go to troubles, again troubles. We wanted peace already. After all these wars we wanted peace and quiet. My father wasn’t a Zionist also. As a youth he was more “Yiddishist”. He finished at a “Yiddishe Gymnasia”, a Jewish high school. And in Vilna he was a sportsman, Maccabi. More of Jewish, not a Zionist - Yiddish. To keep Yiddishkeit. More in that department. Sportsman, too. He was a sportsman. To him, Israel was important to us, but after the congress it was a disappointment and to me it was a blow. I was expecting to go to Israel. And Schwarzberg shouldn’t go to Israel? That was a terrible thing. Then we were evacuated by the American authorities, lifted over to the western sector.

Q: In ‘48 that was?

A: In ‘48, and nobody wanted to leave. Again my father got on the radio and he says he is going to be the last one to stay and he talked to the Jewish people. They trusted him, the people trusted him. And they all evacuated.

Q: Where to?

A: To the western section of Germany, to Muenchen, to Stuttgart.

Q: They didn’t open up another DP camp?

A: No, they distributed the all over the place to different DP camps. We happened to fall into Lampertheim. In Lampertheim my father was already not active in politics.

Q: But that was a DP camp, wasn’t it?

A: It was also a DP camp, but it wasn’t like a camp like we were, like a military camp we were. They took away the houses from the Germans and the Jewish people moved in temporarily there, in the regular houses, streets. Was also a DP camp, but not as organized as the Berlin camps were.

First we came to Bensheim, a small town near Lampertheim. Then we were transferred over to Lampertheim. And the people there in Bensheim wanted my father to leave because they were afraid he would take over. He knows how to talk well, orator and the name went in front of him, so they quickly found a place for him in Lampertheim. And in Lampertheim my father didn’t go into politics. He went into business. he organized a small partnership of ten, fifteen people. They started buying all kinds of stuff, selling, buying - that’s when he made himself a few dollars. Otherwise we would have been without anything. We were in Lampertheim for about a year.

Q: But this was also from the Americans, they were supporting it.

A: All the Joint was supporting it, and the UNWRA, and we registered for America and in America, the council there, we registered to go to America and we had to wait. They had a waitling list. They had to go through medical checks, “roentgens”, X-rays, and they found that I had some kind of problem with my lungs. I didn’t even know about it. Maybe as a child I had some kind of...and they didn’t want to let me go. They found out. Then my father wrote to different places, to people he knew - the correspondant for the New York Times - to intervene. Then they sent me over to a professor, they checked me again and they gave me a clean bill of health. And in 1949 we went to Hamburg. First we went to a different camp “Reichenhall”, I think. We were there a couple of weeks, then we were sent to Hamburg and we waited to transport to the United States. In the United States in February in 1949 we went on the Marina Jumper - it’s a small....I think it’s about a fifty-ton vessel, maybe less, small vessel, passenger vessel, and we went to the States. Two weeks it took to go to the States with this Marina Jumper. I remember it very well. They had good food there, Coca-Cola.

Q: At the time you came to Lampertheim people were already starting to leave.

A: Lampertheim was still....not too many people were leaving the camps. There was no mass emigration yet. Some trickle, younger people, “halutzim” - they went to Israel. They had “hachshara” in our camp in Berlin. They had training there, military training. This was a military base so they had plenty of places. Under the ground they had big hangars there under the ground, tunnels and places, rooms under the ground. And they were training these people that escaped from the Russian army, some that came out from the concentration camps, young people - they were training them to be able to use weapons, fighting. And also no farming there because there was no facilities for that.

Q: In Schlachtensee that was?

A: In Schlachtensee.

Q: But Lampertheim was already much different.

A: Lampertheim was different. In Lampertheim I didn’t see anything. No training there, no nothing. They went to different places to train, the younger people, the “halutzim” they called themselves, or the people that wanted to go to Israel.

Q: How many people were in Lampertheim at the time?

A: The camp was about two thousand, not more than that.

Q: It was much smaller than Schlachtansee.

A: Much, much smaller. There were no activities there, no theatre. Just a Jewish school, a yiddishe.

Q: A school there was?

A: There was a school there, not that good operated, too.

Q: But you went there?

A: I went to the school. I was there in the third grade already. Third or fourth grade I was over there. The level was much lower than in Schlachtansee because I was way ahead in mathematics and other things, history, Tanach. And also people were like on their suitcases already. They were ready to go. Or America or Israel, but most of the people went to America or Canada. From everywhere. Most of the people from these refugees, as a surprise to hear, I think seventy percent went not to Israel. I think so.

Q: Even though there was so much Zionist activity?

A: Zionist activity....I wouldn’t say seventy. About sixty percent went to different places. The majority. And forty percent went to Israel.

Q: Do you know why?

A: Better life in America, Canada. They were sick and tired of wars, sick and tired of hunger, or suffering.

Q: Being discouraged from what they heard.

A: Yes, but still they were supportive. They were very supportive for Israel. No matter if they went to America, but they were supportive to Israel, the “She’erit haplita”. And also I think it’s the fault of the Israel government at that time that they didn’t encourage more, send more emissaries, because they were busy with other things, more important things. Trying to get a state started. This was not that many people there, but yet they were important, they were very idealistic and they were very, like, there is nothing to lose already. They were very determined, these people, these “She’erit haplita” people. And very capable people, capable, educated, capable people. They went through hell already. They already knew what to do. They could survive. They didn’t need an apartment with a Volvo, as they say. For them, whatever you gave them they would be happy with it. They were survivors. They went through hard times, terrible times. These people weren’t afraid of anything, the “She’erit haplita”.

Q: So in ‘49 you came to the States.

A: I came to the States and I thought I came to “Gan Eden”, as they say, to Paradise. We came to New York. The Jewish organization helped us, kept us in a hotel. We met a person, a Polish Jew that was staying with us in 1939 when he escaped from Poland, when the Germans attacked Poland. Freiman. He had a candy store, ice cream store. I came over there to his store and his son was there, too. He came to America through China at that time. And life was very good. We were accepted nicely. America - big, rich. I was in New York. I went to school there in New York. Afterwards we got an apartment with the help of the Jewish Refugee Organization there, that they gave support to....my father started working. His first job was to make speeches for the “Magbid”, the United Jewish Appeal, to these different societies. He went to different organizations to speak for the State of Israel, and he got paid for every speech, not too much, but he did it because he wanted to do it. And then he got tired of speech-making and he decided that we have to settle down. I went to school in New York. School in New York was not that good. It was gangs there. We lived on Amsterdam Avenue, between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenue, 101st Street, which was Puerto Rican - a lot of Jewish people lived there, they moved out. Because we couldn’t afford a better area apartment. We were there for about nine months. I went to school, to American school. They had a special class for children, some Puerto Ricans there, that didn’t know that much English, and they aided and they helped. I got involved over there with another four boys - of course I didn’t tell them I was Jewish because I didn’t know how they would accept this thing. We were walking together because otherwise you get attacked by hoodlums in New York. There were gangs all over the place. I remember I was chased by gangs not one time in the park. In the Central Park also, in the westside park. I was already thirteen, fourteen years old. I wasn’t a small boy already. I had bar mitzvah there.

Q: Where?

A: I had a bar mitzvah later on. The original bar mitzvah I had in Schlachtensee in 1948, but then the party, they made me a party afterwards. I had the bar mitzvah in Schlachtensee. I knew how to read from the Torah. The “melamed” taught me, and the “melamed” that taught me, “zichrono l’vracha”, an older Jewish person, and he said to me, “I want one thing from you,” he says to me, this “melamed”, “that everyday you ‘meneach tefillin’, you’re going to put on ‘tefillin’.” And I promised him and since that day I put on “tefillin”, where I am. Even when I was in the army, the US army. I was in the US army a long time, but I put on “tefillin” everyday. If I didn’t have time to say the whole prayer, I say “Shema Yisrael”, whatever I have time. Here now, in Israel. I go to the synagogue, I have more time. This stayed with me. And also to eat kosher, all that.

Q: So then in New York you moved?

A: Afterwards in New York my father decided he is going to move, He bought a farm with the aid of the Jewish agricultural society which was set up by Baron de Hirsch. He was also helping in Argentina. Wherever Jewish people wanted to settle on land, farming. We decided to go on a farm. We went to Wyeland area and my father bought a farm there, a house, and he built a chicken coop. And after him came a lot of Jewish people there. After him came about seven hundred families moved in. They started buying there, too. Before him came a few families there. How did he get there? They also were in Berlin. Feigenbaum was there and other people were there. And we all came and lived on the farm, lived by the aid of the organization, of the Jewish agricultural society.

Q: What made you come to Israel in 1970 or ‘73?

A: I came the first time in Israel. We lived there on a farm. The “Sochnut” set up a farm over there, too, for “hachshara”, and I used to come over there and I knew how to speak Hebrew, I understood Hebrew, so I came over to the farm. We met Israeli emissaries and people came over there to learn “haklaut”, agriculture. They had a regular farm there. They had cows, chickens, land, tractors. First time I saw Ben-Gurion, came to visit that farm there in America, and other important Israelis. People from the government came to that farm there.

Then I was going to high school there in America and living in his little town called Newfield and going to school in Wyeland, but first I went to Newfield Elementary School and I finished the eighth grade and then to go to high school in the country you had to pass a test in that high school, so my mother took me a teacher. I remember the teacher’s name, Mrs. Dare, and she taught me English, how to write and read well, and mathematics I knew, but English. And then I went to high school, I went to Wyeland High School, and I forgot all about Israel, all about these things. I lived a Jewish life. We had a synagogue in Wyeland and Shabbat we had in our house. We had a minyan and the Jewish farmers used to come there. We had enough people. With all the “simchas”, and there was sometimes funerals there, whatever it is. And my father was elected again, by all the farmers. My father organized a cooperative there to buy feed for the chickens and sell the eggs through a cooperative. He organized it all. And we lived in Wyeland there, a Jewish life. And Israel just left me. That’s what happened. I supported it. I always wanted to read the newspaper. I was very eager to see anything about Israel. And we had some people that left Israel and they settled there in the area and I was asking them always questions, “Why did you leave Israel?” “Yordim” that came to the States in those years. And then I played football in Wyeland High School, American football. Then I was drafted into the army because I lived in a small town and I was in the army for eight years. I was a professional, I stayed in the army. I was a master sergeant in the army, training gunners in the M50 tank, in the beginning. Fort Knox, Kentucky. And I ran into some military men that also came to learn, from Israel, came to learn gunnery. I didn’t teach them, but I ran into them. And I also learned agriculture in Rutgers University, before I was drafted, for a year. Before I was drafted, so I met some Israelis from kibbutzim. They were learning about agriculture, about poultry husbandry. But I thought myself that I am American. I loved America, I loved the freedom, the preamble of the Constitution, the American way of life. I’m amazed how I became Americanized. I thought I owed allegiance to the United States. That’s why I stayed in the army, too. I felt American, Jewish American. I never said I wasn’t Jewish. By my name, I didn’t change my name. When I was supposed to become a citizen when I was eighteen years old, in 1954, the judge asked me if I want to change my name to a shorter name and I said, “No. My name is Jacob Schwarzberg.” That’s when my father didn’t change and I didn’t, because some people changed their names when they became citizens, made them shorter. “Berg”, “Jerome”, not “Jacob”. But I stayed Jacob Schwarzberg. What I am.

How I came to Israel? That’s what you want to ask me?

Q: In short. What made you in the end come in ‘73?

A: Well, I came here at first in 1970 to see how things would go for me. I was in the army. I went in in ‘55 and I came out in ‘63. This was ‘70. In the meantime, I went to work with a friend of mine in the supermarket business and I was part of them - Lenny Brown - he was American - and I was very successful in that business. And then my father’s business in the farming was not good because the eggs were very cheap, feed was high. It wasn’t payable to raise chickens or sell eggs. It wasn’t profitable, so I went with my father and I bought a store, self-service food market, and took in my father as a partner and we had the store for several years. We made a decent living. We were happy and all that. My wife decided that we should take a vacation, so I said, “Alright.” Her parents were here in Israel, in Netanya - religious Jews. And we came to Israel for two months to see how things would go. And then I decided to stay here. At that time I sold the store. I couldn’t leave without selling the store, so I sold the store and I came here for two months and then I stayed for longer. And then I saw that my parents were in America. My mother was very ill, sick, and it was hard for them to make a living - they weren’t yet retirement age - so I decided to go back and I bought a house again. At that time I was renting the first time I came. Now I bought a house. I came first myself. I bought another supermarket in a small town called Laurel Springs. I bought a house for myself. It was cheap, very cheap. We bought the market also very cheaply. The whole market cost me...some old person that already wanted to retire, I came over and he liked me and he sold me the store. Then I had a house, too, but it wasn’t a Jewish neighbourhood, the house. The synagogue I had to go far away. It was difficult. I saw the mistake I made. My mother passed away in ‘73 and I sold the store and decided to come to Israel. I decided to come here at the end of 1973. My mother passed away, “zichrona l’vracha”, in ‘73, in the beginning. I sent my wife and children ahead. I sold my house there and my business was sold, met my father here and we came to stay.

Q: Did you ever go back to Poland?

A: No, I went back to Vilna in 1993. I went back to Vilna once by myself and one time afterwards I came back there. They had a get-together from all the survivors of HKP. I happened to see in the newspaper, HaRav Farber advertised in the newspaper in Vilna. (?) (end of side)

A: They went to school here, they went to high school. My son was in the army here. And my daughter was born here, the youngest one. We are Israelis. My father was here. He passed away in 1987. He is buried in Ashdod. And I am happy here. I wouldn’t leave. I am used to this country and this is my country. I don’t have any other country. I finally came home. That’s what I say. That’s all.

Q: Thank you very much.

A: And I hope that all the Jewish people in the world will come and settle here. That’s what I hope.

Q: Thank you very much.

A: I’d like to mention at this time that we have to support the State of Israel, that such a thing, such a Holocaust, such a terrible thing should never happen again in the modern times or anytime. Never again, never again this kind of murder of one third of the Jewish nation should be exterminated. By supporting the State of Israel, not only financially, but to making aliyah and strengthening the state with more people should live here will prevent such a thing to happening again. And I hope that in the future we will live peaceful with our neighbours, the Arabs, G-d willing. I’d also like to mention at this time that I live in Israel for now twenty-four years. My family was raised here, my children. My daughter, Hadar, was born here, and we are Israelis and we are never going to leave this country again. Thank you for letting me give this interview, this testimony that what happened to me in the years 1941 to 1944 in Vilna. Thank you.

A: This is a picture of my parents and a relative. From left to right, my mother in 1948 in Berlin. Rebecca Schwarzberg, Rivka Schwarzberg. She was born in Vilna and she is about thirty-four years old here. To the right, my father Hirsch, Herschel Tsvi Schwarzberg. He is here about thirty-five or thirty-six years old. Also in Berlin in 1948. And my relative - she’s a cousin, a distant cousin from my mother. Her name is Sonia. I don’t know how old she is here.

A: This is my uncle, Yosef, before the war, in 1938. He is about twenty-four years old. He was the brother of my mother. His name was Yosef Ginsburg and he escaped to Russia and survived the Holocaust. In Poland he came to the town of Walbrzych and there he passed away from a very serious illness in the year 1950. That’s all.

A: This is my mother, Rebecca Schwarzberg, Rivka, z’l, “aleha hashalom”. This picture was taken in the end of 1945 and that’s how she looked at that time. This was after the concentration camp.

A: This is me in 19....the picture was taken in 1939. I was about four years old. This was taken at the Berdadina Garden in Vilna. It’s a big park. This picture is the only one that I found that my parents were given by some Polish people that were servants at our house.

A: This is my father standing up. This picture was taken in the hospital in the end of ‘45, the beginning of ‘46. My father, Hirsch Schwarzberg. My mother had a terrible accident and she was hospitalized in the hospital for a long period of time. This is my mother laying down in one of the hospitals in Berlin. Like I said before, in the end of ‘45, in the beginning of ‘46.

A: This picture was taken in 1993 when I first visited Vilna. It was in March, wintertime. This is the house, the entrance, where we lived - Chopina 3 in Vilna. I came to see my house, my apartment. This house was owned by my grandfather. And I didn’t have a chance to go inside any of the apartments, however everything looked familiar.

A: This picture was taken in the yard of the camp, concentration camp HKP and I am pointing to the window where I was hidden in the “kinderaktzia”. I was giving testimony to the Lithuanian television and the history of what happened to me during the Holocaust, during the years ‘41 to ‘44, and what I lived through. All the testimony I gave at that time. This was in 1993 in the wintertime in March. The interviewer is Rochele Castillian for the Jewish museum in Vilna.

A: This is also in 1993 in March, at the time when I visited the concentration camp HKP in Vilna. This monument was put up by a man by the name of Prenner, with the Jewish Vilna society from Israel and Yeshayahu...I forgot his last name. This monument says that four hundred people, children, women and babies, were murdered here in this yard and buried there, in Hebrew, and by the Germans and their helpers, the Lithuanians. “Hashem kom damam” is written there. “G-d shall take revenge for their blood that was spilled.” What I said before, the monument, the murdered people, the Jewish people, the women , the men and the children were murdered in the year 1944 in July, there on that spot where the monument was put up, for their memory.

A: This picture is the inside of the room - now it’s all broken up and dilapitated, but this was the room where we lived in this HKP camp. And here in this window I was inside. The bricks were taken out and there was a board there and I was hidden inside for at least four months inside that window after the “kinderaktzia” in the year 1944 in March, and I was there till July, so approximately four months I was there in that window, hidden during the day and during the night I came out. A: This room where my parents lived, my father and my mother, and two more people - they were assimilated Jews - and their father which was a lawyer and also the son was a lawyer and his wife. The first name was Lala. I don’t really remember their last name. I think it was Schonberg, but I’m not really sure. This visit was in 1993 in March. The first time I came to this place and I found it immediately without any hesitation. I remembered it in my mind and my memory was like, you know, smitten in. That’s it.

A: This picture was taken in Berlin in 1946 or ‘47. This is Berlin, Schlachtensee, where the DP camp was for the refugees, where my father was president of the camp. Lived about ten thousand people there. This was in the yard there and as you can see, in the background there is in Yiddish written, “Kino Herzl”.

A: This is a picture of my father and his committee, his administration. he was the president of the liberated Jews of Berlin, the “Befreite Juden” from Berlin. He was the president from the central committee and his secreatry of labour, secretary of housing, secretary of administration of other things and each one had his department that he was head of and all went aroudn my father perpetual motion. “Perpetum mobile” “In eibiger Baroegung” (Yiddish). This is in 1946 or ‘47 in Berlin, in Schlachtensee DP camp, “Pleitiru Lager”. My father’s picture is up on top as you see. He is larger than the rest and the wheels are going around him. He is the one that is moving the other wheels, the other departments. They all go around him. There is also the Ministry of Defence there inside the camp and of jurisdicial movement and all that.

A: This is a picture of my class in DP camp Schlachtensee, Berlin in the year of 1946-47. I am on the first row on the left side. I am about twelve years old there. This is the teacher there - Tzipporah. I remember her. And as you can see, Herzl and Weizmann are on the wall. The curriculum was in Hebrew and we were like in Israel here, you know, everything was in Hebrew. We learned Hebrew there. This was the third grade.

A: This picture was taken in 1947 when Figaro Laguardia, the mayor of New York came to visit the camp, the Schlachtensee DP camp, Schlachtensee, Berlin. And you see the person in the centre there is the director of the UNWRA, Mr. Harold Fishbein. My father is on the righthand side, making a speech. These dignitaries came to see how the DP people lived and my father told this Figaro Laguardia, the mayor of New York that the displaced people needed a permanent home to stay in Israel and they should do everything they can to promote that the State of Israel should become a reality.

A: This picture was taken in 1946-’47. This is on an outing in Wannsee, Berlin. We were on a boat sponsored by the DP camp and the Joint Distribution Committee in Berlin. We were very happy then. I am right there in the centre, the blonde-headed guy with the hair. My mother is on the lefthand side, right next to me. Somebody else is in the background. I don’t know the other people’s name.

A: This picture was taken in 1947. My father was speaking here in a referendum and a meeting from the Jewish Brigade, “schlichim” from Israel, emissaries that came from Israel and these people there were trying to bring all the Jewish people from this camp to the State of Israel, which wasn’t a state yet, to Palestine. There were also a lot of Russian deserters who came to the camp and they trained there by the Haganah and the “Bricha”. This DP camp in Schlachtensee was a military camp before. This camp was a Luftwaffe camp and had a lot of military facilities and bunkers where people could train. This is a refugee camp in Berlin, Schlachtensee, in the year1947. There were a lot of meetings. A lot of people came to hear these meetings and a lot of talk about, and also deeds to organize and support and to train people to go to Israel, to Palestine at that time, to fight for independence. As you can see in the background, there is written in Hebrew.

A: This picture was taken in 1949. This is Professor Einstein when he was the age of seventy. He invited the refugee children that came to America and this is somebody from the Jewish Appeal, that grown person talking to Professor Einstein. This was in Princeton, New Jersey in 1949. I am over here, to the right of the professor, standing, and there is a little boy with “peyos” standing next to me with a hat. These children are all children that went through the Holocaust and came to America, refugees from all over Europe.

A: This picture was taken in the camp (?) New York where I went through basic training in the 50th Armoured Division. This is in 1955. I was nineteen years old and I was just drafted into the army and sent through basic training there in the armoured corps. As you can see, I had a pistol on. I was a one of the tank crews at that time.

A: This is me on the left in 1980 where I was doing training somewhere in the hills of Hebron and this was “miluim” in Israel.

A: This picture was taken in the cemetery by the water well in 1993 in July. HaRav Goren, “zichron l’tzadik l’vracha”, is on the left, I am behind him, washing our hands off. I pulled up the bucket to help him wash his hands off in the cemetery Dumbovke in Vilna, the Jewish cemetery in Vilna.

A: This picture was taken in the inside of the synagogue called the “Chorshul”, the street “Zavalne”. Before the war it was called “Zavalne”. Today it’s called “Pilamo”. This synagogue is the only one that is left intact in Vilna. It is a beautiful synagogue called the “Chorshul” and in this synagogue my grandfather prayed during the High Holidays and on Shabbat, Saturdays, and he took me there once on Simchas Torah in the year 1939. As I said before, in Vilna is the only synagogue left intact and it went through renovations by the Lithuanian government. There were more than a hundred synagogues in Vilna; only this one stayed, is still active.

A: This monument was put up in the concentration camp HKP in Vilna in 1993 in July in the memory and remembrance of the people that died there and were murdered and tortured there by the Lithuanians and the German Nazis. This monument was put up with the help of Mr. Prenner and Yeshayahu Epstein from Ashdod, with their help and other people’s help, but mostly with their contributions.

A: This page, as you see, is the record that I found in the Vilna archives in the year 1993 in March. I found my birth certificate there, my birth written. As you can see, my father’s name and his parents, Schwarzberg, Hirsch, and his father’s name is Ya’acov, my grandfather and Pesia, “zichronam l’vracha”. Also Schwarzberg. And also my mother’s name is written there, Schwarzberg Ginsburg, and her parents, Tzippe is my grandmother and Isaac Ginsburg is my grandfather, “zichronam l’vracha”. They all perished in the Holocaust. As you can see, this was written in the 27th day of September, 1934. And I was born in September 20th, 1934. I was born in Tishrei, “yud-aleph b’Tishrei”, which is “Motzei Yom Kippur”. This is the night of, the end of the Day of Atonement in the Jewish calendar. “Yud-aleph b’tishrei” in the year 1934.

A: This book, almanac, was put together by the Jewish Museum of Vilna in the year 1996, with the help of the Jewish Museum. These are the names of the prisoners of the ghetto. The Germans, in 1942, had made a census of all the population and also they counted the people and wrote it down according to their addresses in the ghetto, too. As you see, there is my mother, Schwarzberg Rebecca, born 1907, Schwarzberg Yankel, that’s me, 1934, and there is also my cousins were born, as you can see their names there, and their mother, Goldzweig, David, Shmuel and Etta. Etta was the mother, Shmuel David was one of my cousins. Etta was a sister of my grandmother and she was in the same room with us and she was also registered. As you can see, also my father, Schwarzberg Hirsch, born 1906, also registered and I found some other relatives in the book there. This book was the work by Irina Rosenberg. She was the person that put together all this information and had it printed, sponsored by the Jewish Museum of Vilna. They found the material in all the archives in Vilna.

A: This is an article of the New York Times magazine written in 1948 by Gertrude Samuels, correspondent of the New York Times. This is a story about my father, Hirsch Schwarzberg and myself and the family and all the displaced persons that were living in Schlachtensee, Berlin. At that time the Russians had put up a blockade of Berlin and they didn’t let no food or fuel go inside, so the American authorities decided to evacuate these people, the DP’s, from this Schlachtensee and other camps that were in Berlin to the American sector of Germany like Muenchen, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, in those places, distribute them all over Germany in different DP camps. And this is a story that this correspondent made of my father and his story and his people, the DP’s there in 1948, before we were all airlifted to the American zone of Germany.

A: This is my honourable discharge from the US Army, 50th Armoured Division in 1960, after I served five or more years in the army. I was honourably discharged and sent this in the mail. I was a tank commander in the 114th tank battalion, 50th Armoured Division. This was sent to me in 1960.

A: This letter was written in 1945 by the Jewish Ageny for Palestine. It was written to my father, thanking him for his hard work that he did for the Jewish people, bringing children from monasteries from Poland and bringing them into the camp and then treating them, washing them. And they went on “aliyat hanoar” from these DP camps and they were sent to Israel, early, before there was a state. Also it says in that letter in Hebrew that he is recommended for a certificate to go to Israel, before the state was born. This person also wrote and gave him the okay that he should receive the certificate - “certificatim” they called it at that time - to go to Israel legally.

A: This is a “carta v’cotsina”. Means permit to leave Vilna in 1945. There was a law and an agreement also with Poland, between the Soviet Union and Poland - and Vilna at that time was already Soviet Union-occupied and became Lithuania - that people that were living in Vilna before 1939 could leave Vilna legally for Poland. And then we decided to leave Vilna not for Poland, but we decided this is our way out of Vilna, from this blood-soaked place where all our relatives perished and were murdered there by the Lithuanians and the Germans, Nazis. And it says over there my father’s name, Hirsch Schwarzberg and Rebecca Schwarzberg and Yankel Schwarzberg. In 1945 we left Poland, in the summer of 1945.

A: This is a registration paper, also a permit. This is of the city of Lodz in Poland in 1945, when we arrived in Lodz from Vilna, going with the train which was cattle cars mostly, not a passenger train, and it took about three weeks to get there from Vilna to Lodz, Poland, which normally takes about one day and a night travel by train. Each person that entered any city in Poland had to registered with the police. Otherwise he was illegal and could be arrested. And as you can see, this is a permit and a registration in Lodz, Poland, 1945.