My Sack Full of Memories. Zwi Lewin
and where she was found dead the following morning.
I didn’t know this. I still remember it was warm and snug from the fire below. Even though it was early summer, the nights were still cool. I remember the garden – a brown horse, a cow, goats and many chickens and, of course, the lake. It must have been a delight for me.
I don’t recall how long we were in Vishey, but I suspect the trip would have been planned to be for just a week or two. My mother needed to return to her role in the business. It would have been unlike her to holiday for long or to neglect her husband or her duties, for throughout her life she never failed to fulfil her commitments.
My mother would have found that her brothers and sisters – my uncles and aunts – had grown up and moved on in the seventeen years she was absent. The three younger sisters, Rivka, Malka and Bruria, were no longer children. Bruria had made aliyah years earlier and was living in Palestine. Her brothers, Daniel and Yosef, also were no longer in Vishey. Of the seven surviving children of Chaim and Mina, she may have only found her younger brother, Shmuel, still there.
It was important for the family reunion that she should see her siblings before returning to Poland.
8
My uncle, Daniel, the eldest Lazovski son, lived in Yurburg, a town in Lithuania 150 kilometres directly north of Vishey. Yurburg was a pretty town built on the slopes of a modest mountain on the northern shore of the Neiman River. It had a wooden synagogue, but much of the town was of brick construction of a more northern European style with pitched roofs rather than the barn-like design of Vishey.
Yurburg (Jurbarkas)
Yurburg is the Yiddish name for Jurbarkas and, like Vishey, was close to a border, but Vishey, being down south, abutted Russian-occupied Poland, whereas the north of Lithuania was right on the border with East Prussia. This was a State of Germany separated from the rest of Germany following the Treaty of Versailles after World War One. The German invasion of Poland ensured East Prussia was once more a seamless part of the German nation. Yurburg was only 10 kilometres from this border with Germany. Here, there were nearly 2000 Jews, about 40 per cent of the population. They owned sixty-nine of the seventy-five businesses and eighteen of the nineteen light industries.
Daniel was a motor mechanic and driver, and had his own leased workshop. He was single, as was Aunt Rivka, who had also moved from Vishey and was living somewhere near Yurburg.
Of all the Lazovski uncles and aunts, only Uncle Yosef and his wife, Sara, had children. Yosef had married Sara Glazer from Yurburg and they had two sons. Azriel was ten and Lolek nine, both older than me when I met them in April 1941. Yosef was also a motor mechanic and leased a garage near the Glazer family home in Yurburg where they all lived with his parents-in-law. In the 1939 Jurbarkas telephone directory, there is a Jankelis Glazeris listed, but no Lazovski. The town had 116 telephones, forty-one belonging to Jews. Vishey had fourteen telephones in total, but none to my grandparents’ home.
Lithuania had avoided the fate of Poland in 1939 as a concession to the fact the Germans and Russians were bedfellows. The Germans, following personal threats from Adolf Hitler, had already humiliated Lithuania earlier in 1939 by occupying the country’s major port area on the Baltic.
The Lithuanians considered themselves neutral, but in reality, ninety per cent of their trade was with Germany; the people were mostly sympathetic to the Germans and felt they were subjugated under the Russians, whom they detested.
However, the German and Soviet allegiance also meant the people of Yurburg maintained their close historic relationship with the neighbouring towns on the German side of the border, a border that was so open that traders from Yurburg would take their goods to the markets in Germany for the day. This relationship lulled the people of Yurburg, including the Jewish population, into a false sense of calm, considering the frightening closeness of the border. What followed was a terrifying shock to them.
Yurburg with German soldiers during WW1 1915
We arrived in Yurburg on Friday, 20 June 1941, coming from Vishey. My mother carried a gift of honey, most likely from beehives tended by my grandfather Chaim. We stayed with Uncle Yosef and Sara in the Glazer family home where I met Azriel and Lolek for the first time. It was natural for boys to immediately bond, and within hours we were inseparable. Fortunately, we all spoke Yiddish. My sister, being twelve, was closer to my mother and had no interest in us boys.
My mother and we children had come from Vishey to meet the family. Daniel, who lived nearby, and Rivka had also come to see us for the first time. The fact that we were in Yurburg rather than Vishey for our family reunion that weekend is the key that unlocks the rest of this story.
I doubt if the honey was ever tasted.
9
I know the exact date we visited Yurburg because two days later, early on Sunday morning, 22 June 1941, the Germans broke their alliance with Russia and invaded without notice. The Nazis attacked not only Russia, but those territories under Russian occupation, which included Lithuania. We had been in Yurburg for less than forty-eight hours when we were under attack.
‘Operation Barbarossa’, as they called it, saw German troops invade the parts of Poland previously occupied by their allies, the Russians, including Bielsk Podlaski. It was during the invasion when the Germans had first decided to eliminate all Jews in their path. There was no pretence of creating work camps as they had in the early days in Poland; the ghettos they now made were not to isolate the Jews, but as temporary holding pens for the extermination camps being created. For the Jews of Poland, it was as if the angel of death had them trapped in its wings. This included my father, Yitzchak, and his extended family. If we had not left those few weeks earlier for Lithuania, my mother, my sister and I would have been in Poland with my father and our story would have ended there.
Being so close to German East Prussia, Yurburg was one of the first towns in Lithuania to be taken by the Germans on that Sunday morning. It was not an invasion, for the Lithuanian people saw this as a liberation force freeing them from the Russian rule imposed on them for the past year. They saw the Germans as their saviours. The only resistance would have come from the Russian forces in the area caught by surprise and unready to defend. They ran. Within hours, the local Lithuanians wound white ribbons around their sleeves as they formed a para-military force to assist the Germans. The Germans started the round-up of the Jews, but the Lithuanians completed it.
We managed to escape in a most extraordinary way.
Yosef Lazovski
My uncle, Yosef, a mechanic, was working at the time for the Russian-controlled Lithuanian military. He was employed at the nearby border building tunnels, bunkers, barricades and fortifications in case of such an invasion. Defences were little bother to the German invaders, whose tactic of blitzkrieg stormed or went around such defences in most cases, but with a sympathetic Lithuanian populace there was little resistance.
Uncle Daniel, my mother’s oldest brother, was working as a mechanic in the fire station and sleeping there that Saturday night. The firemen were alerted to the news of the invasion at 3 am that morning and this saved our lives, for when Daniel heard the Germans had crossed the border, he drove a fire truck to our house and was soon shouting at all of us to get out of bed, for the adults to take the children, and telling us that we needed to get to Kovno as fast as we could.
Kovno, 80 kilometres away, was further from the border and the capital of Lithuania. Daniel and Yosef agreed on a hasty plan – get to Aunt Sara’s older sister’s home in Kovno as quickly as possible. Her house was located near a steel factory. Azriel remembers it as being in Yavener Street in Kovno. From there we would try to make our way east, away from the invading Germans.
There was no time to get organised.