Kovno Ghetto
When we came home, we found, of course, Germans were all over. My brother was with his wife there and we went to our apartment, and we stayed there. The killings from the Lithuanians stopped while the German army came. And then there was a notice to the people, to the Jewish people, in Kovno, that by August 15, we all have to leave our apartments, and go to the ghetto in Slobodke. And in August 15, by that time, around, we took whatever we could, our belongings, in a horse, carriage, and we went to Slobodke. In Slobodke we had a little tiny room, maybe twelve by ten, or even less, and the tiny hall in the front, and that was our quota.
JOSEF GRILICHES FOR some time lived in the same building with Eli in the Kovno ghetto. Josef was twenty or twenty-one years old in 1944, and he remembers that Eli was appointed to count the inhabitants of the building every evening and report the number to the authorities. It was a three-or four-story stone or brick building on Varniu Street, Block A, with no running water or toilets, only an outhouse and water brought in from a well. It had originally been built by the Soviets as low-income housing.1 Their building was painted white; others were red. As Eli points out, one or two families lived to a room. Later, Eli’s family lived in the one-room house he describes further on in the narrative, near the Catholic cemetery. Josef Griliches told me that this would have been made of wood (Interview, May 31, 2011).
The only family apart from his wife and child who were with Eli in the ghetto were Avraham, Rose, and Sarah, who lived in a different building. By that time, Eli and Avraham’s father and sister had died, brother Dave was in America, and brother Misha was farther east in the Soviet Union. As for their mother and Mottel,
when the war started, my brother Motteh was a doctor in a small town, and the mother was with him, and there was a man who told me after, in concentration camp, that he begged him to come back to Kovno. No, he said, he does’t want to. It was near Shaktiel, near Shakiai, we call the town, a little town in Lithuania. And, I understand, they had the same fate like all other Jews in the small towns. There they were, they just came, and [they] were killed. . . . They were killed by the Lithuanian partisans.
In 1981, when I collected information on our family for pages of testimony to be sent to Yad Vashem, my father told me that his mother and brother Mottel were living in Plokščiai at the time of the Nazi invasion and were most likely murdered there. Plokščiai is in the Shakiai (Šakiai) district or county; the town of Šakiai is the county seat. I had long assumed that Mottel and my grandmother were killed almost immediately after the Nazi invasion. However, in 2011 Yad Vashem published testimonies from survivors of actions in rural Lithuania, collected soon after the war by Leyb Konuichovsky, himself a survivor. These testimonies suggest a different story. Einsatzgruppen2 organized by the Nazis, but in fact often staffed by Lithuanian executioners, killed adult Jewish men in the weeks immediately after the invasion and later killed the women and children. In Kudirkos-Naumiestis, my grandmother’s birthplace in Šakiai, and the closest town to Plokščiai discussed in these reports, “On July 1, 1941, almost all the local Jewish men were shot in the cemetery. On September 16, the women and children were shot in a nearby forest” (Bankier 133–34). My grandmother and uncle may have been murdered on similarly separate dates; in between, on August 15, my father, his brother Avraham, and their immediate families entered the Kovno ghetto:
The ghetto was of course already [set up; it] had barbed wire, there were soldiers around watching, we shouldn’t go away. Then the Germans came, they had a speech, assuring us that nothing will happen to us, and that everything will be fine, and we shouldn’t worry, the only thing, we should comply with their directives. We should work, and they will get a ration, and all sweet talk.
They had a big speech about work, and about food, and about everything, but the first week they said they needed five hundred persons, intellectuals, to work in an archive to prepare the documents.3. . . They took, at that time they took five hundred men; among them was my brother [Avraham]. The police came to my house, and I wasn’t there; and somehow happened, I was to Rosenthal, going as a—I knew them, somebody was sick, I went to their house. The Jewish police came and says, “We need your husband, to go to, to go to the archives.” [My wife] says, “My husband is a doctor,” she doesn’t know [if] I will be able to come. He says, “He has to, but however, he is a doctor, forget about it. We will not touch him.”4 Among them was Avraham, he was working for the supply of food for this ghetto government.
Avraham’s work as a bookkeeper qualified him as an intellectual for the selection; as Eli put it, “That was enough for that job [in the supposed archives]; he’s not a laborer.” In fact, Avraham had declined higher education to help further his brothers’ ambitions: “He didn’t want to go to any school, he had a very nice, beautiful handwriting, he was intelligent, he finished five years gymnasium, and he says he wants to work and support the family, because I and Mottel were studying, and for the father is hard.”
. . . Now, Avraham was among them. . . . When they took all the men and they came there to a certain place and they counted, there were 502 persons instead of 500. The German punctuality: they said, “We don’t need 502, we need 500.” My brother and somebody else, [they] said, let them go back together. Among [those who did not return] was my cousin, David; he is Lubovsky, the brother of Genya and Rivochka Lubovsky. And the next day we found out they all were shot. That was the first action from the Germans, we all knew.
Some sources, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum website, indicate that the number taken and killed was 534. A note to Avraham Tory’s Surviving the Holocaust: Kovno Ghetto Diary points out that although the Germans asked for only 500, the work option sounded so good that more than the number needed volunteered, and all 534 were murdered (33, n.1). Ephraim Gutman, in his 1946 interview with David Boder, put the number requested as 530, but “they grabbed together . . . five hundred and thirty-four so that four went for good measure” (8). Eli’s account, which differs from both of those, is his firsthand recollection, and thus should be part of the record.
When they first arrived in the ghetto, Eli worked as a doctor at the ghetto hospital.5 However,
. . . we didn’t have any food and it was bad and I told the chief there, that I’d rather go to work [as a laborer at the airfield]. And he says, OK, if you want to go, go ahead. And I was going to work because there I could meet some Lithuanians and get some bread or exchange some belongings for bread, and bring home. (Rochelson, Tape 1)
It was the largest labor force from the Kovno ghetto, working to rebuild and expand the airfield in Aleksotas. According to Samuel Kassow, “many Jews did all they could to avoid going there, and for good reason”:
. . . [W]orkers had to rise at four o’clock every morning to . . . make the three-mile trek to the worksite. The Germans did not provide suitable clothing or footwear, and . . . [m]ost of the work in the airfield was outdoors, and it took place in all sorts of weather. . . . Many workers suffered frostbite or heat exhaustion. While some of the German overseers were “decent,” many of them were sadistic brutes who ceaselessly beat the Jewish workers. The work itself was exceptionally difficult. (29)
Eli recalled how he did “manual or physical labor, carrying cement back, mixing cement, and doing a lot of heavy work,” but apparently the advantage of obtaining food through what was a dangerous illicit market made up for the hardships of the labor. As Kassow points out, eventually the Germans began day and night shifts at the airfield, and no shift could return to the ghetto until the next shift arrived, which meant that shifts could be much longer than anticipated (30). Still, Eli reported that Russian prisoners of war, while they lasted, had even worse conditions:
[W]e could see in the morning that the Russian prisoners were brought, too, to work, and they were holding each other in a line going to work, and there were also horse carriages where the dead Russians were put there, to bury them. They starved terribly. They didn’t give them any food, and youngsters, fifteen and sixteen years old, from the SS—I saw, like, a Russian fellow, soldier, went to—stole a cabbage head from a carriage, and he went to him, he took his [rifle] butt and killed this man, and they were killing for every little thing. They were going twelve hours, with almost no food. They were held in a certain barracks outside Kovno, and they usually went miles and miles by foot, and there, they lived there in very miserable conditions.6
Eli remembered the official Russian reaction:
I heard the speech while under German domination in ghetto, I heard the speech from Molotov,7 who said to the Germans, “I know what’s going on in the occupied lands, I know your attitude toward the Russian prisoners. It is against the Geneva Convention. But if you don’t stop killing our prisoners, I promise you that no German soldier will be taken alive as a prisoner. You better stop.” It seems to be that this helped. They killed, from one hundred thousand Russian prisoners, they say, about ten or five thousand were alive, the others were killed, or starved to death, or heavy work by the Germans. Then, as I said, I worked for a while as a laborer but, after, the ghetto got organized, and they appointed me and some other young doctors to work as a physician in the same place [the airfield], with the working crews in the airport building.
On October 4, 1941, the Nazis set fire to the ghetto hospital.8 In Tape 1, Eli explains how he saw it as he came home from the airfield:
And once, coming from work, I could see that the hospital where I was working for a while was on fire. It seems to be that while all able-bodied people went to work, the Germans surrounded the hospital on the pretext that there was some contagious disease. They burned the whole personnel, the doctors, the nurses, and they surrounded with machine guns, that nobody can escape, and a lot of people were killed at that time. . . . I know my friends and some others were killed at that time, and even the patients.9
Soon after the war, in the typescript he prepared for his OSE testimony on medical atrocities, presented at the Nuremburg trials (appendix C), Eli wrote, “The Jewish hospital located in the section known as ‘Klein Ghetto,’ bearing the inscription ‘Danger—Pest [Seuche-Gefahr: literally, Epidemic/Disease-Danger]’ was set on fire while the sick, the nurses and physicians were inside. In order to prevent any person to escape the blaze the hospital was surrounded by German soldiers, armed with machine guns. This act of arson was committed on orders of the Gestapo with the full knowledge and consent of the German medical authorities in Kaunas (Kovne).”10
There were more atrocities to come.
When we came the 27th of October, 1941, we found that the ghetto was in terrible turmoil, there were all over placards saying that all population, sick, old, and men, and women, and children, should converge in a certain place in ghetto for inspection or some other pretext, and anybody who is found in the house will be killed in his house. And if those who cannot, sick too much, they should take some carriage or carry him to the place. On the 28th— . . . We came there, 6 o’clock in the morning, it was a snowy, wintry day, cold, dark, of course we didn’t have any lights, when we came to the place, and we waited about 9 or 10 o’clock, till the Germans, SS, the Gestapo came, and they started to sort, one goes right, the other goes left. And at that time, my cousin, Shloimke, Minne’s son—I forget to mention, she had a son Shloimke, and she has a son Eli, too; Eli left, [he] never came back, we didn’t know, before the ghetto was established. But Shloimke became a Jewish policeman and he tried, wanted to make sure that they don’t take us [to] the wrong place. We had a feeling, they took the old, and children, and sick people on one side, and the others, more or less healthy looking, they took [to the other]—
The event became known as the Great Action. Ten thousand of the twenty-seven thousand assembled in Demokratu Square were taken to the “small ghetto” and then killed, as Eli describes, at the Ninth Fort, the ninth of a ring of tsarist-era fortifications around the city of Kaunas. Those who survived the selection went to stand on one side of the square, and it was twelve hours before anyone returned home.
Eli wrote an article to commemorate the fifth anniversary of this action, and it was published in Der Tog [The Day], an American Yiddish newspaper, on October 28, 1946 (see appendix D for an image of the article as published). As he explained to Marsha Rozenblit, “I had an urge to put in the paper for the Jewish leaders what had happened on the 28th of October in ’41. [ . . . ] I called them up . . . I said—I feel that five years of such a date shouldn’t be left unnoticed and shouldn’t be left without putting to the readers, American readers who were not in Europe, who are still talking Jewish—[an event they] should know about” (Rochelson, NYPL interview 72). The article had my father’s byline (Dr. E. Rochelson, in Yiddish letters) and contained the following description:
All the 30,000 Jews had to be out very early in the morning, 6:00 in the morning, to make a census. Nobody will go to work. Nobody could stay in the house. Sick, old, and children—all must be at the assembly point. If somebody would stay in the house they would be shot. This is the way it sounded, the order from the Gestapo. We understood what this “registration” meant. The 28th of October, 6:00 in the morning. It was a sleepless night. People were running [streaming] to the assembly point in the ghetto. It was dark, cold, and tragic (mournful). Small children in carriages, and carried by the parents, sick ones and old ones, all went to the place. We understood that this is the tragic moment which will decide the fate. People were screaming, crying, confused, and lost. We saw that people were so confused and so afraid, because they didn’t know what would happen.
In a very organized moment the German police came. The Lithuanian bandits and the Gestapo worked as a team. Part of the soldiers went to the houses to see what was doing in the houses. We heard very well on the place, there was shooting, because they heard someone . . . The rest of the soldiers were standing and waiting for orders what to do. The ghetto was surrounded by extra people who came to look to make sure that everything should go the way they want. Behind the ghetto were standing a lot of non-Jews [Christians], and they were waiting, to look at the tragic game that was happening here. They were standing still, the 30,000, they were waiting. We were very afraid, like an electric shock. The Gestapo came and they started to sort, with cold, murderous faces. Sometimes they made a façade, they had a smile on their faces, when they were sending people to die. Right, left, right, left. We heard the orders from the Gestapo. Whole families were sent to the bad side. Like hungry wolves they were tearing the children from their parents. They divided sister and brother, old and young, sick and healthy. All were sent to death. All day the gestapo and the Lithuanian forest bandits were out of control. All day we heard the screams from the beaten, the cries of woe from the children, the parents and the children. Till the evening, 11,000 people were taken out, a third of the people. The next day in the morning we found out that all of the 11,000 people got killed with machine guns.11
In his interview, Eli described that aftermath:
. . . [W]hen we came back everybody was crying, and was a panic, and they found out from the Lithuanians over the barbed wires, or differently, [that] they shot them; they put them on the mass graves which the prisoners had to dig themselves, and they were shooting machine guns, and those who was still alive they shoot again even in the grave, and that was the first action. Not only in Lithuania but it was in Latvia, Estonia, and other places of German domination. It was an order from Hitler, and it was the first thing.12
Eli continued to discuss life and death in the ghetto, including efforts he made to protect his child:
Then the ghetto was more or less quiet for a while. Of course before each Jewish holiday they always find a pretext to hang somebody, to kill somebody or some other atrocious act there performed. Every day we went out from ghetto, but we had to have some food. The ration what they gave was very meager; and as a matter of fact, after a time they even stopped giving that also. What we were doing, we were taking some belongings, shirts, ties, or socks, whatever we had, and if we didn’t have our own we took from other inhabitants of the ghetto, for commission. . . . [S]ome people had a lot of good stuff, I would say, and for a certain commission you took it out and went, and we were trading with the gentiles, with the Lithuanians, and getting some food for that, and I had to return whatever we agreed to give to [in?] food. Sometimes there were searches at the gates from the German, even the Jewish police, and they took away whatever we had, [what] we brought to the ghetto. The conditions were terrible. We starved, we didn’t have any food, and always in danger to our life.
I tried, some of my friends, Lithuanian friends, doctors, to meet, and I went out despite the fact there was an order if you go out with a Jewish star alone and they catch, the Gestapo, they will shoot you. But I had to go out. I went to Dr. Mayofski who was near the airport. I talked to him, he says he will do something to hide the child, and after a while he said no he cannot; if it would be a girl he would have done, but it’s a boy he cannot [because of circumcision]. . . . He cannot do that, and he doesn’t want. In the beginning he was coming to the ghetto trying to help the people, his friends, with food, till the Germans told him if he comes again he will be arrested. [He was] a gentile. Mayofski. I went with the star to see him. And he went to help to the gates of the ghetto to see some friends and give them food and the guards told him if he comes again he will be delivered to the Gestapo, stop to come; and he stopped coming. I also risked once and went to Dr. Wishnievsky who was in the center of the city, but this time I took off my Star of David because in the city, a lot of Gestapo men, they will see a Jew with a star they will definitely catch him. I took it off but I took a risk and went to him and asked him what he can do for me. He said no, he cannot do anything, he cannot help me; he was afraid himself, he was a Russian, you know.13 And that’s that.
Then I was assigned to work for a short while in university, the same university where I was an intern. And there in this—while I was working outside I knew the ways in the underground corridors and the connections. I went through and some of these nurses saw me and recognized; they looked at me with such a pity but they didn’t say a thing. I went to the pathologist—assistant pathologist—to his place, because Dr. Zacharin, a surgeon in ghetto, wanted to get something, and he was making packages for him, but this Zacharin never gave me a piece, what I risked with my life to go and bring him.14 And I brought him several times, packages; after [that is, later], I stopped. He also gave me certain things to give it to him to sell, and get product[s from?] the gentile pathologist to sell [in the ghetto]. And that was one part of this way we had to make a living.
As Eli made clear, the Jewish police, as well as the Germans, would confiscate items that ghetto inmates had obtained at great risk. In the 1970s, as later, their role vis à vis the Jewish population was questioned and criticized; the 2014 Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police, written by members of the Jewish police force, reveals a complex and more favorable picture than had often been assumed. When Burt asked about the Jewish police, Eli’s evaluation was mixed:
Now, the Jewish police want to save their skin; the Jewish police had good food, and drinking, and cigarettes, and alcohol, and women, whatever they needed, because when they needed there are thousands of people coming from work; they just either told the Germans to search or they searched themself and took it away for themself, and they used the food, and food was a very important commodity, and for the food they could get anything, anything they wanted for food—liquor, cigarettes, even money. And the Jewish police, some were on the level and some were rotten.
My attitude was indifference. I don’t know. I was in a state of shock and fog and I couldn’t analyze and think about them because—Of course when they took away from me the food I was enraged, but you couldn’t open your mouth. Anyway, you couldn’t go again and protest. Because they were the ones who were selecting people going to Estonia and Latvia, to concentration camp, and other places. . . . I knew a few of them. Berman, he was a classmate from the gymnasium, this is the man who recommended me a job in 1927. He was Alonka Berman, very nice fellow, he was on the level. . . . I would say they were not brutal. They supposedly, with the Jewish Ältestenrat and the police, they supposedly were working with the Germans for the benefit of the people. [The police and the Ältestenrat in Kovno were not ostracized by the community.] . . . Dr. Elkes, he’s a good medical man, was also assigned in Ältestenrat and he did a lot of things for the Jews.15
Eli’s descriptions of feeling—at various times or all at once—indifferent, shocked, in a fog, and helplessly enraged say much about the personal impact of ghettoization. That a ghetto inmate could work in a university hospital, even for a short time, and yet no one there could rescue him or his family is something about which I have no comment. It just bears repeating.
Eli went on:
[T]his continued more or less with certain atrocities until 1943 when an order came out that they need certain Jewish people to go to a concentration camp in a north suburb of Kovno, Panemune. . . . And it was a concentration camp, a lager, with a lot of barracks, but the way we heard they said there is good food, and they have to work, but it’s not too bad.
They left in late November 1943, the moment of their departure preserved in a photograph taken by Zvi Kadushin, now well known as George Kadish, who recorded life in the Kovno ghetto with a camera hidden behind a buttonhole (figure 37a). Eli obtained this photograph directly from him; as he told Burt, “This man, he risked his life.” Indeed, he risked his life repeatedly. Kadish’s photographs form a large collection in the digital archives of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and are central to its Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto (55).
Another image recording this event, in a photograph taken from a slightly different angle, is reprinted in Tory, Surviving the Holocaust, with the caption “Jews being forcibly evicted from the Kovno Ghetto in 1942” (Tory, page 12 of the illustrations section). The date is a year earlier than when Eli and his family left for the labor camp. That same photograph appears in the public online photo archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which indicates that it depicts Jews being deported “either to a work camp near Kovno” or Estonia (USHMM Photo Archives #81079). The phrase about the work camp was inserted when I wrote to the USHMM identifying Eli and his family on the transport and explaining where he had said they were going. Their names appear in the online caption, but the longer description is of the Estonia action only, which for most of those deportees was fatal.16
The work camp was at Aleksotas, which is near Panemune, and it was opened in late November 1943 (Germany: A Memorial); the airfield at which Eli and thousands of others from the Kovno ghetto worked was also at Aleksotas (see map in appendix A). Eli described the place, saying, “[w]hen we came there in the concentration camp in Panemune, the women, the husbands and wife and children could be in one place. There was a big room with bunks, and then my wife and child were together. And they had bunks.” In the NYPL interview, as well, he mentions these bunk beds in the brick former barracks, but in both accounts he also reports that the family was able to live together. The barracks would most likely have been communal rather than individual living spaces, with the women and children in one barracks area and the men in another. They may have been “together” in that the airfield workers were not as far away from their families during the day as they had been in the ghetto itself. Eli emphasized in both accounts, however, that he and his family had gone to the camp voluntarily, hoping for better conditions. The inscription on the back of the photo, however (figure 37b), contradicts that significant point:
The barracks of a part/section of the ghetto in the prisoners’ camp, concentration camp beyond Kovne (Aleksat), on the 30th of November, 1943. We appear very bad off because prior to this, they terrorized the ghetto; [we had] not slept, not eaten, [and were] in terror, because we did not know where they were taking us, and the official statement/declaration we did not believe.17
Figure 37a. Eli, Serafima, Boris Rochelson, and others on a cart going from the Kovno ghetto to a work camp in Aleksotas, November 30, 1943. Photograph by George Kadish. This print, with annotations by Eli Rochelson, is part of the family collection. An identical photograph, without annotations, is in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives, #81097A.
Figure 37b. Verso of Figure 37a. Most of the inscription, by Eli G. Rochelson, appears in the narrative. However, it also includes identifications paired with numbers written on the photograph and a brief mention of George Kadish, although not by name:
1) Is me [as the doctor of the camp] (brackets in original)
2) My wife
(This is a (secret) picture.) The man had 6,000 secret pictures of ghetto life.
[Translation by Rivka Schiller.]
It is not clear when Eli wrote these words, but since the photograph was given to him by Kadish it must have been after the war, although relatively soon after.18 Much later, he would likely have written in English. The gap in time may explain why Eli describes the people on the cart as having just arrived at the work camp. If George Kadish took the picture, he would have taken it in the ghetto, before they left. Eli’s remembrance, after the fact, may focus on the prisoners’ depressed state at arrival, or it may reflect his own depressed state of mind after the war, as he remembers the people on the cart who had by that point perished.
As he describes in the long family interview with Burt, Eli, Sima, and Borya were in this work camp for approximately three months:
Every morning we had to run to work with speed, and a German was standing at the door and he said, Los, los!; make fast, fast. And those who didn’t move got hit over the head. And as soon as the bell rang to get up they gave us five or ten minutes to have coffee and we had to run out to work. . . . No, the child did not work. He was staying in the camp. There were other children. Nothing. They didn’t touch the children, at that time. But I can tell you when going to work many times in ghetto I took the child with me, because there were rumors that when we are at work they will surround all kids and take them away, or old men; then many times they went to meet you, they said you cannot take the child there.
But there in Panemune concentration camp from 1943, December, till about the beginning of March—then my wife got sick and she developed diphtheria and again they gave permit to go to the Jewish ghetto, to the ghetto in Kovno, and to admit her to the hospital because she had diphtheria. And we came back by horse and carriage and I didn’t have shoes—I had shoes with holes. And while, it took about three or four hours with the horse and carriage to come, it was cold in the winter, and when I came the same night I developed chills, fever, terrific pain, in the left side, and I developed pneumonia, and Dr. Berman, at that time (figure 38), was a physician in the ghetto and I was critical, I lost my consciousness, and they gave me some sulfa, I could [take it], when I was awake. And they assigned a nurse to my bed; I was two or three days unconscious, till I woke up and the nurse screamed that I went out of my coma, and the relatives asked Berman what will be. He says God can help him, he is very critically ill.19
Anyway, my wife had diphtheria and there was a doctor, a distant relative of my wife’s, seems to be, Grinberg,20 and he was the guy who was going between the ghetto and Kovno city and meeting a lot of people, and he had the diphtheria serum and I asked him to bring me some serum to inject for the wife and he says they have to pay me, and I didn’t have [anything] to pay, cigarettes or money, or something; I didn’t have any valuables, I was a poor church rat. Anyway, somehow he did get it to me, somehow I gave him something, and he gave it to my wife. Then we found out that my son got sick, and they brought him to the ghetto [hospital].21 Meningitis. The same story, meningitis antiserum, I think we got some anyway.
Figure 38. “Kovno, Dr. Elhanan Elkes [left] and Dr. Moshe Berman.” Courtesy Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem. 4613/93.
Then came the twenty-sixth of March, 1944. There was the famous and infamous children’s selections [known as the Kinder Action (children’s action, in German)], in all Baltic states, and all children have to be delivered to the Germans.22 Imagine what it [was]. My son was sick, still, he was sick for a week already. And I tell to the doctor, Zacharin, look, bring the child here [to my hospital bed], he says I cannot. Anyway, I got the child without his permission. They were the Germans like wild dogs running all over the ghetto, looking for the children, going in the house. Women were fighting for the children, immediately shut the windows; they were fighting, surrounding the children, took them away, to Auschwitz, or somewhere, I don’t know. Anyway, my wife recuperated, my son was feeling better, and . . . I took the liberty to take him in my room.
And I had him under my blanket, with my legs up, and he was laying there. He knew the danger already, it was in ’44, he was ten years old, yes, ten years old.23 I know they were coming, they came to the hospital, they looked in refrigerator, they looked in the basement, they looked in all rooms. Then they went—There was set partitions from cubicles for the patients. I was a patient after, recuperating after pneumonia. Then there was a doctor sick on the other side, an elderly doctor, Orbach, and his wife was around, and when they came they took him, and they took him away. And they were taking the children from wherever they could. And it was terrible, terrible tragedy. They took a lot of children, some were able to save. Now, they took this old Dr. Orbach, and they took him away from the bed, and we knew what it is, and his wife knew, too. She asked them, what are you doing? Why are you taking my husband? He is nothing wrong with him. No, we’ll take him. No, she says, you cannot take him; he is healthy, and he is a doctor. She says, never mind, and she was fighting. So he says, OK, come with us. We’ll give you a good place. And they took her away with the doctor.
Now they were going on inspection, and here is what [is] always in my mind, and I think about. They were going from cubicle to cubicle; in some places they found children, some guys, and they took it away. Now, I was laying there and, supposedly sick, and Dr. Zacharin, the chief of the hospital, introduced me to the Gestapo man. He says, this is a doctor, but he is a young man, he has a little cold, he will recuperate, he will be able to work. He was very nice to me, you know. I was probably white like this sheet of paper. You know, the Gestapo man gave a look under the bed, he didn’t pick up the blanket, and he went out and said loudly, no, this room is OK, everything is OK. The other guys would hear, they shouldn’t, you know—I have a feeling and suspicion that he intentionally didn’t pick up the blanket, and he suspected that somebody is there but he let [it] go, I would think. I mean, it was one of those rare Germans who had some conscience and couldn’t see that, but they had to comply with the law and the instructions from Hitler. And that was, I was able to save the child.
William Mishell reports that “Later in the evening,” after he had hidden his own children at his place of work, he learned that the ghetto hospital was “surrounded and all the patients forced into the trucks and hauled away” (209). Eli’s narrative makes clear that there were at least a few exceptions, and that he and his son were both fortunate and brave.
On March 26, 1944, the Jewish police were summoned for an inspection, and on March 27—the same day as the murderous action against children and the elderly—the Germans in control of the Kovno ghetto shot and killed 33 officers, including the entire police leadership (Kassow 2). Kassow explains that all 140 police officers had been summoned and questioned, since certain members of the force had been involved in resistance activities; those not murdered were permitted to return. Eli’s friend Alonka Berman was among the murdered; his cousin Shloimke Kanter survived the police selection. However, as Samuel Kassow points out, “The murder of the police leadership meant the end of the Kovno ghetto police as it had been. To be sure, the occupation authorities set up a new force, but it was led by characters whom the Jews in the ghetto despised” (3). According to ghetto survivor Ephraim Gutman, they were hated because, at the time of the Kinder Action, a number of them saved their own lives by leading Nazis to the hiding places of children in many ghetto houses, but I have not found confirmation of this elsewhere.
A few months later, the Kovno ghetto was liquidated. Not long before that, the Nazis used Russian deserters to raid houses in the ghetto, and Eli recalled how he used the techniques his parents had used in southern Russia during the civil war to try to protect his own family from looting:
We were in ghetto till about, I would say till the end of June, and beginning of July.24 . . . We went from the hospital but we returned to our previous apartment we had. . . .
[In the past, the tsarist armies sent] . . . out supposedly for searches the White Guard, and [now the Nazis sent] the prisoners, with lots of soldiers, the Russians who deserted to the German side. And here we had the same trick. We had cut a hole in the ceiling and camouflaged with the papers there; the whole ceiling was with paper.25 We had a lot of, we put it inside and when they passed by we had the doors open like I did in Rostov-na-Donu; the doors were open, everything was empty, disarray, and when they came in, the Russians, the soldiers, they said—Oh, they cursed, nobody’s there. . . . And then we are hiding upstairs and we heard them; [they] came there, “nobody is there.” And another time when it was we were hiding beneath the table, they couldn’t see us, they came in, they opened and they left. Then they broke the door from a little closet outside, a little place where you keep a lot of supplies, a pantry, they broke this, looked there for the people. . . . And we were in this apartment, and staying there in hiding, . . . but we were able [to survive].
In the beginning of July we heard rumors that the Russians in 1944 [were] doing very well, and they were chasing the Germans all over, going to the Baltic States. The Germans felt it was getting bad and they wanted to have the Jews from the ghettos from the Baltic States deported farther into Germany. And then they decided the time is ripe to liquidate the ghetto. As a matter of fact before that they took from little towns where they still have a few Jews working for the Germans, they brought them all in the ghetto. . . . Most of them, 90 percent, were killed, the Jews in the towns. But this working force, they took people from [that] . . . working force, they brought them to the ghetto. We knew that something is cooking very bad.
At this point, hearing about how the situation worsened, Burt asked Eli about resistance: whether he knew of any attempts in the ghetto to resist the Nazis, and whether he had ever been approached to join a resistance effort. Eli told him about Chaim Yellin, the leader of the Jewish resistance in Kovno, who was captured in April 1944 and killed by the Nazis in May 1944. A textual note by Dina Porat in Surviving the Holocaust suggests that Yellin may have committed suicide after his capture (Tory 500), something that Eli mentioned, as well. Chaim’s brother, Meir Yellin, survived the Holocaust and died in Israel in January 2000; he coauthored Partisans of the Kovno Ghetto.26 Eli knew both brothers, and mentioned that their father had been the director of a Kovno library before the war.
However, Eli was never approached to join the resistance. He recalled that they mostly enlisted young unmarried men and women whom Chaim Yellin had specifically invited. But he also said that he and his friends had not been interested in joining, in any case, although they admired what the resistance had tried to do:
People were afraid to talk, and they didn’t talk, and they were not in the mood to talk. They were depressed, starved, and in fear. In ghetto was only passive resistance and organizing these people who would go fight against Germany in the woods. And about the resistance in the woods and the trouble the partisans, the anti-Nazi partisans, did to the Germans was known. They derailed trains, there was shooting. They [the Germans] were sending out the native Lithuanians to fight with them in the woods because the Germans were afraid, themsel[ves].
Eli also told Burt about the famous revolt at the Ninth Fort at Christmas 1943, when a group of sixty-four sonderkommandos, four of whom were not Jewish, got the German and Lithuanian guards drunk and escaped. The sonderkommandos, prisoners in forced labor, had the task of burning bodies as the Nazis began to hide the evidence of their acts. The revolt was something Eli had not witnessed firsthand, but it belongs in any account of resistance in Kovno. Eli believed that all the escapees had survived, but, in fact, only a small number managed to return to the ghetto and join the partisans. As Martin Gilbert points out, however, the survival of these few “provided witnesses of the fate of tens of thousands of Jews” (646; see also “Messages scrawled . . .”). Eleven of them produced a document now available online through the Shoah Resource Center of Yad Vashem, testifying to the opening of mass graves and the burning of over twelve thousand bodies, seven thousand of those estimated to be from the Kovno ghetto (“Evidence of Jewish Escapees . . .”). In all, “[a]n estimated 40,000 [people], were shot to death in Fort IX between the fall of 1941 and the spring of 1944” (“Messages scrawled . . .”). It had become the major killing center for the Jews of the Kovno ghetto, as well as for others transferred to it from many parts of Europe.27
In September 1943, at around the same time the burning of the bodies began, the Kovno ghetto came under the direct control of the SS, who began the process of turning it officially into KL Kauen, a concentration camp.28 At the beginning of July 1944, as the inmates suspected, the Nazis began to prepare for its liquidation and the transfer of the Jews to other camps:
In the beginning of July there was an order that the Jews will be deported, but we should go voluntarily. And they gave a certain date. At that time people started to dig underground, and tried to save themselves. My [aunt] Minne and her children and Shloimke . . . there was an apartment house in the middle of the ghetto and they dug under the basement. And they told me to come to give a look, maybe I can [join them] with my wife and child. I went there, there were thirty [or] forty people in a small dungeon under, and there was no air, and there was no heat, and no water, and I thought we will die from starvation. I wouldn’t do it. And I said, I will not do it. We knew that the Russians are coming, anyway. Then we saw that people were voluntarily going, the Germans surrounded, took them to the train. . . . As I told you, we had an opening in the ceiling. And we decided instead to get killed there from suffocation we will go upstairs and hope for the best. The same stair. My brother, and his wife [and child], and I and my wife and child went up. . . . We went upstairs and took the ladder and covered up, and there, you see, this was a one-room house, the whole house was in one room, and there through the opening of the boards I could see what’s going on, and observe; and we were observing. We were there about two or three days. [We had no food], nothing. Whatever we had we tried to keep it going on. Maybe we had water. We had a well in our backyard; maybe we ran out at night to get water at the well. Then in a few days we saw the ghetto, explosions and fires. We lived near the Catholic cemetery, nearby. . . . One part of the ghetto nearer to us, [were] more fires, and then loudspeakers went that all those hiding should go out, because we soon will put dynamite, will explode, and put on fire. And I said no, let’s wait, maybe they will not. As a matter of fact, we tried to run through the fence on the Catholic [cemetery] side, which was not too bad, but there were Lithuanian soldiers who said, what do you have? You give me, I’ll let you go through. They took away whatever they had, valuables, and they reported [those who tried to escape] to the Germans. And we found out that was no sense to go because they [the soldier guards] are traitors. They wouldn’t let you go through. They took away everything and that’s all, and that’s the reason we were staying, and couldn’t escape.
When they came, the loudspeakers, the next day, near us, we decided to go out.29 And as soon as we go out we were surrounded by German soldiers. They didn’t beat us up, nothing, we go to this point I think near the Jewish hospital, and there they took us when a lot of people were collected, they took us to the train, and in the train we were like cattle, in cattle wagons with no water, with no food, and they locked up the gates and it took us a week till we came. . . . We thought we are going to be shot. To kill us. That was our feeling.
They were on their way to the concentration camps of Stutthof and Dachau, the destinations of all those from the Kovno ghetto who left in that transport. What happened then formed a new epoch in Eli’s and his family’s experience, and will form the next chapter of this narrative. But in telling the story to Burt, Eli paused near this point to relate the fates of those who had attempted to hide beneath the ghetto buildings:
[T]he Russians came about five or six days later [to liberate the ghetto]. . . . Now I would say that a lot of people were digging underground holes to hide themselves, and among [those] killed were also Minne and her children, were killed there, in the bunker, because they exploded the apartment house. . . . [T]here was . . . one [other] group who dug enough a passage underground [far enough] in[to] the middle of the yard, where they survived. But the trouble is they didn’t have—couldn’t go out, because the apartment house was demolished; there [was] no way [to] escape till one person knew—a Jewish man, I don’t know how—he told the Russians, look, there are people hiding in the middle [of the yard], dig ’em out, and they dug them out, and they took them out alive. They were [there] for five or six days. . . . Winick and others,30 a few people. . . . After the liberation we heard the story. [But Minne and her children] all died, because of the explosion and fire . . . ; the Germans were going, and ripping up all, house by house.
As Kassow writes, “Two thousand Jews ignored the deportation order and tried to survive in hideouts specially constructed beneath the houses of the ghetto. The Germans systematically set fire to almost every building in the ghetto, and all but ninety of the Jews who had hoped to survive to see the liberation perished just a couple of days before the arrival of the Red Army” (52) (figure 39).
Figure 39. “Ruins of the Kovno ghetto.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives #81133. Courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
1. See the map of the Kovno ghetto in appendix A.
2. Literally, mission groups, the Einsatzgruppen were “mobile killing units . . . squads composed primarily of German SS and police personnel. Under the command of the German Security Police . . . and Security Service . . . officers, the Einsatzgruppen had among their tasks the murder of those perceived to be racial or political enemies found behind German combat lines in the occupied Soviet Union” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Einsatzgruppen,” Holocaust Encyclopedia).
3. The “Intellectuals Action,” the first major selection in the Kovno ghetto, took place on August 18, 1941.
4. It was a recurring theme for Eli that being a doctor saved his life, both physically and emotionally.
5. Although he does not discuss this service in his long interviews, he mentions it at this point in Tape 1 and lists it in the file he put together to reestablish his credentials as a physician in the United States.
6. William Mishell, in Kaddish for Kovno, similarly records the treatment the Nazis reserved for Russian prisoners of war. On the work details with inmates of the Kovno ghetto, he writes, “[t]hey were mistreated even worse than the Jews. Not only did they work the same long hours we did, but in the evening they were taken to their stockades, where they were kept under the open sky. Every day when they returned from work, dozens of them . . . had to be supported on both sides by somewhat stronger p.o.w.’s, since they were already too weak to walk. The next morning they would be dead. . . . In a month or so, there were no more Russians” (81).
7. V.M. Molotov was the Soviet diplomat who signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact with the Nazis in 1939. Eli and others would have heard the speech via radio in the ghetto.
8. In his testimony, Ephraim Gutman gives the date of the fire as September 4, but Tory’s diary account on October 6 makes clear that it took place a month later. This probably inadvertent factual error is one of many reminders, throughout the accounts of witnesses, that small details may differ while the larger story remains true.
9. William Mishell describes a similar fortuitous survival by his brother-in-law, a doctor (85). For more detailed descriptions of the ghetto hospital fire, see Tory and The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police.
10. The doctors’ testimony was described at the time in an article in the New York German-Jewish newspaper Aufbau/Reconstruction (see Lubinski). The OSE was an “organization devoted to the promotion of health, hygiene, and childcare among Jews,” founded in 1912 in Saint Petersburg, Russia (Beizer). Its original acronym, OZE, translates to English as the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population. After the rise of the Soviet Union, the OZE became decentralized; a branch opened in 1921 in then-independent Lithuania. After 1933, the central office moved to Paris, where it remains and is known as OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants [Children’s Aid]) World Union. During the occupation of Paris and to the end of the war (1940–45) the headquarters temporarily moved to New York.
11. Translated from the Yiddish by Nissan Krakinowski, 2 June 2011. Personal typescript.
12. For additional firsthand descriptions of the Great Action, see Tory 43–60, Eilati, Crossing the River, 39–48, and The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police 23–26, 132–46.
13. As discussed, Russians, too, were at risk from both Lithuanian partisans and Nazis.
14. Dr. Benjamin Zacharin was head of the health department in the Kovno ghetto.
15. The Ältestenrat was the Jewish Council of Elders, set up in each ghetto by the Nazis. Their behavior and attitude varied from place to place, but Dr. Elchanan Elkes, head of the Ältestenrat in the Kovno ghetto, was admired for his active devotion to his people. See Tory’s account of his role in saving Jews in the October 28 selection and at other times, as well as his letter or “last testament” to his children, rpt. in Tory 503–7. Similarly, the Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police presents the actions of the police in a more positive light, as it takes into account the frequently impossible choices with which they were faced.
16. A photograph identical to mine is in the onsite-only collections of the USHMM (Photo Archives #81079A). As of this writing, it contains only the information about the Estonia transport. Eli’s inscription on the back of the photograph, however, along with the testimony of his interviews, confirms that this group had gone to a work camp not far from the Kovno ghetto. I have given a copy of my photo and the inscription to the photo archives department, and I hope they will make the change soon, if they have not done so already.
17. The inscription is in Yiddish, and in Eli’s handwriting. Translation by Rivka Schiller. Square brackets indicate her insertions, with the one exception noted in the caption to figure 37b. An earlier partial translation, done by Pearl Tucker, translates we appear very bad off as the more colloquial we look very bad.
18. Kadish secretly developed his photographs at a German military hospital where he performed slave labor in the X-ray department. A high-ranking Jewish police officer in the ghetto kept them safe for him, and did not disclose their hiding place even when tortured, ultimately to death. Kadish escaped from the ghetto and retrieved the hidden photographic evidence after the ghetto was destroyed in 1944. He later displayed his work in displaced persons camps, which may have been where Eli and other former ghetto inmates obtained their prints (USHMM, Hidden History 55).
19. Dr. Zelman Berman (as I knew his name), nineteen years older than Eli, forms an important part of this narrative because he was an important figure in Eli’s life. Putting together information I have obtained from Josef Griliches and through documents accessed via ancestry.com, I can confirm that Zelman-Moisse Berman (as he is listed on his American Joint Distribution Committee emigration card) is the Dr. Moshe Berman who “headed the hospital . . . in the Ghetto at the end of 1941, after the Germans burned down the contagious diseases hospital. He was also an active member of the Council’s health department. Before the war he had been head of the Lithuanian military hospital and personal physician to the Lithuanian chief of staff, General Zukauskas” (Tory 229, n. 1; Josef Griliches mentioned that Gen. Zukauskas had also been a patient of his own father, Samuel Griliches, a dentist.). When I was a child, our family often visited Dr. Berman and his wife, Stefa, at their home, which was also his office, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Dr. Berman was quite elderly and he suffered, I recall, from Parkinson’s disease. He and Stefa were kind to us children, but I never fully understood his relationship to my father, or his heroism, until I listened to this interview.
20. Eli pronounces the name Greenberg in the interview tape at this point, but he is most likely the same Dr. Grinberg who at one time, like Dr. Zacharin, was head of the health department in the ghetto. Dr. Zalman Grinberg’s work in setting up the St. Ottilien hospital for displaced persons after the war is documented in Hilliard and elsewhere. He also served as chair of the Central Committee for Liberated Jews in the American Zone of Germany.
21. It is unclear from this account whether Borya traveled back to the ghetto with his parents or had remained at the labor camp.
22. The correct dates of this action were March 27–28.
23. In fact, he was about nine and a half years old. If he was murdered at the time most people have assumed (as I discuss later), he was murdered just a few weeks before his tenth birthday.
24. The Kovno ghetto, by this point KL (Concentration Camp) Kauen, was liquidated by the Nazis in a six-day period beginning July 8, 1945 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto 248).
25. Although he describes this place in the interview as a “one-room apartment,” the way they hide in the attic suggests it may have been the wooden house near the Catholic cemetery. It is unclear exactly when Eli’s family moved there from the apartment block on Varniu Street.
26. Eli owned the original Yiddish publication of this book, and referred to it in his interview. Its title (transliterated) is Partizaner fun Kaunaser geto and WorldCat shows its authors as Meir Yelin and D. Gelpernas (or D. Ghelpern). The only copy of the English translation is held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum library; the translator is Robin O’Neil.
27. Today the Ninth Fort is open to visitors as a major site of Holocaust history and commemoration. See the map of “Kaunas (Kovno) and its Environs,” in appendix A, for its location outside the city and the ghetto.
28. The abbreviations KL and KZ are used interchangeably, depending on the document, to indicate concentration camp. According to the chronology in HiddenHistory of the Kovno Ghetto, the SS took over on September 15 and it was officially declared a concentration camp on November 1 (USHMM 247).
29. In handwritten notes on the transcript of the NYPL interview, Eli wrote, “With loudspeakers on trucks the Germans warned that if we don’t come out they will explode the buildings. We had no choice [but] to leave the hiding place and surrender” (Rochelson, NYPL interview opposite page 17).
30. I have been unable to identify Winick and others who are mentioned by name in the interview. I leave the names in, however, in the hope that surviving family members might discover them.
