After the War

At this stage we had nowhere else to go. We lived in shared houses, several families of survivors together. The memories pursued us; wherever we looked, the absence cried out — what had been and was no more. The survivors returned, each with the pain and the suffering he had been through.

If each of us tells what he went through, we will not be able to live. There is a whole life still ahead of us — do not tell…

But we swore to take revenge… And this is what the late Ze’ev Bartnisky related: “We gave the NKVD — the Russian police — a number of names of hooligans, robbers and murderers. There were trials, but it was hard to try them for the murder of Jews; one had to testify that they had murdered Russians, or had handed partisans over to the Germans, and only then did the scoundrels receive their punishment.”

Shlomo Petshnik also told about himself and his late brother Eliezer, who tracked down and testified against a number of Lithuanians and Poles who had taken part in the murders of Jews. Eliezer set himself the goal of tracking down murderers and bringing them to justice; he did this obsessively for years.

A year and a half passed for us in Pabradė before visas and permits were given to leave Lithuania. Meanwhile we looked for ways to pass the time. The young people went back to their studies, some found casual work; in the evenings we would sometimes drink a little vodka and sing Russian songs. We waited for the moment when it would be possible to go up to the longed-for destination — the Land of Israel.

The memorial gatherings for those who perished in the Holocaust began while still in Pabradė, after the liberation of Vilna and its surroundings in 1944, in the home of Golda and Bora Shapira. And this is what Bora wrote in his memoirs:

Three years since Pabradė was occupied by the Nazis and their Lithuanian helpers, may their name be blotted out, and the lives of the Jews became forfeit: murders, abductions and Aktionen, without distinction, by day and by night our blood was shed. And therefore every day is for us a day of remembrance and commemoration.

Bora saw remembrance and commemoration as a duty and a mission. He opened his home, and together with his wife and daughters and a number of survivors they decided to hold a memorial gathering. The date was set for 13 Cheshvan, the day on which the Jews of Pabradė were murdered at Kemelishok (we will never know the exact number of those murdered). The memorial gatherings continued even when some of the survivors had left Pabradė on their way to Israel, in the DP (displaced persons) camps in Germany. They were held on the blessed initiative of Bora Shapira, Bora Blushinsky and Ben-Zion Lap. And so the continuity was maintained until about 100 survivors reached the Land of Israel.

After the war a small number of Jewish families remained in the town: Blitz, Wilian, Yaavetz, Liberman, Licht, Marinov, Narotzky, Feigel, Fisher, Feller-Yoetz, Kobersky, Klatzko. The Petshnik and Plotnik families lived in Vilnius. The families emigrated to Israel at the end of the 1950s.

And this is how Bella Ayal tells it:

We lived in the town, about ten Jewish families, perhaps a few more… There was a bond and a warm connection between us; we were like an extended family. In one class six Jewish children studied, all of us of the same year — born in 1947 — children of after the war, children of rebirth and of remembrance. In the other classes studied children younger and older than us, but we, those born in 1947, stood out in number.

We were born in place of the families that perished. We were born to parents who decided to build a new family, come what may.

We lived in the shadow of the memory and of the Holocaust that had happened not long before — a feeling that continues to accompany us to this day.

We celebrated birthdays together, as one big family; all the Jewish children were invited to the birthdays that were celebrated. The holidays each family marked in its own close circles. A festive atmosphere was in the air at every festival. Our parents gave us the best they could: education, welfare and love. One year the Jews organised and baked matzot together; that was an extraordinary experience for us. In most years the matzot were bought in Vilnius.

The synagogue, which before the war had been an active, vibrant Jewish centre, became a local house of culture. All signs of Judaism vanished and were erased from it, at the command of the Soviet authorities. In the absence of a minyan and a synagogue, my father travelled to Vilnius on the High Holy Days to pray in a synagogue as prescribed… On the other days my father would pray and lay tefillin at home, alone.

Sundays were market days. Farmers from the nearby villages brought their produce and their crops to sell at the market, and stocked up on what could be bought in the town — and that was very little. Our house was open every Sunday to the farmers. These were the same farmers who had helped my father during the war with food and information on the movements of the Germans, and had not handed him over to them.

One day a pogrom almost took place in the town, and the whole town was in an uproar… and this because of the disappearance of a Christian boy. After searches that turned up nothing, the missing boy’s family decided to lay the blame on my father, who was the oldest Jew in the town, and because he was an observant Jew. Since it was a few days before Passover, the gentiles decided, out of ignorance, that my father was the one who had killed the boy for the ritual of baking matzot, and of course the boy’s blood was used for this ritual. Suddenly there was great alarm in the town among the Jews, who feared an act of revenge for “the murder”. The end of the story was that the boy was found safe and sound. It turned out that his uncle had taken him on a trip to the neighbouring village, on his own initiative. He had no idea what this act had caused in the town. With the boy’s return, quiet returned with him to the town, and the festival was celebrated.

I remember another incident. One night we were woken by a knock on the window shutter. “Get up quickly!” the voice called, “the dam has burst and threatens to flood the town.” When we opened the window we saw that the river, which in its natural state was a few hundred metres from the house, was approaching rapidly and threatening to sweep away everything in its path. By a miracle it stopped very close to the house, within arm’s reach. We were saved from that flood.

The flood caused much damage to the town: houses collapsed, property was washed away and vanished. The house of culture, which had once been the Jewish synagogue, collapsed under the raging torrents, was washed away and vanished.

I remember the piano that stood where the Holy Ark had been, sounding its last chords as it fell into the rushing water.

At the end of the 1950s an agreement was signed between Gomułka and Khrushchev permitting people to leave the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union took a humane position of principle, that “repatriation” should be allowed — that is, members of nationalities living in the Soviet Union whose homeland lay outside it should be allowed to emigrate to their own countries. According to that same humane position, a person had the right to be reunited with his family abroad. This change in the Soviet Union’s position paved the way for our departure. The formal process was complex and wearisome, and took about a year; but at its end the last of the Jewish families left Pabradė for Poland, on their way to the Land of Israel.

Thus the Jewish settlement that had lasted hundreds of years in the town of Pabradė was erased. And here is the story of the town, set before you.

Of all the Jews of Pabradė about 100 people remain, most of them living in Israel. In the United States are the families of Meir Biksen, Niuta Epstein, Rivka Trachtenberg, the Ingeltzin family and part of the Petshnik family.