Tag #120576 - Interview #89576 (Tobijas Jafetas)

My parents’ friends were wealthy merchants, lawyers and doctors. They were the Jewish elite of Kaunas. My parents often arranged receptions and went to see their friends. My father had Lithuanian, Polish and Russian business partners. My father taught me to respect other nations. His secretary Unger was German. In 1939, when Hitler appealed to all Germans to repatriate, he bid farewell to my father and left. I don’t know if this was the last drop in my father’s cup of patience, or if he already knew how Hitler treated Jews, but he insisted that our family moved to England where Mania’s family lived. Many Lithuanians had big hopes for the Soviet regime and looked forward to its establishment, but my parents were well aware of the Soviet Russia in the early 1920s and expected no good from them.