Selected text
I went to the kibbutz, because I wanted to leave for Palestine, but I was one of the youngest in the kibbutz. Well, it was the older ones who got to go first. It was all quite illegal, papers were arranged in Russia. There were all kinds of organizations in the kibbutzim in Vilnius: leftist, rightist, all Zionist.
We were in these former army barracks on Subocze [a street in Vilnius, leading from the center of the city to the suburb of Poplawy]. It was horribly cold [in the winter of 1939/40]! There were no toilets in the building. You had to go out into the yard.
And to get there you’d slip on [frozen] pee. There were hundreds of people there and lice. We used to go to the so-called ‘banya,’ the baths, and those lice were crawling on the walls, on the tiles. It was a horror, this first period. But then we broke up into groups and each organization tried to somehow function independently.
There were more or less 90 of us in our organization, Akiba. I knew some of the people from before the war. For example there was this Fryda whom I knew from a camp organized by Akiba before the war. We settled in a very nice house with a porch from the yard.
It was somewhere near Ostra Brama [a city gate in the southern district of Vilnius, erected before 1514]. The street was called Beliny. We’d be assigned jobs and then paid for doing them. The money was collected in one cash box and then used to buy what was needed to survive.
We were in these former army barracks on Subocze [a street in Vilnius, leading from the center of the city to the suburb of Poplawy]. It was horribly cold [in the winter of 1939/40]! There were no toilets in the building. You had to go out into the yard.
And to get there you’d slip on [frozen] pee. There were hundreds of people there and lice. We used to go to the so-called ‘banya,’ the baths, and those lice were crawling on the walls, on the tiles. It was a horror, this first period. But then we broke up into groups and each organization tried to somehow function independently.
There were more or less 90 of us in our organization, Akiba. I knew some of the people from before the war. For example there was this Fryda whom I knew from a camp organized by Akiba before the war. We settled in a very nice house with a porch from the yard.
It was somewhere near Ostra Brama [a city gate in the southern district of Vilnius, erected before 1514]. The street was called Beliny. We’d be assigned jobs and then paid for doing them. The money was collected in one cash box and then used to buy what was needed to survive.
Period
Year
1939
Interview
Wygodzka Irena