Tag #123080 - Interview #99947 (Samuel Birger)

When we were left without the bread-winner, aunt Leya was helping us out a lot. Her husband Moishe came back from the front with impaired stomach. When Leya found a job, she took her children from the orphanage. The biggest tragedy of the family was that son Rahmil could not forgive his mother for leaving him and his sister in the orphanage. He thought that it would have been better to share the last slice of bread, and stay with mother. Rahmil could not live in the family and left for studies in Kaliningrad. There he served in the army and after demobilization started living on his own. Etka lived with her parents. In 1949 Moishe was arrested when anti-Semitist state campaigns commenced [Campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’] [14]. He was sentenced to 10 years in camps in accordance with the political article 58 of Civil Code of USSR [It was provided by this article the any action directed against upheaval, shattering and weakening of the power of the working and peasant class should be punished] – and nobody explained what he did wrong. There was no trial, he merely was arrested and that was it. After husband’s arrest aunt Leya lived modestly by herself. There was nothing she could help us with. Moishe came back home after Stalin’s death, when unfairly condemned were released. In 1956 he was rehabilitated [15]. His health was completely undermined and Moishe died in 1959. Aunt Leya survived him by eight years and died in 1967. She was buried next to my father in Jewish cemetery of Vilnius in accordance with the Jewish rites. Her children Rahmil and Etka are currently living with their families in Israel. They have grandchildren and great grandchildren.