Tag #141703 - Interview #99921 (Shahne Berznitskiy)

My brother Iosif was living in Vilnius. He came back there with the Lithuanian government. He got a nice apartment consisting of several rooms, in the center of the city. He accommodated there all our relatives who survived that terrible war. Mother, who came back from evacuation, where she raised Yankel’s daughter Liza, whose mother had died in evacuation, lived in this apartment as well as Charna, the widow of my brother Isroel, who perished in Kaunas ghetto [17], and her grown-up son Aaron, and I.

Iosif found out about my siblings from the sources of special departments. Isroel perished in Kaunas ghetto during its liquidation in 1944. Ester’s husband, Alter Aronovich, escaped from Veisieja at the very outset of war, having left Ester and the children with Grandmother Mihle. Ester couldn’t leave Granny as she was bedridden and would have died of hunger. Ester, her children and Grandmother Mihle as well as Sheina’s family were murdered during one of the actions in Veisiejai. They said Grandmother was taken to the execution in the blanket. My father’s sisters Lyuba and Rohl and their families perished during one of the actions in Veisiejai.

My eldest brother Yankel was the only survivor out of our entire kin. He was also in Kaunas ghetto. A couple of months before the end of the war he was taken to one of the concentration camps in Germany. Yankel managed to escape during the transfer from one camp to another. He jumped from the car in the darkness, landed in a pit filled with water and remained unnoticed.