Aharon and Lea Barak
I, Lea Barak Meirowicz, and my son Aharon Barak (who was 8 years old in 1944) were saved from the Nazis and from the Kovno ghetto by a Lithuanian by the name of Rakevicius and by a simple farmer, Jonas Mozūraitis, his wife Ona, his elder daughter Mefodija, his elder son Alfonsas, his daughter Zuzana and his son Zenonas.
It was in the spring of 1944, after the Children’s Aktion, from which we managed to save our only son, Aharon, when it became clear that we have to get him out of the ghetto and find a place with a Lithuanian. I turned to all those I had studied in the university with, but they were not willing to take the risk and save me. We negotiated with a Lithuanian by the name of Rakevicius, a brave and bold man, who was supposed to come and get our son before the massacre, but he arrived only at the beginning of May and demanded that I would join them because his wife had died, and there was no one who could care for an eight-year-old.
I have the typical face of a Jewish woman. I nevertheless decided to do whatever necessary to save my son. We put him in a sack, and when large sacks with clothes produced in the ghetto were taken out, we also put the small sack in the pile. The Germans at the gate were bribed, and so was the German who transported the goods. He received a large sum, and deposited us at the house where Rakevicius was waiting for us.
At night we drove in a street that was crowded with Germans. I was sitting next to Raevicius, with the sack at my feet. We stayed for a short time at Rakevicius’ place. He had three sons who were in the age of being drafted to the Lithuanian auxiliary forces. The SS came to round up all those who did not show up. All of us – the sons of Rakevicius, I, my son, and another Jewish family, the Zarkins who Rakevicius had kept at his home for three years out of sheer friendship - hid in a trench that was covered with large branches. Fortunately the Germans did not find us, but in the house they found Mr. Zarkin’s prayer book. The told Rakevicius that he was hiding Jews and that he would have to turn them in, but he denied the charges emphatically and the Germans left. It was evident that we and the Zarkins had to leave. Zarkin knew all the peasants in the area and soon found a place for him and for us.
At night we went on foot to the home of Mozūraitis, where we stayed until we were liberated in October 1944 by the Red Army. During that time the Rakevicius’ sons would come and visit us, to see if, following the return of the Zarkins, we didn’t want to return to their home too, but I preferred to remain at our present place. Mozūraitis was a poor farmer, his home was small and isolated. He had a wife and four children. He was a naïve man, who didn’t comprehend the danger in having Jews stay at his home; a delicate and loving person. He was sure that the Germans would not come to his house. What could they find there? His food was simple – yoghurt, potatoes and bread. The bread was bought with money that I gave him. He and his family cared for us lovingly. They protected us and out of the kindness of their heart did everything to help us. They admired Aharon and called him by a Lithuanian name – Algirdes. The would take him at night to a nearby river to wash, would take him riding on the horse. When the farmer saw how lonely I was, he would comfort me by saying: ‘See Madame, your son will one day be a great man! After it is very bad, it will be good!’.
Following my request they dug a bunker under the floor of the room so that we could hide when neighbors from the village would come on visit. We hid in that bunker when Katushas were fired at the village. Thus we were saved. The Lithuanian farmer was very proud to have saved a woman and a child from the Nazis. He took my son from house to house and proudly showed him around. It was his life’s accomplishment.
After liberation we returned to Kovno where I found my husband, Zvi Barak (Brik) and my sister and brother who survived, but I never forgot our rescuers.
When I left his home I left all I had at his place, including my sewing machine. After we arrived in Israel and beginning in 1950 until this very day, we have been sending him packages. He lives with his family in Lithuania and is unable to comprehend that we have not forgotten him and are helping him.
After liberation the three sons of Rakevicius came to Kovno. We left them our three room flat with all its furniture. Since then contact with them has been interrupted. I couldn’t write to Rakevicius because I didn’t have his address. I asked Mozūraitis to look for him, but he couldn’t find him. They must have left the village.
This family as well as the family of Mozūraitis deserve to be listed with the Righteous Among the Nations for their help to us and to other families.
From: Yad Vashem
Smuggled Out of Kovno Ghetto in a Sack, Apr 29, 2019 by Adam Ross
On 25 June 1941, the thriving and vibrant Jewish life in Kovno came to an abrupt halt when the Nazis conquered the city, unleashing a wave of brutal attacks by Lithuanians who murdered hundreds of the Jews in broad daylight on the streets of the city. Within weeks, the Nazis consolidated their grip on the town, forcing the Jews into a ghetto, and in a series of gruesome aktions, led large groups to nearby the forests, shooting them in military forts abandoned by the Soviets.
The killings spread fear throughout the community, with the date October 28 1941 still etched in the memory of the few survivors of the town. On that day 9,200 men, women and children were led to the notorious ninth fort, lined up and shot, their bodies buried in shallow pits. The remaining 20,000 Jews in the ghetto lived in constant fear.
No memories of happiness
Five years old when the Nazis entered the city, Arik Brik testified over 60 years later, “I don’t remember that I ever played in the ghetto, I was always afraid.” He added, “I was always within four closed walls, I could not go out. I have no memories of happiness. I can remember only the fear and worry of the daily deprivation.”
Several bitter moments have been etched into his childhood memories. “One day I dropped a pot of soup,” he said. “It was a tragedy because you have no food.” The food was in such short supply, “A rotten potato which has been smuggled in from outside turns the day into a festival.”
The Nazis brutally exploited the Jews for slave labor, marching 4,500 Jews, already weak from hunger, six kilometers a day to build a military airport for the German air force. Those who worked there lived with the hope that being useful to the Nazis would keep them alive, while each day they would come home terrified to find their families had been deported or taken away in another brutal aktion.
Arik’s father, fearing for his son’s safety, dressed him as an older boy taking him along to work with the other men of the ghetto. On March 27 1944, the Nazis stepped up their murderous plans for the Jewish people, dragging 1,800 children and babies out of the ghetto, shooting them in cold blood. Somehow Arik survived the aktion. “Death is a phenomenon that I saw from up close all around me,” he said.
Hiding underground
As the remaining Jews of Kovno realized their end was near, they began to dig underground bunkers under the buildings of the ghetto, hoping they could hide or owing to some twist of fate, survive until they were liberated. Some who had good contacts outside of the ghetto tried to find ways of escaping but Zvi Brik, a respected leader in the city both before and during the war, refused to abandon his community. Joining others in one of the bunkers, he used his pre-war connections with local gentiles to smuggle his wife and their son out of the ghetto, so Erik’s incredible story of survival continued.
‘They put me in a sack and told me not to make a sound’
One of the ghetto’s factories produced uniforms for the German army; it was another way the Jews of the city used their skills as artisans to remain useful to the Nazis for as long as possible. In a carefully worked out plan, Zvi bribed the wagon driver and guards collecting a batch of uniforms from the ghetto and organized his family’s escape, placing Arik into one of the sacks, with the guard allowing his mother to walk alongside the wagon.
“They put me in a bag and told me not to make a sound,” Arik said remembering the tense journey. “If it was cold or hot or whatever, I was not to make a sound.” The wagon contained valuable goods for the Nazi war effort, and the sack containing 8-year-old Arik was placed on top so that he’d be able to breathe.
A few kilometers outside the ghetto, the wagon stopped and all of the sacks were unloaded into a barn. They had arrived at the farm of a friend of Jaroslavas Rakevičius, a friend of Arik’s father before the war.
Arik had spent his childhood in the ghetto and had never spent time in the countryside. “When they opened the sack,” he recalled, “I opened my eyes and saw a cow. I had never seen one before.”
Arik and his mother stayed at the farm, just outside Kovno for three days before Rakevičius and his sons, who had also helped 20 other Jewish families to escape, sensing the Nazis were looking for Jews in hiding, took them to their own farm in the village of Keidžiai, around 100 kilometers away from Kovno. He remained hidden there with his mother, moving between two bunkers built under the family’s home and yard, hoping the war would end soon.
“Our biggest fear was being given away and someone informing on us,” Arik said. “If anyone would tell the authorities then not only we would be killed, but also the family that was looking after us.”
You must keep learning
Despite living with this fear, Arik’s mother refused to give up on her only son’s education. Drawing from her experience teaching before the war, she insisted they use their time in hiding to continue his education, tutoring him daily. “She taught me math and history, and I remember many long conversations about the world,” he said, recalling how his mother engaged him about life beyond the confines of the war.
As Arik and his mother stayed in hiding, Zvi Brik, along with the remnant Jews of Kovno, were hiding in the ghetto in their underground bunkers. As the Soviets advanced and the fortunes of the war turned, the Nazis began destroying the ghetto, setting fire to its buildings and smoking the Jews out of hiding. Sadly most of the bunkers were discovered, with the Jews inside suffocating from the smoke. Zvi’s bunker was not found and remarkably he too survived the war.
Reuniting and moving to Israel
After six months in hiding, the Brik family finally reunited, and two years later in 1947, moved to pre-state Israel to start a new life. Arik recalls the family’s journey: “We travelled from Lithuania to Poland, from Poland to Romania, from Romania to Hungary, from Hungary to Russian-controlled Austria, and from Russian-controlled Austria to British-controlled Austria.” He continued, “When we crossed the border we were suddenly met by a division of Brigade soldiers bearing the symbol of our flag.”
These were members of the Jewish brigade serving in the British army; from there they joined a boat of refugees sailing to Palestine. “These are things that will never be forgotten. The view of Haifa from the ship when we first arrived is something I will always remember."
Eleven years old, when the ship docked Arik’s parents changed their family name from Brik, to Barak, meaning ‘lightening.’ Their survival had been like flashes in the dark - one of a very few number of Kovno families who managed to reunite and begin new lives after the war.
Following in his father’s footsteps
In Israel, Aharon continued his education, the efforts of his mother in hiding had helped him retain his thirst for knowledge, despite the fear and anxiety he lived with on a daily basis. After serving in the IDF, he completed a bachelor's degree in International Relations at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University before choosing to follow in his father’s footsteps to qualify as an attorney.
After gaining great renown, in 1974, Aharon Barak was appointed the Dean of the Hebrew University Faculty of Law and one year later, the young boy smuggled out of Kovno Ghetto in a sack served as Attorney General of the State of Israel from 1975 to 1978. Barak served as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel (1978–95), and became President of Israel’s Supreme Court from 1995 to 2006. Such was the potential of one Jewish boy who survived the Holocaust.
Aharon Barak’s remarks at the Conference on the Survivors’ Legacy, Yad Vashem, April 2002
I have not dealt with this topic since the Holocaust or since we made Aliya in 1947. I distanced myself from this subject, and spent most of my life engaged in things that anyone who had not gone through the Holocaust engaged in, be they family matters or my professional concerns as a law professor and a judge. Nevertheless, I must admit that in recent years, I have found myself increasingly reflecting upon and perturbed by these topics. I have been asking myself what effect the Holocaust had on me, as well as what my personal and private lesson from the events of the Holocaust was on the one hand and what the public and general lesson was on the other. It has gradually become more and more intense for me and I find myself discussing it with my family and with my children. Although I never experienced mental inhibitions about facing the topic of the Holocaust, I must confess that I did not deal with it. I did not participate in conferences of this kind. It is even possible to say that I kept away from them… I always thought, and in fact I still think, that I managed to get through the Holocaust without being scarred too seriously. Perhaps that is the biggest scar that the Holocaust left on me, but my subjective thought was that I somehow managed to emerge unscathed, without any particular emotions, fears, and so on. However, as I mentioned before, these issues have begun to bother me in recent years.
Of course, my Holocaust experience was very narrow, absolutely specific, and completely insignificant in the general-national sense. My experiences did not take place in the epicenter of events, but rather, in a certain sense, in the sidelines. In 1941, I was five years old when I, together with my parents (I am an only son) and the rest of the Jews of Kovno in Lithuania – about 29,000 men, women, children, and infants – entered the Kovno Ghetto. They were good Jews, many of them Zionists; Jews who spoke Hebrew (my father, for example, was a Hebrew teacher). There were no doubt several thousand children in the ghetto, and out of all of them only a few survived, certainly fewer than one hundred. Incidentally, there are a few dozen of us in Israel, and we meet once or twice a year and reminisce. In the overall picture, our memories are very similar – after all, we were in the same ghetto – but because each of us was in a different street, the personal perspective is completely different. Each of us has his own story and we tell one another these stories… Naturally, we went through whatever the Jews in the ghetto went through. When the big Aktion took place, we were stood in the ghetto square with the very symbolic name “Democrats’ Square”. Right, left, right, left – and fifty percent of us were shot on the spot. By some miracle I remained alive. Subsequently, there were all kinds of Aktions, including one where they simply took all the children from the ghetto and killed them. Miraculously, again, I managed to survive. In fact, since that episode, I have never feared death. To me, death is a phenomenon that I saw from up close all around me; when it comes, it comes – everything is fate….
What lessons can be learned from these events? Schematically, I think that there are two types of lessons. One type is linked to the people of Israel and the State of Israel, to the centrality of this state in Jewish life, Zionism and the realization of the Zionist vision, to our power of endurance, to the impotence that characterized us, to the necessity that these things not happen again, to our inability to rely on other people and to our own need to defend ourselves, to the centrality of the State of Israel in our lives, and so on. I will never forget our flight from Lithuania to Poland, from Poland to Romania, from Romania to Hungary, from Hungary to Russian-controlled Austria, and from Russian-controlled Austria to British-controlled Austria, sneaking over the border. When we arrived, we crossed the border and were suddenly met by a division of Brigade soldiers bearing the symbol of our flag. Those are things that will never be forgotten. The view of Haifa from the ship when we first arrived is something I will always remember.
That is a very central and basic lesson. It is, however, not my only lesson. My other lesson is a positive lesson, not a negative one. It is not a lesson of hatred of man, nor is it a lesson of a lack of trust or of despair in man – on the contrary. My second lesson is a deep belief in man, in the human being that was created in the image of God. It resides in the individual’s ability to survive in the most difficult conditions, in the will to live, in the desire to establish a family, to raise children, to love and to give them endless love. It is a sincere belief in the ability of human beings to cooperate with and help one another despite the extremely difficult conditions that prevailed in the ghetto – by maintaining cultural life, for instance.
My second lesson is based on belief in man, on the belief in every person, Jew and non-Jew alike. This is the source of the centrality of my thinking as regards the concept of law and the perception of human dignity. The dignity of every person who was created in the image, the liberty of every single individual, is the same dignity that the Germans trampled underfoot during the Holocaust; it is the same liberty of which we were deprived during the Holocaust. My second lesson is the need to uphold, to reinforce, and to express, as much as possible, the dignity of every single person in his capacity as a person and the liberty of every single person in his capacity as a person. Of course, this is not only my individual lesson, but also the lesson of civilized society, the universal declaration of human rights, the various beliefs pertaining to human rights, the various – new – constitutions that were drawn up after the Second World War, the courts that were established, and the independent judges who were appointed in order to ratify and exercise the human rights that were decreed in those constitutions.
These are two lessons that race around inside me every day, every hour. The first lesson concerns the centrality of our country today, of national existence, of Zionism, and on the other hand, the centrality of the individual and human liberty and dignity. The lesson that I learn vis-à-vis myself from all of those things is that we have to find a synthesis between the two. We must not sacrifice the state on the altar of human rights. In one of my rulings, I wrote: “A constitution is not a formula for national suicide and human rights are not the platform for national destruction.” However, on the other hand, we must not sacrifice the human being, liberty and dignity on the altar of the state.
My lesson from the Holocaust is, therefore, the relentless, ongoing search for equilibrium, for the proper synthesis between the unit and the collective, between the public and the individual, between our national objectives as a country, as a nation, as Jews, and the universal values that are reflected, among other things, in the values concerning human dignity, liberty, the autonomy of individual will, and so on…. The need to achieve this equilibrium, as I see it, is the essence of life, it is legal philosophy, and it is the judicial philosophy that accompanies me on a daily basis when I don my robes and enter the courtroom. Each day, when I sit in judgment, I myself am on trial as regards the extent to which I have succeeded in creating this synthesis. In my opinion, this synthesis, this equilibrium, can be achieved…. That is my very personal and private lesson from the events of the Holocaust.
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