Sergei Korablikov — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Segei Korablikov at a Righteous Among the Nations event 2019

My father Makar and my mother Basia met in Vilna before the war. My father was not Jewish, so my mother's family forbade her to meet with him. He married my mother's friend, Bluma Trosky, who was also Jewish, and they had a child. By then the war had already begun, and Bluma hid with her son, Ilya, with her mother-in-law, my father's mother (later my grandmother). One day, the Germans started an 'aktion' against Jews in the area, and led them in a convoy towards the forests to execute them. Bluma looked out of the window and saw her father and mother walking together in the convoy. She could not stand the pain, and entrusting her son to her mother-in-law, joined her parents and never returned. During that difficult and painful period, my father and mother fell in love and that is how I came to be. I was born in 1942 in Vilna Ghetto. That same year, shortly before I was born, a command came from the authorities that the birth of children in the ghetto was forbidden, but my mother risked her life and secretly gave birth to me in the attic of the Jewish hospital, where I remained in hiding for several months while my mother would go to work and return to nurse me every few hours. My father was a non-Jewish Russian and therefore did not live in the ghetto. He was a partisan in an anti-fascist movement, and was wanted by the Nazi authorities, hence was in hiding all the time. Occasionally he would wear a yellow badge and enter the ghetto to visit us; thus serving as a liaison between us and the outside world. If the Nazis had discovered that my mother had given birth to me in the ghetto, they would have killed us both, so they had to smuggle me out of the ghetto.

When I was a few months old, I was smuggled out of the ghetto by my father and mother in collaboration with help from others in the ghetto. In the dead of night, I was taken down through the attic window of the hospital in a basket tied to a rope and the rope was slid down from the top floor. It was very dangerous and everyone would have been killed if caught. I was hidden by my father's sister, my aunt Patina Korablikov Chernitsov, who registered me as her son. In order not to arouse the suspicion of the neighbors, she married a friend who collaborated with us (Pavel Chernitsov) and even dressed up as a pregnant woman, so they looked like a married couple with their new son. My father smuggled my mother from the ghetto and she joined the partisans. They fought the Nazis for months, until my mother fell in battle near Lake Naroch in September 1943, while my father was captured by the Gestapo, and executed after enduring unimaginable torture. In the meantime, I grew up with my aunt and grandmother together with my half-brother, and knew nothing about my parents. It was a very dangerous time; one had to avoid taking one wrong step. The neighbors were suspicious, and from time to time would send denouncing letters to the authorities accusing us of hiding a Jew in the neighborhood. Once in a while, the Nazis or the police would come looking for the hidden Jew. One of our young neighbors, a 15- year old boy named George, would come running to warn us every time he heard the police approaching. One day, when I was about a year old, he was caught before he could reach us.

The police discovered he had a radio on him (at that time, keeping any means of communication was forbidden so as to prevent us from finding out what was happening), and beat him so severely that he was left crippled. My grandmother only heard the police when they were already at the door of our house, and I was immediately thrown out of the window into the potato garden behind the house. Miraculously we survived, and I was not found. This is how we lived - in daily danger. My aunt and grandmother were recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem, as they were not Jewish and yet risked their lives to save me.

I lived with my aunt as a Russian under a false identity until the age of ten, when she died of leukemia. The war was already over, but I knew nothing about my true origins. Over the years, Jewish uncles, relatives of my mother, came to visit us, but we lived in the periphery, far from the city center and I did not understand what the word "Jew" meant, and did not ask myself why their name was different from mine, (at that time I bore my father's name - Korablikov.) After "my second mother" passed away, my grandmother told me the story of my life, but I did not really understand it in depth. Since my aunt had died and there was no one to raise me and my brother, we were enrolled in a military boarding school for sons of soldiers and celebrities (my father was a soldier - a famous partisan). When I was 14, a friend of my mother's came to visit me and gave me a picture of her. That's how I saw my mother for the first time. At that time, I watched a number of films about the Holocaust, and I connected and identified with my being Jewish. Hence, it was important to me to change my identity and become a Jew and thus I did. At the age of 20, after the military boarding school, I decided not to go to the army but to study medicine. I felt I had to pursue something serious, important, a life-saving profession. The academy was in Leningrad, Russia, where I also met my wife and was married. We returned to Lithuania, where I worked as a doctor at the General Hospital and progressed in my position, serving as deputy director of the hospital, and as the medical representative in the Lithuanian government.

At one point, I felt I needed a change, and asked to be transferred to a job abroad and was transferred to Yemen, where I worked for about three years. Unlike Lithuania, in winter, the lowest temperature reached 24^oC, while in summer, would go up to 55^oC. During my stay in Yemen, in 1982, many wounded Palestinians from Lebanon reached the hospital. The hospital did not know I was Jewish (my last name was my father's – Korablikov). One day, a wounded Palestinian fighter suddenly grabbed my throat and shouted "What is a Jew doing here!"? I did not know how he discovered I was Jewish. He felt I was Jewish. The staff helped save me from him, of course, but I had to report to the embassy, and when I did, was told I was in great danger, and thus ended my contract in Yemen and returned to Vilna.

In 1989, a conference of Jewish doctors was held in Lithuania, and I received an invitation to visit Israel. I came to visit the country and found a lot of relatives. Something in the country fascinated me. When I was at Kibbutz Ma'abarot, for example, in the dining room I saw a well-known archaeologist washing his tools in the sink together with the usual cutlery as if they were just spoons. Something attracted me - the simplicity and the democracy in the country, and when I visited the Western Wall, it was clear I wanted to make aliyah to the country. When I returned to Vilna, I told this to my wife and children, and we decided that before taking such a big step, we would take a break and think things over. I applied for transfer to another country, and was transferred to India. At that time, my two children, Vladimir and Tammuz were already born. Tammuz was a few months old, so he and my wife traveled with me to India, and my son Vladimir stayed to study in Lithuania. After a few months, my son, who had remained in Lithuania, asked us to return. He did not want to stay in Lithuania any longer. I realized the time had come.

We made aliyah to Israel in 1991. Since then I have been working as a doctor in the Jordan Valley kibbutzim and in the Italian hospital in Nazareth. I write poetry in Russian, and have already published three books of poetry. I am recognized as a writer in the Russian Writers' Union. About ten years ago, I applied to renew my Lithuanian citizenship. It is important for me to influence history, to preserve the connection between Lithuanians and Jews, that young Lithuanians would become acquainted with Jews and not let the Nazi mindset return to influence them – that such a thing would never happen again.

By Sergei Korablikov