Rivka Feller-Milner — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Today I am telling the story of my rescue for the first time. I have always avoided talking about this subject. I was born in 1935 in Kaunas to Aaron Feller, a well-known paediatrician, and Berta, née Neiman, Feller.
During the occupation my father had not wanted to work as a doctor and he was a general labourer in the factory. One evening, when my parents thought I was asleep, I heard my father saying that my sister Aviva and I had to be taken out of the ghetto. Mother was against any such move. ‘What will happen to the children, if we are killed?’ she asked. Father replied, ‘My brother Noah will be coming and he will take them to Palestine.’ Noah Feller had left for Palestine before the war and had since become a leading figure in the healthcare system there. I remember how I lay in bed and started thinking about that unknown country, Palestine.

In the first days of the ghetto, Jews were ordered to hand over all jewels and gold to the authorities. The Nazis found out that our neighbour Beck (or Meck) had concealed his money and jewels. They hung him near our house. It was the first time I saw a hanged body. This horrific sight I will never forget.
I remember when I saw my father crying for the first and last time in my life. That was after he had gone to visit his parents Leib and Sara, and his sister Dvora Kaufman with her husband Yehuda and little daughter Altale, who lived in the ‘Small Ghetto’, and found that they were all killed. We were told that little Altale had been buried alive.
We lived in a house where you could see people being led away to the Ninth Fort. I remember the ‘Great Action’ clearly. We were dressed in our winter coats; 16-month-old Aviva was ill with measles and had a temperature of nearly 40C. Father was carrying her. We were lined up along four sides of the square. I saw one of the Germans cross the square carrying a child’s pottychair (with a hole in the middle of the seat); he went over to Father and said, ‘Sit the little girl down, it’ll be easier.’ Nor will I ever forget the scene when an old man fell over and one of the SS planted his foot on the old man’s chest and started pulling him along by his beard.

During the ‘selection’ my father and we children were sent off to the ‘good’ side, while my mother and Reiza, my grandparents’ housekeeper, were dispatched to join the other column. My father grabbed Mama by her sleeve and literally dragged her back over to us saying, ‘This is my Frau.’ Reiza perished.
In 1943, not long before the ‘Children’s Action’, I was sent to live with a Lithuanian family in Vilijampole. I was dressed in a grown-up woman’s frock and put on high-heeled shoes before leaving the ghetto with a group of women workers. Andrius and Katrina Vasiliauskas, who already had a son of their own, took me in without asking for anything in return. They remembered that my father used to treat children from poor families for free. Unlike my sister Aviva, who did not look Jewish, my features were ‘typically Jewish’. My rescuers were very scared of their neighbours. Even after the war they would ask us not to say anything about their having saved a Jewish girl, because they did not know what the next regime would be like and what its attitude to such questions would be.

They managed to get hold of false documents for me, first of all papers where my name was down as Viktoria, and later more plausible ones where my name was Danute. I was taught to pray and taken to church wearing a scarf tied round my head, as was the custom; to reduce the suspicions of their neighbours, it was always me who would put money in the collection bag brought round the congregation by the servers. Just before the round-up of children, the Germans came looking for Jewish children in the town. The Vasiliauskas family took fright and brought me back to my parents in the ghetto.
I saw that our flat had been ‘compressed’: there was another family in it by the name of Bloch. My father told me that I had to hide, because my parents did not have any papers acknowledging my existence. It emerged that while I had been ‘outside’, all the ghetto population had been registered, and so I was now ‘non-existent’. One day near the Krishchiukaichio Gate, jolly music was being played very loudly. It was a bad sign: the Germans always used to play cheerful tunes and songs over the loudspeakers when people were being rounded up. My father, who had already passed the gate, came back to warn my mother about it. I was hidden in an attic containing a double partition. I was there with Henale Kuchinka, who had whooping cough and was coughing away all the time. I could see through a gap in the partition how the Germans and the Ukrainians dragged my friend Fira Gurfinkel out of the house. Her mother ran after the SS men in tears, begging them to give her daughter back. A police dog was set on Fira’s mother.Fira was hurled into the back of a lorry, while her mother was shot on the spot. The old people in the Bloch family were taken off as well. When the first section of the attic was searched they found Henale’s eldest sister, Mirka. The Polizei brutally raped her, and after that killed her there. They did not bother to search further, so did not find Henale and myself; I remember a soldier looked around and murmured in German, ‘Nobody is here’.

It was impossible for me to stay on in the ghetto. I was dressed so as to make me look as grown up as possible, complete with lipstick, and my parents arranged with a Lithuanian woman that she would be waiting for me at the other side of the ghetto fence. When we had managed a smooth exit from the ghetto, it was only to find that the woman was not there at the agreed place. Mother and I set off in the direction of Vilijampole. Mother was very frightened, but I, in my childish naivety did not feel any fear at all. We wandered through the town for a long time until we reached the Sixth Fort. From there I already knew the way to the Vasiliauskas’ house. My mother spent the night under their roof, and the next day she returned to the ghetto.
My parents also succeeded in escaping from the ghetto, thanks to help given them by the grateful parents of my father’s previous patients. Until the liberation they were hiding in Shanchiai, in the bunker of the ‘Metalas’ (steel) factory.
After the war I studied in a Jewish school and, when it was closed down, in a Russian high school. I went to study in the teachers’ training college in Vilnius, and after that I taught English in Kaunas. I married and in 1972 we left for Israel, where I worked for more than twenty years as a teacher. My father died in 1988 at the age of 86; he even managed to work for a time in his chosen profession in Israel. Mother lived until she was 96, and for most of her life she was able to live independently.

From: Rescued Jewish Children