Dita Shperling — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

On October 28, 1941, the "Great Action" began in the Kovno Ghetto, the second-largest city in Lithuania. At 6:00 AM, all the Jews gathered in Democrats' Square in the ghetto. The sorting process lasted all day. The head of Jewish affairs in the Gestapo, Helmut Rauca, sorted the Jews and sent them to the left or right side. All the people sorted to the right side were surrounded by guards from the ghetto's Jewish police, leading to the assumption that the right side was the good side.

Approximately 9,200 Jews sorted to the left side, including many women and children, were sent to an area in the ghetto whose inhabitants had already been murdered, known as the "Small Ghetto." At dawn, the ghetto residents who survived the selection heard the cries of the Jews sent to the Small Ghetto as they marched up the hill to the killing field at "Ninth Fort" – a 19th-century fortress on the outskirts of the city – where huge pits had been prepared in advance, into which the victims were pushed and shot with machine guns.

100-year-old Dita Shperling was there when it happened. In her warm apartment in the old north of Tel Aviv, she welcomes me with a well-groomed appearance, in which, despite her years, the beauty of her youth and a spark of mischief are evident, which undoubtedly helped her survive those days of distant, blood-soaked history.

Before she tells her story, she shows me four framed photos hanging on the wall. She is photographed and drawn in them in moments captured within the ghetto, with a sad look and a yellow patch, alongside her late husband Yehuda Zupowitz, whose portrait in a police uniform hangs on the wall.

Zupowitz, who was the deputy commander of the ghetto's Jewish police, was one of the policemen in that selection in the ghetto, and she is eager to tell his story. Two years later, Zupowitz died under torture along with senior members of the Jewish police, but he did not betray the ghetto's underground or the hiding places where the elderly and children were hidden. The Germans eliminated them, and then carried out the children's Action in the ghetto.

"Look at the pictures, you see me in the picture with Yehuda," she says to me in Russian, pointing to the picture on the wall. "It was two weeks before he was shot. One day Yehuda came with a photographer friend, he photographed the ghetto. I told him, 'Leave it, who needs this?'" she recalls how she initially resisted, but eventually agreed – and he photographed. The photographer's name was Zvi Kadish, she recalls, his nickname was Kadushin, and he secretly documented the ghetto. The Gestapo offered a reward of 10,000 Reichsmarks for his head. Despite the severe torture he endured, the Jewish policemen did not betray him either.

Two framed portraits of the two also hang on the wall. They were painted by an artist named Yosef Schlesinger, who documented the ghetto at the instruction of the Ältestenrat (the Jewish council that ran the ghetto). "We called him Pipsi," she recalls. "He stayed alive, he lives in Prague."

It's hard to believe that these people – with their lives in danger, with their loved ones being murdered by machine guns not far from them – continued, despite the danger, to live and document and draw the ghetto. It's amazing and moving to see their work on the wall in her home in Tel Aviv, 80 years after the hell they experienced.

Like the pictures, the story Dita wants to tell me is a story about life in that dark period. It's a story about the man she loved and admired, who died a terrible death, under torture; it's a story about almost all her relatives who were brutally murdered; it's a story about Jewish life in the ghetto that lasted three years, knowing that death lurked around the corner. It's a story about people who, despite the killing, they had a police force, and an orchestra, and a painter who painted them, and a photographer who photographed them, and they wanted to live – even though they were being killed mercilessly. They wanted to survive and they wanted to testify about what was done to them. And Yehuda Zupowitz, even though he died under torture, managed, despite everything, to leave behind his young wife Dita, who was a forced laborer and survived by the skin of her teeth from the horror – and now she tells his story.

In 1941, the Germans invaded Lithuania and captured Kovno (Kaunas in Lithuanian), the second-largest city in the country and an important Jewish cultural and spiritual center, and established a ghetto in the Slobodka suburb (Vilijampolė in Lithuanian) where 30,000 Jews were imprisoned. During the three years of the ghetto's existence, many of its residents were executed or transferred to labor camps.

"Two weeks had passed since they closed us in the ghetto," Dita says about the moment her husband Yehuda, who had previously been an officer in the Lithuanian army, was recruited into the police. "And the Ältestenrat arrived. I left the room and they talked to Yehuda. He was a Zionist, and after they left he said to me, 'Dita, you should know I've taken on a very dangerous job.'"

"On the one hand, the Germans demanded that there be a police force in the ghetto," she recalls, "and they made him a policeman, on the other hand, the Ältestenrat wanted him to organize an underground in the ghetto. So I myself remember that I learned to shoot in the underground, we had a shooting range in the ghetto, they closed the place, and nothing was heard from outside. I learned to shoot, my brother Zvi also learned to shoot."

"He didn't tell me anything," she continues, "he said that what I don't know, even if they torture me I won't be able to tell. But at one point he told me, 'The world needs to know after the war who these people are. We need to tell what happened in the ghetto.' He kept telling me that the world needs to know, but he didn't say more than that."

At the end of the first period of bloodshed, in which many of the ghetto's residents were eliminated, about 17,000 Jews remained, most of them of working age, and the "Quiet Period" began, which lasted nearly two years (from November 1941 to September–October 1943), which was accompanied by the systematic transfer of ghetto residents to labor camps. During this period, the ghetto residents felt some relief. The Jews worked in jobs that helped the German war effort, and during this time the activities of the internal institutions in the ghetto, including the ghetto police, were established, and a kind of flourishing occurred on the cultural and social level.

This period ended with the children's and elderly Action, which took place on March 27–28, 1944, in which more than 1,300 victims were sent to their deaths. Initially, the Germans arrested the Jewish police officers (mainly officers and sergeants) on charges of collaborating with the underground movement in the ghetto and murdered them after an interrogation accompanied by brutal torture at the Ninth Fort fortress. In the days that followed, the Jewish police were disbanded and replaced by a body that more faithfully carried out the Germans' orders.

"Although some of the Jewish policemen were eventually returned from the fort to the ghetto, Yudka, and 40 other senior officials, remained there forever," writes Dita's brother, Zvi Katz, about Yehuda – who was a young man in those days – in his Holocaust memoir "Surrounded Me a Blazing Fire." "The returnees told of his proud stand before his tormentors and executioners. When he was returned wounded and torn to his cell after the interrogation, he called on his subordinates and friends, with his last strength, not to betray and not to reveal to the murderers the bunkers where children and the elderly were still hiding."

The arrested policemen, who firmly refused to reveal the secrets of the underground to the Germans and the hiding places of the children, were murdered in the most brutal torture and left a Yiddish inscription on the wall of the Ninth Fort: "Jews, if any of you remain alive, know that here the men of the Jewish police in the Kovno Ghetto perished terribly. Our hands are clean of Jewish blood. Death to the murderers! Long live the Jewish people."

Dita avoids describing the death of the man she loved. "After he didn't return from the Ninth Fort, when he was shot," she recalls, "three boys came to me, who didn't survive the war. 'Come with us, and see well where we're going,' they said. I went, it was on our street in Kovno, on one of the streets, in the fourth house we entered, and there was a big oven with a chimney. Near the oven I saw a box about half a meter in size," she describes the box made of wood and metal in great detail.

They told me, 'Look, we're hiding the box inside the oven, because even if the house is destroyed, the oven will remain.' When the war ended and I returned from Stutthof camp, I wanted to look for the box. I got married again quickly, I was very young."

Her second husband, the late Shperling, was, according to her, an important man in Lithuania in those days. She told him about the box and he referred her to an acquaintance of his, a senior KGB officer. "I came to him and talked to him, they didn't know I was Yehuda's wife. I told him that I happened to know where there was a box with German documents from the war. I went with him to where the ghetto was, and I showed him the place and left. I never asked about the box again, as if it didn't interest me at all. Later I learned that they hid the box so well that even the Russians couldn't find it. Only later, when they built a house there, they found the box, and the box was kept by the KGB in Vilnius. The Russians didn't touch it, it remained as it was."

Dita says that she didn't know at all what happened to the box until her granddaughter, who lives in the United States, visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington and during the visit came across Yehuda's picture. "This is my grandmother's husband," she said in surprise, and then it was revealed to the family that the documents hidden in the box had ended up in the museum. "I don't know how they brought it to Washington, all the history of the ghetto is in Washington, all the killing and everything that happened," she says. "Later they invited me to the museum to talk about him, but I went to Lithuania for the summer and didn't come," she says and smiles mischievously.

Inside the box were many documents that the Jewish policemen in the ghetto hid, including a 253-page composition, typed on a typewriter, titled "The History of the Jewish Ghetto Police in Vilijampolė." The historian Dov Levin, may his memory be blessed, who was himself a member of the underground in the Kovno Ghetto, wrote about the document and the period.

The document, written in Yiddish by members of the Jewish police in the ghetto, attempts to document the period and the impossible mission of the Jewish policemen, who were forced to carry out the German orders and still maintain a human image in front of the Jewish population they were part of. They didn't write anything about the underground's activities, fearing that the Nazis would find the document. When it was clear that the Germans intended to eliminate the ghetto, the policemen buried the documents in a tin-covered wooden box and hid it in the same oven chimney that Dita was taken to so that she could locate it after the war.

The Kovno Ghetto was completely destroyed and burned to the ground by the retreating Nazis in July 1944, and the box remained buried for 20 years and was found by chance in 1964 during construction work in the area. It was handed over to the Soviet authorities, who did not allow the publication of Jewish documents. Only 25 years later, in 1998, when Lithuania became an independent country, a microfilm containing the entire collection of documents from the box reached the Holocaust Museum in Washington. The authors of the document remained anonymous, but researchers identify that the text has at least two authors. It is not known if Yehuda, who was appointed deputy commander of the police, and who was very dominant in its leadership, was one of the authors – but it is clear that he was one of the initiators of the document and that he believed with all his heart that his wife, who was only 21 at his death, had a high chance of surviving and locating the box after the war.

The document left behind by the police is a kind of report on their activities, and it describes, among other things, the Great Action in the ghetto. Levin quotes the passage in his article in the translation of Sara Liebenzen-Benyamini: "After everyone went home (after the action – ed.), the police, who were the last to stay to clean the square, found forty-odd sick and elderly people lying [on the ground]...

"Also, eight live babies were found in the square. They lay among the sick and elderly, wrapped in diapers and rags, frozen and unconscious, but still alive. The policemen took the babies to a nearby house for overnight accommodation to find arrangements for them the next day. The attitude of some of our Jews towards each other is typical. The babies had to be left in the nearby houses. They were not at all willing to accommodate the orphans lying on the ground, hungry and frozen. After they were threatened that if they didn't take some babies, they themselves would be taken to the Small Ghetto, they finally agreed.

"What happened that night in the Small Ghetto? According to several survivors who managed to escape that night and the next morning, many of those sent to the Small Ghetto were sure that they would stay there to live.

"Early the next morning, on October 29, at about four o'clock, units of partisans (Lithuanian collaborators with the Nazis – ed.) and Germans arrived at the Small Ghetto and began to expel everyone from their homes, beating them...

"The people were taken to the Ninth Fort; long lines stretched for endless hours. 10,000 people moved up the hill in an endless death march. Pushed by the partisans, they went to their deaths and annihilation. We stood below by the fences and watched. We saw with tears of blood, swollen eyes, and wounded hearts how our unfortunate parents, brothers, sisters, dear relatives, innocent good Jews were led up the hill to unprecedented mass extermination. It is clear to us today, one hundred percent, that all 10,000 Jews were exterminated. According to Lithuanians, the people were driven in groups into the pits and all were shot with automatic weapons, after being stripped of their clothes. The children, innocent pure souls, were taken from their mothers, thrown alive into the pits, and blown up with hand grenades.

"Words are inadequate to describe the horrifying scenes that took place, according to the Lithuanians, at the Ninth Fort during the murder of 10,000 Jews... Thus ended the Great Action, recorded in our tormented history in blood-soaked letters. October 28 will be, for us, if we remain alive, one of the darkest days in the history of the ghetto."

But Dita's story did not end in the ghetto. From there she was sent to Germany with her mother and cousin Luba, who was a young girl, and they were forced laborers in one of the sub-camps of the Stutthof concentration camp. "After the ghetto, they took us by train to Germany, including Zvi." We were at the Stutthof station. It seemed that the men were being taken further and were probably going to be shot or something unclear. Zvi didn't get a chance to say goodbye, he couldn't, his wagon left. We were taken to the concentration camp, like transporting concrete or something, in trucks, and when we arrived the first thing we saw was two bodies of young girls at the entrance, and everyone said we were being taken to the crematorium, but I believed we would get out of it."

"Mom was 50, maybe less, I was 22, Luba was 14, but tall," she recalls. "There was a selection, who to the right, who to the left, who to the crematorium, who stays alive. I held Mom like this, and watched. The one who did the selection looked like a doctor, with a long coat and stripes at the bottom, meaning he was a prisoner. They put him there."

Dita, with her sharp mind, realized that it was a Jewish prisoner. "And further on stand two tall SS soldiers, with those hats that make them even taller, their hands as if they were clean, he's the one who sends to the crematorium. I approach and he raises his hand like this," she demonstrates to me, "he wants to separate me from my mother. I said to him in German, 'Leave me my mother,' and he looked at the Germans, luckily for me and my mother, they were talking to each other and didn't look, so he lowered his hand. That was the first time I could save my mother."

"They sent us to a labor camp, where we worked from morning to night, digging trenches for the war," she says. "It wasn't easy for Mom anymore, it was cold early in the morning, we women slept in these plywood barracks, probably more than 50 women in a barrack, and in the middle a small stove, made of metal. One day a woman approached Mom with a thick needle and said, 'My tooth hurts terribly, can you help me?' Someone told her that Mom was a dentist. Mom took it and opened the canal in her tooth and saved her and the needle remained in her hands. We went to work and Mom stayed in the camp and with that needle, she helped whoever she could."

She continues to another story that pains her and refuses to let go: "The two most terrible things were the Children's Action, when Yehuda died and they took the children, and this story, about Luba." I know the story about Luba. Dita is my grandmother's cousin, and Luba was a cousin to both of them. Luba's mother, Aunt Rachel, was sent to Siberia before the war by the Soviet authorities and left her children behind in Kovno. After the war, she blamed Dita for her daughter's death. My mother was also named Luba. She was also a child in the war, and this story is especially hard for me.

Dita recounts how in January 1945 the Russians began to approach and the SS forces closed the labor camp and marched the prisoners back to the Stutthof concentration camp in the snow. "I dragged Mom, whoever didn't get up was shot, it was terrible," Dita recalls in pain. "And I'm dragging Mom, and they tell me, 'Your Luba is really weak,' I asked friends to hold Mom and I took Lubachka by the hand, and I'm dragging her. It's below zero outside, close to 20 degrees, it's morning, girls working in the kitchen, whom I befriended, run from the kitchen and say to me, 'Dita, you're completely white,' and I'm dragging the girl, and we already see around us everyone who has been shot, and Lubachka has no strength left, she's walking on her knees and she's holding me and I can't walk. I could have let go of her hand and run away, and they'll shoot both of us here now."

"Suddenly an SS soldier arrived, whom we were always afraid of, he didn't hit anyone, but he looked scary, he had one eye. He was old. He approached me and saw that I was standing with this girl and said to me in German, 'Girl – you're crazy, girl, Mädel,' and I stood. He took and released my hand from Luba's hand, and said 'Go, go,' in German. That's it, and I heard 'Dita,' those were her last words," she says in pain.

"When I came to Israel after the war, her mother was here. I kept quiet and didn't tell what happened. 'You couldn't save my girl,' she kept blaming me, and I closed my mouth and kept quiet, what could I tell her, that her last word was 'Dita'?"

She reached liberation with the last of her strength after a grueling death march with her mother, who managed to survive against all odds. "We arrived at a place in Germany, it was a small place, the soldiers put us in an old warehouse. There were so many people there, we lay like sardines in a barrel, how long we were there – I don't remember, I only remember that they gave us black water, they told us 'it's soup,' and silence, there's no one, somewhere there's dog barking. One day I heard a boom, I saw light, I realized it was the Russians, I calculated they were 20 km away from us, in a day, maybe two, they'll arrive."

"We thought the Germans wanted to burn the warehouse with us inside," she says, noting that there were flammable fabrics in the warehouse. "One morning I went out of the warehouse, it was an old, dark warehouse. Outside it was a winter like in a fairy tale, with sun and heavy snow on the branches of small fir trees, sparkling in the sun – and for you it's the end. That was the picture. And next to them stand young SS men, and I think 'they're going to live and we're going to die,' we were sure they would kill us."

"I slept at night, morning came, no one came and we didn't go out. We lay quietly like this, afraid that if we went out they would shoot us. Suddenly a woman came, her name was Levinova, she was from Shauliai (a city in Lithuania – ed.) and she said in Yiddish, 'We are liberated.' No one moved. 'I swear, my daughter will live,' she says. She had an only daughter, 13 years old. Another voice was heard, 'Levinova has gone crazy,' and I heard and laughed. And suddenly I hear such a terrible scream, as if from the stomach. It didn't sound like a human scream. And suddenly I hear that I'm also screaming. What happened? At first Levinova said and no one believed her, and then someone else came, she probably escaped from the warehouse and returned with a bucket full of cucumbers – that was it. We realized we were being released. Because of the cucumbers."

From: Ilana Norman n12  28/04/22