The Ghetto Orphanage — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

One of the problems in the ghetto was taking care of orphans whose parents had been killed in the Aktions.  Children’s homes and boarding schools were set up for children up to the age of 10. It was worse for small children who had been left without a mother or father and without siblings – so lonely in an endless sea of death. This is about a little boy of six who had been hidden in the loft. He lay amongst planks of wood in the loft of strangers who had hidden him. He spoke to himself out loud, mumbling something about a little house and a warm bed, about the murderous hands that had kidnapped his mother and father, his two brothers and his sister. While talking he fell asleep, exhausted and tired. Could anyone remain indifferent or not be moved by such an image? I couldn’t remain there. I left the loft in which the child had slept and went outside with tears streaming down my cheeks. “Gregori Shor, Page 62 of the Vilna Ghetto records of 1941-1944 (July 1942).

There were dozens of orphans aged between 9 and 15 who wandered the streets, stealing from houses and the Judenrat food warehouses. The ghetto authorities and members of the youth movements put a lot of effort into handling them. The ghetto police recruited them for purposeful work. The orphans were supervised by counselors; they were in charge of transportation within the ghetto using dozens of carts and transported food from the Judenrat warehouses to distribution points using hand carts. For this they received food and clothing. The ghetto police officer Josef Mushkat managed them and was responsible for them. They supervised the cleaning in the ghetto for the police to whom they reported when there were cleaning offences.

“At the party … there was a children’s performance, mostly orphans living in the ghetto as ‘illegal children’, and without the proper permits. Their performance was most impressive. Many people could not restrain themselves and cried when they saw these children, who did not know what childhood was, performing”. Alexander (Senia) Rindzionski, The Destruction of Vilna, page 85.

In March 1943, Gens established a central authority to take care of children and teenagers up to the age of 16, with the aim of supervising the children’s homes, boarding schools and those children working in various locations.

From: Yad Vashem

From the testimony of Tsviyah Vildshtain on running the Vilna Ghetto Orphanage 1941 – 1943.

I had been at the ghetto for about a month when I came across the children from Ghetto no. I and whose parents had been murdered at Paneriai. They were hungry and miserable and they wore torn clothing after having escaped from the pit of death or from Paneriai. They had been found by Lithuanian police who had brought them back to the ghetto. True to nature, I started to get busy. I was the secretary of the Department of Epidemiology. I asked to be released from this role in order to take care of these children who had returned from Paneriai and were living the death of their parents, all alone. Not everyone can take care of a strange child. We set up a girls’ orphanage at the synagogue as well as a general children’s orphanage. This was the ‘kinder internet’. When there is someone who knows how to make demands and in the right way, then the children would get the best of what is available. There were practically no teachers – they had been the first to go. In fact, all the intelligentsia were the first to go. Sitting with a group of friends, I asked them to help me organize studies for the children, since I was busy running around trying to make the synagogue feel homely. I had worked with some of the teachers before…

We were allotted a house after having been evicted from the stairwell of four houses. We would gather in the stairwell and I would bring them food. Luckily, my in-laws’ employee, who lived in the city after the ghetto had been established and who had stopped working for them after many years, would buy the food and bring it to me … I had been allotted a room when I was a student and found it empty upon my return from Russia where I had been living in a village after the Germans had left and until the arrival of the Russians. We organized the orphanage where the children lived and learned Hebrew. We organized evenings attended by Peretz Markish and writers such as Bergelson etc. A lot was published in the press founded in Vilna about a school for Yiddish which the children attended. There must have been a hundred or so children at the time – then more came.

Source: Yad Vashem Archives O.3 – 7038.

Dr. Roza Shabad-Gabronska and the Orphans of the Vilna Ghetto / an article by Muriel Chachois as part of her research on Dr. Roza Shabad-Gabronska; translated from English by Hadassa Fuchs. The complete article in French appears in Tsafon no. 64, December 2012, page 127.

When the Jews were expelled from the ghetto, 100 poverty-stricken, barefooted, naked and starving orphans from the children’s home, aged between 3 and 12, were marched between two rows of SS soldiers. The older ones looked after the younger ones. The orphanage director, Dr. Shabad-Gabronska, also disappeared with them. (From the testimony of Dr. Moshe Feigenberg at Yad Vashem, 03/2069/3560067).

The Vilna Ghetto Orphans:

On 15^th September 1941, the Lithuanian government gave the Judenrat (the Jewish Council) a list of 28 children who had previously been in orphanage no. 1. The names the mother and father were recorded next to each child as well as others who were twelve years old. They appeared in a column under the heading TOZ.

The eldest was three and a half and the youngest just a few months old.

Their names: Brom Goldin, Meises Kruglik, Dvira Marghnes, Mira Lechobiza, Henrique Pajares, Misa Maza, Avram Severblatt, Nechemia Pressman, Yankele Reskovich, Rachmiel Aronovich, Elena Kasizobkeit, Sara Kinkolkina, Dova Maisel, Salome Charni, Ada Goldberg, Hirsch Abramowitz, David Maze, Salome Rebstein, Mendel Kek, Aron Milner, Baruches Fischkin, Liba Finkelman, Sholem Marins, Meises Malakobich, Feige Schneidrit, Meri Biber-Ambrum, Etke Schneider, Avrum-Wolf Arbeter.

Medical institutions were established for those children whose parents had disappeared in the Aktions as well as for all the children in the Vilna Ghetto. Among the doctors, teachers and others who devoted themselves to helping the children as Dr. Roza Shabad-Gabronska.

Dr. Shabad-Gabronska – a short biography

Roza was born in Vilna in 1882, a daughter to Israel (Isidore) Shabad, the elder brother of Dr. Tzemach Shabad, and Paulina Paperno. She studied medicine at the Freiberg University in Freiburg im Breisgau, and St. Petersberg. While studying at Freiberg, she was a member of the Socialist- Revolutionary Party and was close to Nikolai Avksentiev and Buknof. Between 1914 – 1916 one of her daughters became ill compelling them to stay in Switzerland for a time. Later on, between 1917 – 1919, Dr. Shabad-Gabronska worked in Caucasia.

In 1931, she founded the Maternity School at the Zuveirinich Hospital where she continued working for about 12 years with Dr. Hertz Kubarski. In 1934, she took over responsibility for the TOZ ambulatory department which treated children with TB. Between 1923 – 1930, she had also served as the Sofia Gurevitz high-school doctor. She focused on the prevention of infection and preventive education, which was expressed in the lectures she gave at TSBK and her activities in the Public Health journal.

The Vilna Ghetto institutions which she ran:

On 11^th September 1941, the doctors established a public health service. Dr. Raphael Sadowski was appointed as the head doctor of the ghetto, with a medical council which included Dr. Roza Shabad-Gabronska, Dr. Lazar Epstein, Dr. Lazar Finkelstein, Dr. Alexander Kanterovitch and Dr. Gregori Ran.

Dr. Shabad-Gabronska (known as Shabad-Levanda by her third husband) suggested setting up children’s medical services, which would include the distribution of milk and baby food. It was also decided to conduct a census of the children in the ghetto and examine the children in their homes.

The Department of Health was responsible for organizing hospital activities and establishing additional medical institutions, one of which being the out-patients’ clinic headed by Dr. Kalman Shapiro. Dr. Shabad-Gabronska was appointed to head counselling services for children up to the age of seven, children’s day care, baby clinics and the children’s home which was established in the Eliashberg Synagogue at 1 Spitalna Street, adjacent to the hospital, and which was inaugurated on 8^th March 1942.

The Children’s Home – Vilna Ghetto:

Thanks to the writings of Dr. Ya’akov Movshovitz we are able to get a glimpse of the children’s home. After describing Dr. Shabad-Gabronska’s contribution to coordinating the various institutions established for the children, Dr. Movshovitz describes the lives of the children, including their particular moments of happiness. He recalls the roles of the adults who were with the children – people who took it upon themselves to make sure that the children keep a hold on and a longing for life. Manya Levy, who had previously been a teacher at the Frug School, was one of these adults. Manya Levy kept monthly records of the orphanage. Here is the report for June 1943, when there were 73 children in the orphanage:

“As everyone knows, there is a long waiting list for the orphanage. We need to make changes to the children’s bedrooms…. the younger children play outside when the weather is clement. We wonder what it is going to be like in the summer. Unfortunately, we can barely see the trees through the window, which is more than can be said for the small flowers in the garden. The older children go to school and do their homework together with the staff in the afternoons. This month, we organized a march to Zakretsa with a group of children. One of the children graduated from the technical school as a blacksmith, and we are trying to find him a suitable job. The school holidays will be starting soon. If the weather is fair, we shall try to go out and enjoy the forest again”.

The fate of Dr. Shabad-Gabronska and the children in the children’s home:

We don’t really know where Dr. Shabad-Gabronska was murdered. Three testimonials have been written: one by Dr. Libo who states that she was murdered in Majdanek; another by Dr. Feigenberg that she was murdered in Treblinka; and the third testimonial by Mrs. Dagon, states that she was murdered in Paneriai.

Is it possible that she suffered the same fate as Manya Levy? “Manya helped all the children climb up onto the truck and then walked with them to the selection point in Subocz Street. Rumor had it that, when Manya realized that the children were being led to their death, she protested and was shot dead by the Germans for her interference. Other reports say that she was sent to Estonia where she died.

As for the rest of the orphans: according to Assia Trugel’s testimony, there was a group of a few dozen children who were crying, alone, separated from the rest of the prisoners in the Monastery grounds.

Sofia Libo, Dr. Shabad-Gabronska’s granddaughter, recreated scenes from life in the orphanage using artistic dolls, in memory of those orphans with whom she had played in the ghetto and in memory of her grandmother. She donated the display to Yad Vashem.

The aim of the author of this article is to compile the names of all the children from the orphanage, in order to commemorate them.

Anonymous Heroes

Stefa Vilchinski is only one of a long line of orphanage principals during the Holocaust who went to their death with the children, says Yehudit Inbar, head of the Yad Vashem Museum Department. She says that Korczak was etched in the collective memory as a super-character who had sacrificed his life, but “When I started researching, I found this to be a much wider phenomenon vis-à-vis the principals of children’s homes, most of whom were women. Most of them were very strong women, many were doctors, very unique individuals. For the most part, they were well connected to the Judenrat and underground institutions, but still did not try to extricate themselves”.

One of these women was Dr. Roza Shabad-Gabronska from Vilna. Inbar say, “She was one of the very few women in the Judenrat, a doctor who had studied in France and Germany. An unusually talented woman. She founded an orphanage, a day care center a food distribution center for the Vilna Ghetto children. She managed to hide her family – two daughters, a son-in-law and granddaughters. She could have gone with them but, instead, chose to stay with the children”. Her granddaughter, the artist Sophie Libo Wawrzyniak, now lives in Israel and commemorated her grandmother with her exhibition at Yad Vashem ‘The Talisman of Memory’.

“If we shake in fear every day, we will allow them to destroy us not once, but every day. The children will notice that and suffer as a result. I refuse to think about anything other than what needs to be done from one minute to the next for the health and well-being of the children. This should be our goal and the sacred motto of this house”. This is what Roza Shabad-Gabronska repeated to the staff of Vilna’s children’s home, the home she had established and run, and the children with whom she went to her death.

From: (Hebrew) Yehudit Kol-Inbar – The Voice that was Silenced: The Jewish Woman in the Holocaust. The Unit for History and Theory, Bezalel // Issue no. 29 – Quiet Please! On Silences and Silencing.