Chaim Lazar — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Written by Snounit Ozacky

Chaim Lazar-Litai was born on 31/5/1914 and died on 31/8/1997. He was a partisan in the forests of Rudnuki and Naroch, a Beitar member, an historian, and a writer. He was born in Ponevezh, Lithuania, at the beginning of World War I, and his adult life was shaped by World War II. He joined Beitar at the age of ten, after hearing a speech by Jabotinsky during the latter's visit to Lithuania. When the war broke out, he was in Vilna for studies and remained in the Ghetto, where he became a member of the United Partisans Organization (FPO) on behalf of the Beitar movement. After escaping the Ghetto through the sewers, he fought as a partisan in the forests surrounding the city. He lost his right hand, in an action against a German armaments train but taught himself to use his left and never stopped writing. His mother, Batya, died when he was a child; four of his brothers and sisters made aliyah to Eretz-Israel before the war; he was left with his father Elijah and his younger sister Sarah who perished in the war. His sister, Ada, also survived, but lost her husband and infant, both of whom were murdered by the Germans. After the war, he was active in Bericha Movement and came to Italy, where he served as a Beitar representative and organized "illegal" aliyah to Eretz Israel. He made aliyah with his wife Chaya on March 15, 1947. A day later, their eldest daughter, Sarah, was born. As soon as he reached the country, he began publishing articles in the press about his experiences during the Holocaust and wrote a personal book about the Vilna Ghetto - Destruction and Resistance (1985). He then devoted himself, on the one hand, to commemoration, documentation and research, and on the other, to the struggle against normalization of relations with Germany and the reparations agreement. Additionally, he researched and wrote about the role of Beitar members in the resistance during World War II and in Israeli wars. One of his major studies revealed the existence and central role of the Jewish Military Union (ZZW), founded by Beitar during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the 1970s, he established the Combatants and Partisans Museum in the Jabotinski Institute's basement, and in a long series of museum publications over the years, contributed dozens of testimonies, documents and studies on these topics. His latest book, Beitar in Sh'erit ha-Pletah, appeared shortly before his death in 1997. For about five decades, he worked as the director of the National Health Insurance's center, and was responsible for its branches throughout the country. He was a member of many organizations established in Israel after the Holocaust - in the Yad Vashem management, the Partisans and Fighters Organization, the Disabled War Veterans as well as in the Writers Association. From the day he arrived in Eretz Israel, until his last day, he lived in Tel Aviv with his wife Chaya. They had two children and four grandchildren

To My Father, Chaim Lazar-Litai, on the 10th Anniversary of his Death / Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, 2007

My father lost consciousness at four in the morning, at the same time as Princess Diana and her Egyptian partner smashed themselves against the wall of the Paris highway, and ascended into heaven amid a public storm. As always, an old radio transistor was close to his ear, and he heard the news day and night, at home and at the hospital. I will never know if he passed away before or after hearing about that accident. He loved blonde and beautiful women. My mother, the love of his life, Chaya Shapira, whom he met as a girl in the forest, and over whom he extended his protection, was a beautiful black-haired and brown-eyed beauty. At six in the morning, we received a call from the hospital asking us to come as the situation was difficult. It was a Sunday; they were about to catheterize him again at eight o'clock. The young doctor, who had read his books, said there was nothing left to do and catheterization would be hard, perhaps causing the aorta in the neck to explode. My father chose the faint chance of continuing to live, because his angina had become unbearable. He was eighty-three years old, skinny and small, with a lean, slim body – a featherweight. He had reduced his food intake for several years "so as not to weigh on the heart." Only his strong spirit and tough will to live, both born in the ghetto, kept him alive. On Saturday night, I sat next to him in Ichilov hospital until late. The windows overlooked the frameworks of the swiftly constructed Azrieli Towers, glistening with thousands of lights. He loved this cityscape; he always asked for a bed by the window. In his hand he held Friday's Haaretz newspaper, which he read from A to Z, as he did every Shabbat. We talked about an article that appeared in the "Culture and Literature" supplement, and the response of the Department of Public Works spokesman, published that same day, in reply to a letter I wrote to the newspaper's editorial board regarding the incorrect writing of signs in Arabic, and that it is possible to travel for hours in the Galilee without encountering the name of one Arab village on any of the green road signs, as if through the signage, it was possible to delete Sakhnin and strengthen Mitzpe Aviv. He did not like the letter, just as he did not like the political path I chose, which in his eyes was a deviation. However, he loved me, us - the members of his tiny family – with an intense love independent of anything and without judgment

Throughout his life, he wrote diaries with only one hand, his left hand, in a special script leaning strongly to the left. He lost his right hand when he and his partisan friends blew up a German train loaded with ammunition that had passed near the forest. He hitchhiked to Moscow for two days, and when he arrived, the doctors had to amputate the gangrenous forearm. Throughout his life, he suffered from phantom pain in the stump, which even modern medicine cannot cure. As a child, I thought he was Trumpeldor, but a few trips to Tel Hai on the 11th of Adar clarified to me the difference between my living father standing next to me, and the legend engraved in stone. Every evening he sat with his back to us, hunched over his desk, writing down in great detail the private and public events of the day. He mainly documented his extensive activities in the many organizations of which he was an active member: the Partisans and Combatant Organization, the Organization of Disabled War Veterans, the Yad Vashem Council, Misdar Jabotinsky, the Herut Movement, the National Workers' Union, and much more. Despite being a mild-mannered man, soft-spoken man, he allowed himself to vent his anger in two areas - on the pages of his personal diary, or when he took the podium and shouted against the reparations agreement and relations with Germany. Dozens of diary notebooks contain poignant notes and amusing insights about the people around him. He knew how to identify hypocrisy, arrogance, and lies - and despised them

"Don't forget what Amalek did to you," was one of the first sayings I learned at home. In first grade, I went to buy pencils at the neighborhood grocery store in Yad Eliyahu, whose owner was a Yemeni from the Hatikva neighborhood. I returned proudly carrying a sharp yellow pencil. To this day, I remember how much I wanted to start writing with it, but was sent back in shame to return it to the store, and explain to the astonished store owner that we did not buy anything made in Germany. Thus, the endless indulgence, the suffocating envelope and the constant anxiety under which I grew up, like all those of my generation, included also boundaries and prohibitions that at first seemed illogical but over time became second nature. For many years, I refused to shake the hand of Germans, also those who were friends and well-wishers, and went to Berlin for the first time only after my parents' deaths. From his first day in Israel, my father set himself the goal of writing, narrating, commemorating, and fighting the routine of oblivion. To this was added a parallel and no less difficult war against the deliberate disregard of the actions of the members of Beitar during and after the Holocaust. Without the formal education of a historian, he collected everything he could find: documents and certificates, faded photographs and tattered objects; gathered evidence and transcribed memories and stories of those who wanted to remain silent, but whom he forced to speak. As early as 1947, immediately upon his arrival to the country, he published a series of articles in the Hamashkif  newspaper, which preceded Herut, where he recounted his experiences in the Vilna Ghetto underground, in the ranks of the partisans in the Rudnuki and Naroch forests, on the escape routes after the war, and as a Beitar representative in Italy, where he organized the Sh'erit ha-Pletah (Surviving Remnant) and the Ha'apalah, until he boarded one of the dilapidated ships so that my mother, who was nine months pregnant with me, could give birth to her firstborn in the homeland, and not on European soil saturated with their family members' blood. His first autobiographical book, "Destruction and Resistance," first published in Hebrew in 1951, (was translated into English in 1985) contradicted the myth that had already begun to spread in Israel around the character of Abba Kovner and the Vilna Ghetto Revolt (which never took place). In those years of Mapai rule, his voice had no chance of being heard beyond the limited political circles to which he belonged. Nonetheless, he did not shy away. In his following books, he documented the Irgun's conquest of Jaffa and the breach of the Akko Citadel, the AF-Al-Pi (Despite All) aliyah and the Beitar organization that launched the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, - stories which are still hidden today from the public. He made his living all these years working for the National Health Fund, a place that allowed him to do some good. His office was a pilgrimage site for the sick and the needy. His actions were characterized by anonymous charity and quiet assistance that did not expect a reward. After realizing he was not Trumpeldor, I thought maybe he was one of the thirty-six righteous men who came down to the world. When we were sitting Shiva (Hebrew 7-day mourning period), dozens of people came and said, “You do not know who your father was". "You did not really know him

In the spring of 1993, when he was almost eighty years old, and fifty years after turning his back indefinitely on the place where he was born, he finally agreed to our pleas to return to Lithuania which had lifted the Iron Curtain. It was a groundbreaking journey into the past that never ceased to be the present. After long strolls through Vilna's alleys, a trip to the nearby forest where the Soviets kept the excavation trenches where the partisans hid - and an exciting meeting with the squadron's comrades, who clung to communism passionately and did not leave after the war, we drove to Ponevezh. The city had changed beyond recognition. A few dollars dispelled the suspicion of the head of the 25-member Jewish community left there. He led us to the Jewish Quarter and opened a gate to a courtyard centered on a well and a wooden granary. The Germans brought dozens of Jewish men from the community here one night, and burned the granary down with them in it. Perhaps there my grandfather Eliyahu was turned to ashes and ascended to heaven. Who knows? My father never managed to find out what happened to him. A few blocks away, our guide pointed to a tall building housing a bakery, from which the intoxicating smell of fresh bread rose. Under the roof, you could see the signs of the Tablets of Testimony engraved and sunk in stone - this was the glorious Ponevezh Yeshiva, where my father studied in his youth. He began to count steps from the yeshiva towards the river, and then from the river to the city, and suddenly stopped at a grassy mound, under a thick tree, and said in a low, strangled voice - Here was the house! I photographed him from all sides on this grassy mound where had stood his childhood home. To relax, we entered in silence to a somber café - the only one that was there. In his later years, he spent long hours a day lying down. He swallowed books instead of food, wanting to read more and more - mostly biographies, and mostly in English. Piles of books and newspapers lay near his bedside; he was alert to the end, did not miss any event and any information, despite his weakness, expressing a firm opinion on everything and anything. Nine hours after losing consciousness, he stopped breathing quietly. He took advantage of a brief moment when my mother, brother and I went out to breathe outside the hospital, and only my spouse, who resembled him in his quiet, introverted nature, one who did not want to frighten, bother and worry, sat next to him. The line on the monitor straightened, and his pure soul flew out of the window straight into our hearts