Tsila Magdasi (Tori) — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Ceremony at Yad Vashem 21/2/2003. Written by Tzila Megadasi (Tory)

When father passed away a year ago he left a request in his will to memorialize all his family members who were not buried in Israel. We were of the opinion that Yad Vashem was the most appropriate place to do this, because the Holocaust of the European Jews occupies a central, difficult position in our family, and also because of father’s connection to this institution, one that became even more significant for us when, with our blessing, father chose to donate the diary he wrote in the ghetto, along with the numerous other documents he had collected, to Yad Vashem.

When we approached Yad Vashem with the request to fulfil father’s last will and testament, Mr. Yaron Ashkenazi suggested that we also memorialize members of our mother’s family who were not buried in Israel either and many of whom perished in the Holocaust. We are very grateful to the dear and dedicated staff of Yad Vashem who have been beside us all the way, from the time we handed over the diary and the other documents, and during the process of preparing the memorial, for enabling us to do this, for your sensitivity, care and devotion.

When we began preparing the list of family members we wanted to memorialize, I became even more aware of the enormity of the disaster that had struck our parents’ families and the Jewish people. Name after name, and yet another name - a mother, a brother, a sister, a brother in-law, a sister in-law, children who perished at the hands of murderers.

Abba Kovner’s words are inscribed at the entrance of Bet Hatfutsot (Museum of the Jewish People): "This is the story of a people which was scattered over all the world and yet remained a single family; a nation which time and again was doomed to destruction and yet, out of ruins, rose to new life." These words shook me to the core, and this reflects the story of my family as well.

My father Avraham Tory grew up in Lazdijai. His father Zorach Golub had rabbinical ordination, like his father Rabbi Yosef Dov who spent his whole life studying Torah. His mother Sarah-Leah was a true “woman of valor” who ran the business, and took care of the family with devotion. She was the daughter of Yakov Prosek, a farmer who had a farm and was deeply connected to the land he owned. In his memoirs father wrote: “My father’s house was always full of people, some of who came for community business and matters relating to the authorities. I was the youngest in the family and everyone tried to spoil me and play with me. My mother was strict about cleanliness and tidiness. So were my sisters Batya and Rivka, the oldest girls”.

When the First World War broke out, the family, along with all the other Jews in the town, were forced to leave their homes. When they returned after the war, they discovered that their house had been broken into and all their property had been stolen.

His brothers left Europe in their teens. Leibel (Louis) to the US and Avigdor to Argentina. There they lived, and there they died. In 1928 father travelled to Pittsburgh to study law. A year and a half later, after his father had passed away suddenly from a serious illness, he returned to Lazdijai at his mother’s request. He writes in his memoirs: “This was a bitter blow for me as I loved and respected my father very much”. On his return to Lithuania he continued to study law in Kovno where his eldest sister Batya Romanovsky lived. During this period he became particularly close to her. His sisters Rivka and Aliza lived in Lazdijai with their families, and the entire family living in Lithuania would gather together every year and spend the whole Passover festival together in their mother’s home in Lazdijai. Mother Sarah-Leah passed away in 1939.

When World War Two broke out, the family started to realize the extent of the danger. They tried to persuade one another, each according to his or her own opinion, to go somewhere less dangerous where they could stay until the storm blew over. The family scattered in every direction because each of them had a different viewpoint and because it had become difficult to move on the roads. At the beginning of the war, nobody dreamed that the Germans would murder women, children and the elderly too, and they certainly didn’t imagine that men would be subject to mass murder either. Batya and her husband Binyamin Romanovsky had to leave Kovno because of his position as a senior official in the Soviet administration. At some point, they were separated from my father who decided to escape on his bicycle. He fled to Vilkomir where he met Shoshana, mother’s sister (they had not yet become close to one another). She was a very brave lady who saved him from the Germans and who begged him afterwards to convince mother, who was living in Kovno, to come to Vilkomir immediately with her husband Pinchas and their little daughter, my sister Shulamit. She believed that her Lithuanian friends would hide and save them all. Shoshana was unaware that even then mother and her family were incarcerated in the yellow prison (known as the “hard labor prison”) in Kovno. Father had not managed to escape from danger owing to the approach of the Nazis, so he returned to Kovno after riding around for three days on his bicycle. He actually thought that Kovno “the big city” was safer than the small villages and he made strenuous efforts to bring his sisters Rivka and Elsa, with their families, to Kovno. However, they refused to leave with the wagon driver he had sent them because they believed they would be safer in Lazdijai. In a note they sent him to inform him of their decision they begged him to join them, as they were certain that the Lithuanians wouldn’t do anything to harm the Jews. As father recalled in his memoirs: “After all, every Lithuanian knows all the Jews in the village, them and their parents, and good neighborly relations have been in place between them for generations. How could they ever kill them?” Father continued: “I read my beloved sisters’ note again and again. For some reason I was in no doubt that they were making a fatal mistake and they might have missed the only chance to run for their lives and save their families. After all, what was the difference between a Jew from Lazdijai and the Jews from the forests near Kovno, who had been massacred by the Lithuanian partisans? I couldn’t stop myself from crying. I knew nothing of the fate of my eldest sister Batya, her husband and their children, to whom I had bade farewell at the train station. I was all by myself”.

Later it was discovered that Rivka, Elsa and their families had perished in Lazdijai. Batya managed to reach Russia with her family, and after the war, she and her family came back to Vilna where she lived until she died. Lewis passed away in the US and Avigdor years later in Argentina.

Mother’s parents Tzila and Leib Ushpiz dealt in commerce. Grandfather was the manager of a wholesale business and grandmother ran the family store while bringing up their eight children. On her many travels to purchase stock, she would always be accompanied by the latest infant. Education was of prime importance to grandfather and grandmother, as was the Zionist idea. So it was no wonder that all the children studied at the Hebrew Gymnasium.

The first tragedy that hit the family was when their brother Moshe died of an acute lung disease. When the Russians occupied Lithuania, the brothers Meir, Avraham-Yitzchak and Binyamin fled to Vilna out of fear of the Communists, because the family was well off. And indeed, when they did arrive, they confiscated the family’s property, their house and their business, and grandfather, grandmother and Meir the firstborn were sent to Siberia. Grandfather and grandmother lived under difficult and inadequate conditions in Siberia, without any decent medical services. Grandmother Tzila was unable to survive this way and she died at the age of 63. Uncle Yonah came on Aliyah to Israel and established a successful electric motor production plant, the first of its kind in Israel. Mother and her first husband Pinchas were planning to join him with their little daughter Shulamit, my sister. As they were in the middle of planning Aliyah, they got caught up in the war. This was also the case with mother’s younger brother Shlomo (aged 20) who already had a certificate for Aliyah although the Russians prevented him from using it. Pinchas perished at the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, with his father Eliezer and Shlomo, at the Ninth Fort; mother’s brother Binyamin (aged 25) and his wife Luba at Ponar; her sister Shoshana (aged 23) who had helped father to survive at the beginning of the war and her husband in Vilkomir, and the cousins in Pilvishok, Riga and Bresin. The hopes Shoshana and father’s sisters had pinned on their Lithuanian friends and neighbors, believing they would take care of them, had been dashed.

In spite of all the hardships and dangers during the war, father and mother managed to stay alive, to save themselves and Shulamit, to make Aliyah to Israel after a long, perilous journey replete with adventures, and build a home here. Uncles Meir and Avraham-Yitzchak also survived and made Aliyah.

In spite of the dangers grandfather Leib had encountered, he also managed to survive thanks to his resilience and his dream of reaching the land of Israel. When the United Nations voted in favor of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, nobody was more overjoyed than he, and he wrote to mother and father: “Mazal tov, mazal tov to us that we have a State, and thanks to Stalin for voting for us at the UN. If I don’t manage to get to Israel, never mind, after all Moses didn’t enter Eretz Yisrael either”. But he did… With extraordinary efforts and resourcefulness, father succeeded in bringing him to Israel – the first person who earned the right to come on Aliyah from Siberia after the birth of the State, and we were fortunate to know him and live with him, enjoying his presence for 11 months until he passed away. He was very happy to be living in Israel, and derived enjoyment from everything he saw around him, from a house in the process of being built, from a road being paved, as if they were his own. The only thing that put a damper on his happiness was the fact that he didn’t have enough money to donate to Keren Hamagen.

Father, mother and Shulamit, who were among the few survivors in the family, came to Israel and made their home here. The family grew and flourished with two more daughters, and the addition of six grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren (so far).

Throughout his life, father occupied himself with memorializing the Holocaust and those who had perished, all the while living life to the full. He was a warm and loving family man, involved in a wide range of public activities, running a successful firm of attorneys, and despite such a terrible chapter in his life, as he approached the end of his days, he said: “I didn’t waste my life”, like the statement by Abba Kovner: “Remember the past, live the present, believe in the future”.