Alex Feitelson — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Alter - Aleks Faitelson was born on April 15, 1923 in Kaunas, Lithuania. Due to the family's straitened economic circumstances, he was obliged to leave school in 1936 and help support his family. in 1938 he joined the Communist youth movement. After the German's conquest in June 1941 he was interned in the Kovno ghetto. There he was an active member of the Communist underground and was appointed secretary of a cell. He took part in a campaign to establish a partisan base in the Augustov Woods, and en route was captured by the Lithuanian police and handed over to the Gestapo. He was incarcerated in the Ninth Fort, an extermination site. There he was put to work with fellow inmates in a Sonderkommando group, taking the corpses of murdered Jews for incineration. He was the instigator and an organizer of an escape attempt from the Ninth Fort that took place on Dec. 25, 1943. After the escape, he succeeded in infiltrating back into the ghetto, and with the help of the underground went out to the Rudninkai Forest and joined the "Death to the Occupiers" partisan battalion. Upon that unit's reorganzation, he was posted as a fighter to the "Kadima" (Hebrew: Forward) battalion. He took part in many combat missions, and was sent to take up a position in the Naliboki Forest. Upon the area's liberation by the Soviet Red Army he enlisted in its ranks and continued fighting the Nazis. At the war's end he returned to Kovno.
In 1971 he immigrated to Israel with his wife, former partisan Sima Faitelson, and their two children.