Daniel Schmookler — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Daniel Schmookler's story in the Vilna Ghetto 

This is the story of how I was rescued and survived the Vilna Ghetto, against the background of what happened to Vilna Jewry during the Holocaust.

Vilna was an important Jewish city, known as "Jerusalem of Lithuania", because of its strong Jewish infrastructure. The Talmud was printed there at the Romm printing house and, even today it is considered the definitive edition of the Talmud. The Jewish population covered a broad spectrum that included all the streams of Judaism. For example, the Bund (the Jewish workers' union that espoused the integration of Jewish workers wherever they lived) was founded in Vilna. There were also many well-known rabbis such as the Gaon of Vilna, the Hafetz Haim and Rabbi Haim Ozer (after whom the main street in Petah Tikvah is named) who was one of the chief rabbis; there were schools where the language of instruction was Hebrew and/or Yiddish, Torah academies, many synagogues, cultural institutions etc.

In effect, Jewish life operated autonomously and the Jewish community was an independent autonomous body.

At its peak, there were one hundred thousand Jews in Vilna. Vilna, which is now the capital of Lithuania, was part of Poland when I was born. When World War Two broke out in 1939, it was occupied by Russia under the terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov treaty.

In 1941 the Germans invaded Russia and that marked the beginning of the mass murders of the Holocaust. As soon as the Germans entered Vilna, the period of kidnappings (haphunas in Yiddish) began; during this period Jews were kidnapped by the Germans with the enthusiastic help of the Lithuanian population. The Jews could not understand where people who were taken to the Ponary Forest near Vilna were disappearing to; in the forest, pits for the storage of fuel had been prepared and there the Jews were murdered. In September 1941, half of the Jews of Vilna had already been murdered at Ponary and the rest of them, around twenty to thirty thousand people were crammed into a ghetto. 

I remember, as a 3½ year old, walking alongside my parents, each of us carrying a bundle, going into the ghetto.

I recall that later on we moved to a labor camp near the ghetto that was called the Kailis camp. We moved there because there were frequent Aktions (extermination activities that took people out of the ghetto to be killed in the Ponary Forest) in the ghetto.  The Germans wanted to take advantage of the skilled Jewish labor so they decided to keep those workers alive in the meantime. This camp was intended for workers in the Kailis fur factory and other factories as well. We were transferred to this camp because my parents worked in the leather factory.

There was a period of about a year when the Germans stopped all the killings and allowed us to lead a more or less tolerable life, both in the central ghetto and the Kailis ghetto.

There were other children in the Kailis ghetto and schooling for the older ones by teachers who came from the main ghetto was organized. Life was almost normal in the main ghetto and they even put on shows (an example is the drama Ghetto currently showing at the Cameri theater).

I was four years old. I played around with other children in the yard. I remember that they built a sukka (a tabernacle built like a little hut) with a straw roof. My father went to work at the factory and, later on, my mother also went to work there.

The central ghetto was liquidated in 1943 and some of our relatives came to our camp. They had managed to escape from the main ghetto and were accepted into the camp after they had bribed the Jewish police of the Kailis ghetto. The relatives who arrived knew how to bake (my grandfather was a baker) so we were given a room in the basement where we built an oven where we baked bread rolls; I even remember that at Pesach (Passover) we baked matzot (unleavened bread) and I even helped put the holes in the matzot.

At this stage the Germans introduced a stricter regime; the guards were from the S.S. and they blocked the gates of the camp and increased their surveillance.

Suddenly, one day, they announced that the children had to be brought in for medical tests; my mother was at work so I went with one of my aunts, the wife of one of my mother's brothers. She came up from the basement towards the yard when she suddenly noticed something unusual.

Just as she realized that something was going on, the Chief of Police arrived; my aunt turned to him and said:" Look, his undershirt is dirty and we are going to do medical tests. I would like to change it for him." Kanterowitz, the Jewish policeman said:"No need," and tried to catch me but my aunt managed to pull me back into the room and hid me in a cranny under the oven.

I lay in the cranny for a long time, not understanding what was going on. After a while it became quiet and I realized that everyone had gone. I waited a bit and then got up, left the room, wandered around the corridor but I couldn't see anyone. I returned to the cranny, closing the opening with a bin that was nearby.

A while later two men came into the room and began searching; I couldn't see them but I heard their voices. They were talking Polish or Russian and they threw around all the furniture in the room until they came across a bottle of vodka. They must have begun to drink and left the room. That was how I was saved from the children's Aktion.

In other words, it was the children's Aktion. The children were ostensibly taken for medical tests but eventually they were sent to the Valley of Death in Ponary. In some cases, mothers joined their children.

The Germans searched for children who were in hiding and assembled all the adults in one place so that they would not interfere with the search.

The assumption is that ten to twenty children were saved from that Aktion. A special hiding place was prepared for the surviving children where I would also hide occasionally.

Later on, all the men including my father and uncle as well as the aunt who had saved me, were sent to Latvia; just before liberation, a group of them including my relatives escaped from the camp. They came across a group of Latvian partisans who had, allegedly, been fighting against the Germans; the partisans murdered them all.

My mother returned from work and found me alone in the room. She took me by the hand to the basement, yelling:"Where is my family?" (in Yiddish). My aunt, Bella, my mother's younger sister, who had stayed behind to help my mother take care of me, came out of one of the crannies. By then I was 6½ and it was difficult to leave two women with a young boy.

After the ghetto was liquidated, the H.K.P. camp was set up; it was intended for Jews   working in the garage workshop repairing German vehicles who the Germans had decided to spare. My mother had friends there and we asked to be transferred to this camp.

We went by truck. Since I was a Jewish child who had survived the children's Aktion and nobody knew of my existence, they put me into a sack for the move to the H.K.P. camp. There were two blocks in the camp. There was also a special hiding place for the twenty to thirty children who had survived the children's Aktion. Every morning the children would go there and stay there all day with two caregivers. In the afternoon when the parents returned from work, they would take their children back to their apartments in the camp.

In the hiding place, I would look out of the window and notice different things such as the camp policemen escorting a VIP. Mickey Drezin was his name and he was one of the collaborators with the Gestapo; the police would show him a great deal of respect.

We then moved to a ground-floor apartment. A few days later we heard that the Russians were coming and the Jews began to make preparations. I remember my mother and I going upstairs to her friends who were on the uppermost floor and she said: "The Russians are coming and the Germans will kill us all so let's hide" they responded:"We don't have to hide since they will send us to work in Germany but you and the boy must hide because the Germans will murder you because of the child."

So we went back down to our room which was the entrance to the basement and we stayed in the basement for some time. I told my mother I was hungry so she gave me a piece of bread but I couldn't swallow it; it transpired that the problem was lack of oxygen and there was a big fuss because we were not the only ones to feel it. We went up to the children's hiding place that I mentioned earlier. There were two rooms and -- about two hundred people there.

Eventually the Germans discovered the hiding place because someone had informed on us and turned everyone out. The entrance to the hiding place was through an oven that was in the cooker and they began taking people out of there.  There were about ten armed Germans standing around the opening and I went out followed by my mother and aunt.

The Germans were busy checking the people, searching their pockets, so my mother and aunt dragged me and we ran to the adjacent room where we hid under the beds.

The older people, as well as my mother, who were lying under the bed fell asleep and they hid me in the cranny near the oven. I heard them talking to someone, asking if he had gold. Afterwards I understood that it was my aunt Bella whom the Germans had discovered; instead of answering, she began to run and got rid of the Germans who might have killed me.

The Germans took my aunt Bella and the other people into the yard and shot them there because they didn't have enough time to take them to Ponary.

We ran away from there to an abandoned hut and waited there for a few days until we heard that the Russian army had liberated Vilna. We still had a long way to go before we arrived in Israel.

There is one other event that I recall: we received a call to go to America and I told my mother that I would not go to America, only to Palestine because I had decided I wanted to live in a Jewish state. I was only 6½ at the time.

There is no consolation for what we underwent. It is a small comfort that I have a family, children and grandchildren and that we have a state that is supposed to protect us.

I have thought a lot about what happened to us during the Holocaust, but the most important conclusion I have reached is, "in my humble opinion", that we can rely only upon ourselves; we must not rely on promises of the nations of the world. We must stand up for ourselves, everywhere and at any cost, and thus we will be united.

Written by Zafrira Schmookler. Published: 12/3/2012 on the Tapuz forum