Sara Voloshin — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

1928-2020

After years of silence, Sarah's story, "We Knew No One Would Survive" was published.

For decades, Sarah Klibatz collected testimonies from Holocaust survivors during her work at Yad Vashem, but she herself rarely spoke: "For me, it was the Holocaust of others." It was only at the end of her life that she shared with her son what had happened to her in Ghetto Vilna, on the day she lost her family, and during the war when she joined the partisans. This year she passed away.

On November 11, 1959, a plane from Poland landed at Lod Airport, disembarking new immigrants. Among the immigrants were Sarah and Mordechai Klibatz. "We got off the plane with coats and boots, because it was cold in Poland," Sarah told her son, Zvi, seven years ago. "But it was a summer day, so we started downloading everything, downloading and downloading."

Sarah, then 31 years old, married, and the mother of a little girl, did not ask just to take off the warm clothes that protected her from the Polish cold, but wanted to open a new page in this hot country and bury her past deep as a young girl during the Holocaust. "We erased what was," she told her son. The young couple settled in Jerusalem, studied and invested modestly and quietly, bought a small apartment, integrated into jobs, made many friends, and after five years in Israel, another child joined the family cell called Zvi.

Like many Holocaust survivors, Sarah rarely spoke about what she went through during the war, and like many children of Holocaust survivors, her children did not ask or inquire very much.

"As a child and teenager, the culture of the Holocaust was not something in which I wanted to be involved and which I wanted to hear about," explained her son Zvi Klibatz. "At that time, people were less interested in other people's experiences, and although my mother had a pretty heroic story, as a child I had a hard time identifying with that story. There existed then a culture that believed in the sturdy sabra of the Israeli wars, and something very tough enveloped my mother when it came to the story of the Holocaust. She said little, and when she did, she emotionally distanced herself from what she said."

"As the years passed," said Zvi, "Mother softened, and so did I; and we became closer."

Sarah's story was ready and waiting to be told to her children concisely and emotionally. Seven and a half years ago, when Sarah was 84, the son and mother began a series of meetings to document her life story. The meetings took place at her home in Jerusalem from the end of 2012 to the end of 2013 and were recorded.

[Sarah told Zvi:]"At first we heard shots; it was so fast and sudden. Fear, sadness, everything changed." Zvi is a clinical psychologist, and he based his thesis on the memories of Holocaust survivors. But, in Zvi's words: "You don't have to be a psychologist to talk to a father or mother who are Holocaust survivors. I suggest that everyone should ask and talk about the past. Obviously, the conversation should be conducted with sensitivity, without judgment or criticism, and according to the ability and needs of the person to whom you are speaking. However, it depends on the individual, and closed wounds should not always be opened at any cost."

After responding to a request from a family of friends and interviewing their father, a Holocaust survivor, Zvi became even more eager to do the same with his mother. "The person I interviewed passed away, and his family told me with emotion how much the interviews I did with him remained for them a meaningful experience. I knew I wanted to do something similar with my mother; I wanted to hear the whole story from her."

"I remember days of freedom; in the summer we always went on vacation. I remember the vacation we spent with our grandparents. We always received gifts from them. They had a large fabric store. However, we were also very happy with the Rudashevski family on my father's side. They lived a few houses near us, three houses away, so that even when I was small and alone, I could still go to them." (From Sara Klibatz' story told to her son).

When everything changed

Sarah was born in 1928 in Vilna, and had a happy childhood together with her sister Shula. Her father, Aaron Volozhin, was the administrative director of a Yiddish newspaper called Vilner Tog (Vilna Day); her mother, Zelda, was a housewife. Sarah grew up in a warm and loving home, in a city vibrant with Jewish culture, and studied at a high-level Jewish school.

It was important for Zvi to hear from his mother her whole life story, not just about the war episode. "I did not want to lose anything she said about her experiences. I wanted to hear from her what the house looked like, what they learned, where they learned, the teacher's name, the addresses - even about life in the ghetto - I wanted to hear about what might be considered non-relevant - what songs were sung, how they dressed up on Purim, what they celebrated on Hanukkah."

[Sarah said] "At first we heard gunshots - it was so fast and sudden, the Germans were in Vilna. Life was hard. Fear; sadness. Everything changed. Within a short time, the men were required to report for forced labor. The Germans also sent my father to forced labor outside Vilna, and it was even sadder since we were left alone, me, my mother and my sister."

In June 1941, the Germans entered Vilna after having conquered it from the Soviet Union, which conquered it from Poland in September 1939. Jewish life became a nightmare. Sarah's childhood ended at the age of 13. Her father was taken to a labor camp. Sarah, her sister and her mother were transferred to a ghetto in the city. The father returned to his family, but life was no longer what it used to be.

[Zvi asked Sarah:] "Couldn't both your mother and father calm you, encourage you? Couldn't your mother and father encourage you, calm your fears at such a difficult time?"

[Sarah answered:]"Yes; but they too were afraid, just like all of us. I was only 13, but I had already been through so much that ... also the entry of the Germans, then the walk to the ghetto, then I had already managed to escape death at the time of an Aktion they led …At the time, we were already like adults, we understood a lot; we were no longer children. I already understood a lot and knew that life was starting to be very difficult."

Later in the interview she told her son: "The two years I was in the ghetto were very sad, and what should have been the best time, passed in fear and hardships. As I said, there were also moments of joy. The joy was in the school I attended, in the youth club where we met and sang, heard lectures and forgot what awaited us."

Hardships in the ghetto, according to the details given by Sarah to Zvi, meant escaping Actions that included pursuits across rooftops, and of German soldiers shooting at them like in the movies. But there are also many small details, seemingly less heroic - of trying to maintain daily life in the ghetto. The same routine of daily life included a school established by the Jews, and beloved teachers who devoted themselves to the children. One of them was Mira Bernstein

who also taught Sarah before the war. "Her end was sad; she died of starvation," Sarah said. According to her, there were also cases where teachers stopped coming to teach, "But we did not know everything; we learned about it later. We only knew who was missing, who was gone."

The education system in the ghetto also included afternoon classes, in history, literature, theater, and Israeli holidays. The interviewing son was interested to hear from his mother what songs were sung during the holidays, what they ate, and how they managed to make costumes during the terrible times during which they lived. "It was also possible to paint your face a bit ... wear something funny. It didn't have to be bought like today, just some kind of interesting outfit," Sarah replied simply.

She also told her son that she supported an underground group operating in the ghetto called the FPO ("United Partisans Organization"). She and other children were a kind of auxiliary force for the youth who planned the revolt, and she became a courier, passing on messages.

[Sarah continued:] "Once, at night, I was woken up and told I had to report, and whatever they told me I would have to do. We were set up as quintets. I was in Itzik Rudashevsky's quintet, and when I was instructed to report, they gave us a list of those who were supposed to prepare a revolt. Once they were ready for action, but didn't succeed."

Meanwhile, her father was again sent to a labor camp. More and more residents were constantly taken from the ghetto to the killing pits in Ponar, and on September 23, it was "panic in the ghetto." The Germans began to liquidate the ghetto, sending its inhabitants to be exterminated in Ponar. The mother and her two daughters decided to hide in an attic that was in their apartment. The Rudashevski family joined them – this included the sister of Sarah's father, her husband and son, Itzik, who was a little older. Four other Jews joined them in the hideout.

[Sarah continued:]"We heard gunshots, noise and panic and knew that the people were being taken out of the ghetto. We hid for 11 days, almost without food and with little water. Each person already found it hard to speak. The situation was bad. We needed to drink and eat ... we were weak, with no hope that the situation would end soon. We knew we did not have many choices. It was impossible to stay there without food and water – but to go out meant they would catch us. Finally one of us could no longer stand it and opened the door to get water. He managed to get water, but at the same time some Lithuanians appeared. The Lithuanians and Germans who always roamed the streets caught him. After they caught him they also caught us. That was the end . . . "

The hideout was exposed and all its occupants were taken by the Gestapo. A moment before descending from the attic, Sarah hid pictures of her family who were with her, and her cousin Itzik hid the diary he had written in the ghetto.

[Sarah added:]"It was terrifying, so hard, we knew no one would come out of there alive, or instead of shooting us, if there was a larger group, they would send us to the Ponar Valley of Death. We waited while they took our documents."

They were taken by car to some building, realizing that the end was near. However, Sarah said that her mother still had hope: [Sarah continued:]"My mother saw that my sister had no desire to continue to live after her boyfriend was taken from her; she was ready to die. She became very depressed. So my mother started talking with me, and told me: 'Try to escape; you are small, thin, no one will see you; it is almost dark, try to get out of this building. If you succeed, wait an hour or two, maybe I'll try as well.' "

[Sarah added:] "At first, I did not want to, but she insisted so much that when the door opened a little, I went out; I saw some stairs. I was confused, not knowing where to go, so went down the stairs leading to the courtyard, not the main entrance. There was no one there. I saw a Gestapo car driving by that went out through the gate. I ran; the gate was open. I escaped and went out the other side of the Gestapo building. It was a kind of miracle; it's impossible to know how I managed to do that. Then I entered another building, stood at the entrance for an hour or two without warm clothes while it rained outside. Vilna is cold in September, and I did not know what to do."

After two hours alone in the cold and the dark, Sarah realized that her mother and sister would not be coming. She knew that near the ghetto was a forced labor camp called Kailis where Jews worked in leather processing. After an hour's walk, she reached the camp's gate and the Jewish police took her in. she was adopted for two weeks by a couple whose children had fled the camp, until one day a man came to the camp who had fled the ghetto and told her that her mother and sister had been shot dead. At that moment, she decided to flee to the forest, to join the partisans.

Zvi shuddered at his mother's description: [Zvi said:] "She made the decision to join the partisans when she received a kind of official message that her whole family was dead. She realized that now she was left alone in the world. The decision to join the partisans was a decision that came from a sad place.

At the end of two weeks in the forced labor camp, she escaped and joined a group of fifty people marching towards the Rudniki forests. They marched at night and hid during the day, until they joined the partisans who operated in four frameworks called "battalions." Sarah, aged 14, joined the HaNitzachon Battalion and was its youngest member. She helped in the kitchen and stood guard; she remembers the partisans who went out to sabotage ammunition trains and the enemy's rear units. Sometimes, they managed to come back with guns. The goal of many activities was to obtain food for the people.

For ten months she lived with the partisans, through rain and cold, with water dripping into the tents, diseases and toothaches that led to an extraction with pain suppressed with vodka. Intolerable conditions. She remembered harsh scenes of the sick and wounded, including a partisan who had fallen due to high winds and the cold; both his hands and ribs were broken, and there was no way to treat him.

[Sarah continued:] "There was no place to bathe so we bathed outside. By the time we were finished bathing, we were covered head to toe with ice and snow. When I washed my head, I combed out snow. That shows you how strong we were. Eventually, we built houses underground – a type of hut that could not be seen from outside, and there we no longer felt neither rain nor snow - that was already much better."

As the Red Army approached Vilna, the partisans joined it. Sarah, already 15 years of age, returned to her liberated hometown, but was left without a family. One of the first things she did was to go back to the hiding place in the ghetto to find the pictures she had hidden.

[Sarah continued:] "It was very important to me. I found the pictures as well as the book - Itzik Rudashevski's diary. I went upstairs to the attic. The comrades held the ladder, and I started looking. I knew it was not going to be so simple because at first I couldn't see anything, but I started to turn over the earth and found the family album with the photos. Then I suddenly saw a small book and I immediately realized that this was Itzik Rudashevski's diary."

Did you expect to find it there? Did you know he left the diary there?

[Sarah answers:] "Yes, I did. Excited, I returned with my pictures and with the diary. I read it and cried, and once again I remembered everything, everything that was in the ghetto. He wrote what happened each day; and if not every day then later on, if there was nothing special. He wrote very beautifully; he was talented. It's a real literary diary; by the time I finished reading it, I seemed to undergo once again all the difficult things that I suffered in the ghetto."

The diary was given to the renowned Yiddish poet Avraham Sutzkever, who arranged for the book to be translated into Hebrew and English, and entitled "The Diary of a Boy from Vilna." The original book reached the YIVO institute of Jewish Research in New York. Twenty years ago, Sarah fought to have the book, which actually belonged to her, returned to her to be sent to Yad Vashem. Her attempts failed, and according to her son, this made her very sad.

In Vilna, she began to rebuild her life, completed her studies, and began to study law. She met Mordechai (Marrick) Klibatz, and married when she was 22 years old. She worked in the State Attorney's Office, and Mordechai worked for the Vilna Municipality; but in 1957, they decided to make aliyah to Israel. The trip required them to sit "on their suitcases" in Poland for nearly two years, until they could reach the country.

Thanks to her legal education, and her knowledge of Polish, Russian, Yiddish and German, she was hired by Yad Vashem shortly after the capture of Adolf Eichmann. Even after his trial, she continued to work in the war criminals section. Her job was to search for archival material on war criminals in memoirs, diaries, and testimonies.

Did you feel good working there?

[Sarah answers:] "It was hard, because it was also emotionally difficult… emotional because I kept remembering. How did I search for these criminals? I read a lot of testimonies, and every witness told what he went through - murder and criminality. Everything reminded me of my family who had been killed, so it was quite difficult."

Sara Klibatz worked at Yad Vashem for fifty years, and only at the age of 83 did she retire. During all these years, she was exposed to testimonies, memories and documents. She herself rarely talked about her past and her personal loss, until her son began the joint documentation project.

"There are many things that are very gratifying and pleasant to remember," Sarah said towards the end of the documentation project. "The part of the Holocaust, the part I went through during World War II, was more difficult, because once again I had to recall personal events. Even though I worked at Yad Vashem all these years, I was working with the Holocaust, and for me it was not ... but it was the Holocaust of others."

This was a summary of a life's long journey, with a lot of pain and also a lot of power and happy moments. She started a family, had children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Sarah Klibatz passed away three months ago; she was 92 years old.

https: //news.walla.co.il/item/3352336 [Hebrew]

https://www.yadvashem.org/he/remembrance/survivors/klibatz.html [Hebrew]

1928-2020

Sarah Klivatz was born in Vilna, Lithuania. During the Nazi occupation, she was sent to the Vilna ghetto. She survived a number of mass murder Aktionen, and later managed to escape from where her family were forced to concentrate prior to mass murder.  She found herself at a work camp from which she went to the forests where, at the age of only 15, she fought together with the partisans.

When they were liberated, Sarah remained the only surviving member of her entire family. She returned to Vilna where she found the diary from the ghetto period written by her cousin Yitzchak Rudashevski who was murdered in the Holocaust. It was thanks to her that the precious document survived and was published.

Sarah studied law, raised a family, came on Aliyah and worked for decades at Yad Vashem. She collected documents and translated them, also assisting in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann.

Sarah Klivatz was born in 1928 in Vilna - in Poland at the time, now in Lithuania. Her parents were Aharon and Zelda Voloshin, and she had an older sister – Shula. Her father Aharon had a secular socialist worldview and her mother Zelda née Fackler came from a religious family. Aharon was born in Kishinev, where his father was murdered in the Kishinev pogroms, after which he immigrated to Vilna. He was a director of the Yiddish newspaper “Vilner Tog” (“Today in Vilna”) and was involved from time to time in public and social issues. Sarah and her sister studied at the Yiddish Gymnasium (high school) -“Real-Gymnasia” - where their cousin Yitzchak Rudashevski was a student as well.

"I grew up talking three languages. In school the language in which we were educated was Yiddish. We spoke Yiddish and Polish to each other. We read the books of Shalom Aleichem, Mendele Mocher Sfarim and Y.L. Peretz. I can’t say we knew Hebrew but we did get the basis.

My childhood was quite happy. We lived fairly well. Every summer we went on vacation. There were summer houses not far from Vilna that we rented for a month, beside the Wilia River. We went swimming there and had a good time.

On Friday nights and Jewish holidays we would eat at the home of my grandparents on my mother’s side. They lived not far from us. We would walk there. Because of Saba (grandfather) and Savta (grandmother) we celebrated all the Jewish festivals. We always received presents from them. They had a fabric shop. The Rudashevski family lived a few houses away from us which meant that when I was young I could go there by myself. Itzik Rudashevski was nine months older than me, although we attended the same class. We were very close to one another.

We lived in two rooms which was the standard at the time. We had everything and were never short of anything.

In June 1941 Vilna was invaded by Nazi Germany.

A few days before the Germans came, my father sat up during the night in his office at the editorial board and burned a large number of documents in order to destroy evidence of the vast amount of written anti-German sentiment there.

I was only 13 years-old at the time. Lithuanian thugs and German soldiers were free to do harm to any Jew whenever they felt like it. The Jews had no rights or protection, either over their lives or their property. Then the edicts arrived. We had to wear the yellow star. We were forbidden to walk on the pavements.

The process of exterminating the Jews of Vilna had already begun by the middle of July. We knew that Jews were being arrested, forced into vehicles, brought to the Gestapo headquarters, and from there driven to Ponar, where they were shot to death. We lived in constant fear. My father Aharon was deported for forced labor. In September 1941 the Vilna ghetto was erected.

We had to make our own preparations to move into the ghetto. We gave our possessions to our Polish neighbors for safe-keeping. We packed our belongings at home. My mother is crying. The house looks as if there’s been a pogrom. I can see that we are being uprooted overnight from our home. We walked encumbered by large packages. People were stumbling, packages scattered everywhere. Now I have already reached the ghetto gate. It hurts me that I have been robbed of my home.

The crowding is awful. There were 25 of us in two rooms. We received ration cards for food, 100 grams of bread per person per day. Thousands of Jews from the ghetto were incarcerated in the Lukiškės prison and from there they were sent to the mass murder site at Ponar.

In mid-September 1941 the Jewish police suddenly began going from house to house, informing us that anyone not holding a work permit would have to gather for transfer to the other ghetto. Among those were my mother, my sister and myself. As we went on our way we realized that they weren’t taking us to the other ghetto, but to the Lukiškės prison. One thing we knew for sure; from that place nobody returned. So my mother took the initiative, and we removed our yellow star, discarded the packages we had with us, and we left the line of people, thus managing to escape and find a hiding place in the stairwell of a Polish building. We spent the night there in fear and trembling. We knew that if one of the occupants were to enter or exit, they would discover us Jews there and were likely to hand us over to the police. But it didn’t happen.  All we felt was cold and fear.

The following day we joined the Jews who had returned from work and went back to the ghetto with them. The same day my father came back from forced labor, which made us very happy.

On Yom Kippur, 1^st October 1941, some two thousand Jews were deported from the ghetto. Jewish police went around the first ghetto with the instructions that everyone holding a permit should go down to the gate and get it renewed. Realizing that this was yet another Aktion, we hid up in the loft of the house in 6 Rudnicki Street. The hiding place started to fill up with people. We heard the Lithuanians banging hard on the walls and they discovered our hiding place. My father helped us escape through the skylight in the loft. We jumped from one roof to the next. Shots were fired at us. We finally found refuge in a loft belonging to some Christians. We were covered with soot from head to foot, but at least we were alive.

Our family members survived further Aktionen by hiding, escaping and using forged documents. My grandmother, Dobe Woloshin, was caught and murdered during one of the Aktionen.

After the period of mass killings the ghetto entered a period of relative calm. I began to study at the ghetto school.

We learned history, biology, mathematics and physics, as well as Yiddish, Hebrew, Latin and German. I was a diligent student and took my studies seriously. We had excellent teachers. I enjoyed my studies, but it was noticeable on a daily basis that a number of teachers and pupils were missing from the classroom. Teacher Chaimson, Mira Bernstein, Yaakov Gerstein all died along with others.

Gerstein’s choir was a favorite with the whole community. A club for children and youth was formed in the ghetto. This club played an important role in our lives. We went there almost every day. It was set up in an apartment renovated by the children. A number of different classes were provided there, such as Jewish History, Yiddish and Hebrew literature. The club was managed by Leo Bernstein. Among our leaders were the poets Avraham Zutzkever and Abba Kovner. We had a choir, a drama group that gave public performances, and a “wall newspaper” (Youngsters between the Walls).

I participated in a class researching the history of the ghetto, headed by the historian Herman Kruk. Using copies of a questionnaire he had formulated, we approached people in the ghetto and asked them to complete them. We recorded events that happened in the ghetto, such as testimonies about the Aktionen, hiding places and loss of families. We handed the questionnaires to the class tutor.

We acted in plays portraying trials against historical figures, for example Josephus Flavius. On Jewish festivals, like Chanukah and Purim, we held festive parties in which we sang lots of songs. Shmerke Kaczerginski took the club under his wing and taught us his poems. As club members we had permission from the Judenrat to stay out on the streets during the curfew too, so that we could come back after the activities. In spite of all the horrors I was experiencing, I really enjoyed taking part in the club activities.

We, as the young ones, were helpful to the ghetto underground -the FPO - because it was assumed that at some point there would be an uprising in the ghetto – a rebellion. And indeed on a few occasions we thought it was about to happen. We were asked to come to a meeting place where we were given orders to go and inform the FPO members and adults that had to mobilize. They had a few firearms. We were the auxiliary helpers, the messengers. We helped the adults with whatever they needed.

We would organize ourselves in groups of five. I was in Itzik Rudashevski’s group.  
In August 1943 my father, Aharon, was taken away for forced labor to the Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia. He never returned. In September 1943, during the destruction of Vilna ghetto, a hiding place was found for me, mother and sister, Yitzchak Rudashevski and his parents, and another four people. After 11 days in the hiding place, we were found out.

We knew we didn’t have many alternatives. To stay put with no food or water was not an option. To go out would mean we’d be caught. Until one of us could no longer bear it, and he went out through the opening to get some water. He managed to get the water and was immediately surrounded and caught by some Lithuanians.

I managed to keep some photographs when I was in the loft. Family photos. Itzik did the same. He left the diary he wrote during the ghetto period there. Then we went down.

Sarah and the other people who had been hiding were taken to Gestapo headquarters. It was a fact known to everyone that nobody came out of there alive. The whole family and the others who had been hiding were murdered, but Sarah managed to escape. Escape from Gestapo headquarters was a most unusual occurrence.

"We were taken in a vehicle, and we stood up and sat down knowing that any minute the end would come. My mother urged me: “Try to escape. You are small and thin, nobody will see you. It’s almost dark out. Try and get out of this building. If you can, wait for a couple of hours. Maybe I’ll manage to do so too.” At first I refused, but mother was so insistent that when the door was slightly ajar, I slinked out and lo and behold! I see some stairs. I escaped via the steps that led to the courtyard, not the main entrance. There was nobody around. I saw a Gestapo vehicle driving out of the gate. I ran and the gate was open. I escaped to the other side of the Gestapo headquarters. It was a miracle. I have no idea how I managed to do it.

I entered another building. I stood at the entrance for two hours with no warm clothing and it was raining outside. This was in September, and in Vilna it’s cold during this season. I didn’t know what to do. By then I realized that my mother would not be coming".

Sarah knew that there was a camp in the vicinity where Jews worked. It took about an hour of wandering around until she arrived at the Kailis forced labor camp where Jews were made to work relentlessly. “Jewish policemen were standing there. They saw a girl wearing a summer shirt and realized that I had escaped from the ghetto and they took me in.

I found out that groups of people went out to the forests from Kailis. Previously, in the ghetto, I was a pioneer (active in a youth movement). Sonia Medeisker told us stories in the ghetto and we celebrated the Russian holidays with her. Suddenly I saw her wandering around the Kailis camp. I was told that she transfers groups to the forests. I went up to her one day and told her that I used to belong to the pioneers to whom she would tell stories. We would talk and celebrate holidays and I told her that my entire family had been murdered and that I want to go to the forests".

At the end of October Sonia Medeisker transferred a group of Jews from the Kailis camp to Rudniki forest. Sarah was among them and she joined a partisan unit in the Rudniki forest.

'Where Father was concerned, I was still hopeful that he had managed to survive in the Estonian concentration camp, but by then I knew that my mother, my sister and the rest of the family had been shot to death.

Four divisions of partisans were formed out of the members of the FPO who made it to the forest: “Mstitel” – The Avenger; “Za pobedu” – For Victory; “Smert Fashizmu” – Death to Fascism; and “Barba” – The Struggle. I belonged to the “For Victory” division.

It was cold and wet in the forests. We slept in tents made out of weaved branches and leaves. Rain dripped through into the tents from above. We were constantly afraid that the Germans would find us.

The partisans in my unit bombed a German train and shot at the Germans. Whenever we were informed that a vehicle carrying Germans was due to pass by, the partisans laid dynamite on the road which they detonated. Wherever Germans were to be found, they found out where, and shot them. Food had to be organized, so groups would go out to the villages, which was dangerous because Germans could be found in the village too, and often partisans died while fighting. It was dangerous to bring food for the division but nevertheless they even brought a cow every now and again, so we had milk as well, and then had the meat too.

I was the youngest partisan, and the smallest. I was 15 years-old. I helped out a lot in the kitchen and also stood guard. I did everything I was asked to do.

Sarah lived with the partisan division for ten months. In July 1944 after Vilna was liberated by the Red Army, Sarah returned to Vilna.

"Out of my entire large family I was the sole survivor. While the battles in Vilna were still raging, our partisan divisions entered the city. I ran up to the loft where we had been in hiding. I knew our photographs were still there. It was very important to me. Up I went to the loft. My friend, Feige Itkin, held on to the ladder. I started to search and I realized it wasn’t going to be so simple. I didn’t find them at first. I started to look under the earth-covered floor in the loft and found the family album with the photos. Then I suddenly noticed a small book and immediately realized it was Yitzchak Rudashevski’s diary.

I was excited as I carried it down, together with my photos, with the diary. I read it and I wept. And again I recalled everything that happened in the ghetto.
Yitzchak Rudashevski’s diary – one of the most important documents from the Holocaust period – was translated from Yiddish and published in Hebrew, English, French and Lithuanian.

On the 9^th May, Victory Day, there was dancing in the streets, and it was so joyful, and I was so sad, because I realized that I was all alone in the world.

During the first days and weeks in Vilna, when I was wandering the streets, I would stare at passers-by, maybe I would meet my father who had been sent to Estonia… I wrote to Moscow searching for my uncle who had lived there before the war, but without success. As far as my mother and sister and the rest of the family were concerned, I knew they were no longer. I walked up and down the streets of Vilna and thought about the city “The Jerusalem of Lithuania”, that produced the most illustrious, learned people, writers, poets, rabbis and Jewish teachers in the past, a town that had lost some 80,000 Jews and with them Jewish culture itself.'

Sarah went back to her high school studies, completed them and began studying law. She worked in the Lithuanian National Archive and in the State Attorney's Office. She met Marik (Mordechai) Klivatz and they married in 1952. Sarah suffered from discrimination and anti-Semitism, and after the birth of their daughter Ilana, Sarah and Marik decided to make Aliyah to Israel. In 1957 the family moved to Poland and they came to Israel in 1959.

In 1960 Sarah started work at the Yad Vashem archives. In 1964, their son Zvi was born. For many years in Yad Vashem Sarah was in charge of the section documenting Nazi criminals and the trials against them. Her first job involved helping to prepare the Eichmann trial, and later she assisted with preparations for the trial against Demjanjuk. Among the material she accessed were records about trials against the Kristallnacht perpetrators, the Nuremberg trials, and trials of other Nazi war criminals – trials that had already been held in West Germany since 1945 – as well as information about hundreds of Jewish communities in Germany that had been affected during the Nazi regime.

"Emotionally this was a difficult task for me. I read many witness statements and every one described what he or she had experienced, the murders, the crimes. Everything reminded me of my own family, which had existed but was no longer. It was especially hard for me to read material about the abuse and murder of children. Sometimes I would just close up and leave as I needed to take a break, and then I would start to read again. I would sometimes come home and find myself unable to fall asleep. But I knew I had to continue working".

Sarah was a highly professional member of staff and possessed an enormous amount of knowledge. However, she was modest, had a pleasant demeanor, and she was a team worker who expressed profound concern for others. She was fluent in a number of languages – Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian and German – and was an expert in Yiddish and deciphering Yiddish manuscripts.

Even after she retired, Sarah continued working for many years at the Yad Vashem archive, taking advantage of her vast experience.  She worked in recording original documents in Yiddish, her mother tongue, cataloguing original archive material in different languages, and finding information about Nazi war criminals.

"I was asked to translate or to decipher. Sometimes they brought a testimony on paper that was torn to pieces, and I had to stick the bits back together".

Sarah was dedicated to her work at Yad Vashem, which she considered as her life’s mission. She proved her dedication in many ways, including the fact that when she travelled to New York for a vacation, she found time to pay a visit to the YIVO offices to find additional material for the Yad Vashem archive.

In 1999 Sarah completed a witness form in memory of her grandmother Dobe, her father Aharon, her mother Zelda, her sister Shula, her uncle Eliyahu, her aunt Rosa and her cousin Yitzchak Rudashevski.

Sarah lived a full family life, took care of her children and grandchildren and loved them very much. She herself was a person who was much loved; she had a rich social life, partly with acquaintances she knew from Vilna and Poland, and with colleagues from Yad Vashem. She was an affable person and loved talking to people. She lived harmoniously with Marik (Mordechai) who was an attorney, she travelled all over the world with family and friends, and loved taking care of her home.

Marik passed away in 2003. Losing him was hard for her, and although she was sad, she continued living an independent life. At the age of 80 Sarah went to live in “Ahuzat Bet Hakerem” – an assisted living facility where she was very happy. Over the years Sarah provided her personal Holocaust testimonies for researchers and writers, and especially in reference to Yitzchak Rudashevski’s diary which resonated over the past years owing to its translation from Yiddish to Lithuanian, and even became Book of the Year in Lithuania.

During the last ten years of her life Sarah suffered from a pulmonary disease and required oxygen, yet she still got around and remained independent. Sarah retired from her work at Yad Vashem at the age of 82. Her farewell party included a seminar dedicated to the Real-Gymnasia school where she had studied in Vilna.

Sarah passed away in 2020, surrounded by family members and loving friends. She is survived by her children Ilana and Zvi, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

From: Yad Vashem