Rescued Jewish Children
Rina Badesh
‘I Don’t Want Any More Mamas’
Rina Badesh
From: Smuggled in Potato Sacks
Fifty Stories of the Hidden Children of the Kaunas Ghetto
Editors
Solomon Abramovich and Yakov Zilberg
My father, Itskhak Badesh, was a lawyer and my mother Sonya née Kalmansky, was a bookkeeper. In 1937 they had a son called Izya. I was born in 1939. My pregnant aunt, Ema Shtok, and her husband were shot by Lithuanians during the first days of the German occupation.
My father and my young unmarried uncle, Yankale Kalmansky, had perished at the time of the so-called ‘Intellectuals’ Action’, when about 500 young educated Jews had been lured by a promise of interesting work into a fatal trap. They had all been shot immediately in the Ninth Fort. Everyone quickly found out about it, including my mother, who was left in the ghetto alone with two children on her hands to care for.
Some scenes of our life in the ghetto are still clearly imprinted on my memory. I remember our room, the house, the shouting in the street, my brother worried that he would be punished after he had lost the keys to the flat, and how I comforted him. I even found a way of getting back into the house by climbing through a fanlight.
I cannot forget policemen beating up an old man on Mapu Street until he stopped moving. I remember how some Germans dragged a woman out of a hiding place in the ghetto as she shouted and begged them not to hurt her. I remember the shiny buttons on the uniforms of the Germans and the local Polizei, and ever since I have been unable to look at shiny buttons.
I remember Mother preparing a blanket to wrap me up in order to take me out of the ghetto to some woman. I readily agreed to go, and to this day I cannot grasp how a little girl of four and a half could understand how still and quiet she had to be. I even tried to persuade my little friend, Dvorale Murin, who was crying and did not want to go, when her mother told her that they would possibly have to live apart for a time. I said to Dvorale, ‘If you don’t go, Hitler will come and get you and you’ll die.’ Unfortunately, she refused to go.
One night my mother carried me wrapped up tightly in a thick blanket to the fence. I suddenly felt I was flying through the air and then I fell to the ground. A woman took me by the hand and started walking quickly away from the ghetto. When I took off my headscarf, I saw that it was Manya Beresniaviciene, my mother’s pre-war maid. Her husband worked in my father’s factory. They asked absolutely nothing for hiding me.
I began to cry, hitting out at Manya and biting. Manya brought me to her flat in 3 Mapu Street, not far from the house we had lived in before the war. For the first two days I would eat nothing; I just sat there crying. On the third day I asked, ‘Vandens’ (water). That was the first word I used, as I started to remember the Lithuanian language, which I had known from the moment I had first started to speak.
Manya was very kind to me; she talked to me gently and affectionately and smiled at me all the time. I grew used to her and stopped crying and thinking about my mother. One day, out of the blue, Manya said that we were going back to my mother. She took me to another flat, where a woman I did not recognize opened the door and said she was my mother. At that moment I believed her. It turned out that Manya was afraid to keep me with her, because her brothers were collaborating with the Germans. That was why Manya entrusted me to Bronya and Antanas Karaliauskas, who did not have any children of their own. They gave me the name Renate Karaliauskavichiute in the hope that my mother would not survive.
At the beginning Bronya and Antanas treated me well. Mother came to visit me from time to time, but Bronya used to make sure that I should not see or hear my real mother. Once Mother came by when I was at home on my own, but I did not open the door, saying that we were afraid of thieves and did not open the door to strangers. After the war Mother told me that she had been taken aback by my answer, but on the other hand she had been happy to hear my voice.
However later, when Antanas was taken by Germans for some service from which he never came back, things had changed. Bronya began drinking heavily and forcing me to drink vodka as well: it was revolting. If I refused to drink, she used to force my mouth open and pour the vodka in. It was terrible; I tried to spit it out without anybody noticing. Ever since, I have been unable to bear even the smell of alcohol.
But the most awful thing was that Bronya used to abandon me, a girl of 5, leaving me on my own for several days. During that time I would feed on bread and butter, which I used to spread in thick layers on my bread and then sprinkle with sugar. If my behaviour was not to Bronya’s liking, she would beat me or make me kneel on dried peas in the corner. That used to hurt a great deal. I don’t know what crime I had committed, although I was quite a mischievous child. I used to think that God was punishing me.
Bronya had taught me to pray, and used to take me regularly with her to the Catholic Church. She believed that prayers would save me from death. Ever since then, despite this having no connection at all with religion, I love visiting churches and listening to church music.
At the end of the war I remember an incident when there was a lot of shooting. We were running to the shelter. I was ill with whooping cough and kept coughing and stopping to get my breath, unable to run any further. Bronya came over to me and smacked me hard on the face. Perhaps in that situation there was nothing else to be done, but I still remember that slap on the face.
When the fighting was coming closer to Kaunas at the end of the war, Bronya took me with her to the country where I played with the Lithuanian children. No one in the village suspected that I was a Jewish girl. One event from the time spent with Bronya in the village I will never forget. There was heavy shelling and a bomb hit some buildings. We ran to look what happened: there were bodies of children without arms or legs scattered in a field. I could not understand why one boy without a leg was so white and did not scream.
After Lithuania had been liberated from the Germans, we went back into Kaunas. Father’s sister, Hiena Labensky, returned from Russia and went to see Bronya so as to take me back, but Bronya refused outright to let me go, saying that she would only give me back to my mother. Afew days later my aunt’s husband, an army doctor, Simha Labensky, appeared in the flat in his army uniform. My uncle offered Bronya money for having looked after me, but she demanded a huge sum and my uncle left. The next day I looked out of the window and saw some men in militia uniform. I said to Bronya, ‘Let’s jump out of the window.’ At that moment Simha and his friend Liubecki, disguised as militiamen, came into the flat. My uncle placed a large sum of money on the table and picked me up and we all left together. Bronya fainted. My uncle was carrying me and, just as two years previously with Manya, I started shouting, biting and scratching.
I did not like ‘Mama Bronya’. After the war when she used to come and visit us, I did not go up to her to give her a hug. Mother scolded me on more than one occasion for being so cold towards Bronya.
My uncle took me to my aunt, who hugged and kissed me and said that she was my real mother. I believed her. My uncle and aunt were living in a large flat belonging to a Jewish family who used to give temporary shelter to Jews from different backgrounds. All those Jews with long beards I found frightening and ugly. When they used to come to the flat I would hide under the table saying, ‘Another Jid is coming’.
Later I was taken to Vitebsk, where there was a military hospital in which my uncle worked. I did not feel comfortable there and was afraid of everyone and everything. Children in our yard, sensing my fear, used to taunt me. My uncle told the chief doctor at the hospital about me; his advice was to teach me to give as good as I got. That was what my uncle did, telling me I should stand up for myself. The next day I punched a boy on the nose, which started to bleed. I thought I had killed him. I could still remember from the ghetto that when people began bleeding that meant that they were dying. It turned out that the boy I had punched was the son of the chief doctor, who after shaking my uncle’s hand said that everything would be all right now. That was indeed how it turned out; I stopped being frightened, slept calmly at night and went out into the yard without a care in the world. When the war was over, we moved to Vilnius.
My energetic mother had also succeeded in sending my brother to a village to what she had thought was a good family. Apart from my brother, the family was also sheltering a few other Jews for short periods and an escaped POW. Someone informed on them and the Polizei came to look for him. When the POW caught sight of the Gestapo people, he ran into the shed and set himself on fire. The head of the household was arrested and never returned. His wife was warned by the Gestapo that the same would happen to her if she went on hiding POWs or Jews. Terrified, she took Izya back into Kaunas where she abandoned him in front of the Catholic church. My brother, Izya, disappeared forever. My mother was told that people saw Gestapo men arresting a Jewish boy at that place.
After the war some Jews in Israel managed to obtain the status of one of the ‘Righteous among Nations’ for this woman. An article was published describing the rescue of a small child with the surname Badesh, whom they had to hand on to another family, but who survived. Someone telephoned me one day and said that my brother was alive. You can imagine how agitated we all were, but it turned out that they had simply read an article about that woman full of ridiculous assertions and lies.
I even went to Kaunas so as to meet with her and ask what had really happened to my brother. For a long time she refused to see me, until eventually I was able to obtain a meeting with her daughter through a lawyer. She kept contradicting herself, saying that her mother had seen Izya after the war, working in a garage; she did not admit that her mother had abandoned Izya to his fate.
Mother was transferred to Stutthof and survived. After the liberation she worked for nine months in a barracks in Germany. She sent a letter to Bronya, who told my mother that I had been taken away from her; my mother was in despair, thinking that I was no longer alive. Nevertheless she went to Kaunas to look for me. At the station in Vilnius, by chance she bumped into an acquaintance, a person called Kibarsky, who told her that I was living there with my aunt.
Meanwhile I had been settling down and had started to call my aunt ‘Mama’. I was very fond of my uncle; it was a real ‘love affair’. Then all of a sudden, yet another woman appeared saying, ‘I am your real mother’. I got angry and said, ‘I don’t want any more Mamas. My Mama was young and beautiful and well dressed, and you . . . ’ Mother naturally looked terrible, dressed in a makeshift smock sewn together from soldiers’ greatcoats. She refused of course to give in, and with a great deal of patience, perseverance, presents and loving care managed to win over my heart.
Mother married a second time. We lived in Vilnius where I studied medicine. I married Wolf (Zeev) Sharas. In 1971 we arrived in Israel. Here I immediately started working in a health centre as a paediatrician. I have two children and four wonderful grandchildren. Mother worked as a bookkeeper. She is 93 now, mentally alert and blessed with a wonderful memory. She lives in a flat on her own.
To this day I have not forgiven the Germans for their evil deeds and I have always refused to go to Germany.
First published in 2011 by Vallentine Mitchell
London, Portland, OR
Rina Badesh
From: Smuggled in Potato Sacks
Fifty Stories of the Hidden Children of the Kaunas Ghetto
Editors
Solomon Abramovich and Yakov Zilberg
My father, Itskhak Badesh, was a lawyer and my mother Sonya née Kalmansky, was a bookkeeper. In 1937 they had a son called Izya. I was born in 1939. My pregnant aunt, Ema Shtok, and her husband were shot by Lithuanians during the first days of the German occupation.
My father and my young unmarried uncle, Yankale Kalmansky, had perished at the time of the so-called ‘Intellectuals’ Action’, when about 500 young educated Jews had been lured by a promise of interesting work into a fatal trap. They had all been shot immediately in the Ninth Fort. Everyone quickly found out about it, including my mother, who was left in the ghetto alone with two children on her hands to care for.
Some scenes of our life in the ghetto are still clearly imprinted on my memory. I remember our room, the house, the shouting in the street, my brother worried that he would be punished after he had lost the keys to the flat, and how I comforted him. I even found a way of getting back into the house by climbing through a fanlight.
I cannot forget policemen beating up an old man on Mapu Street until he stopped moving. I remember how some Germans dragged a woman out of a hiding place in the ghetto as she shouted and begged them not to hurt her. I remember the shiny buttons on the uniforms of the Germans and the local Polizei, and ever since I have been unable to look at shiny buttons.
I remember Mother preparing a blanket to wrap me up in order to take me out of the ghetto to some woman. I readily agreed to go, and to this day I cannot grasp how a little girl of four and a half could understand how still and quiet she had to be. I even tried to persuade my little friend, Dvorale Murin, who was crying and did not want to go, when her mother told her that they would possibly have to live apart for a time. I said to Dvorale, ‘If you don’t go, Hitler will come and get you and you’ll die.’ Unfortunately, she refused to go.
One night my mother carried me wrapped up tightly in a thick blanket to the fence. I suddenly felt I was flying through the air and then I fell to the ground. A woman took me by the hand and started walking quickly away from the ghetto. When I took off my headscarf, I saw that it was Manya Beresniaviciene, my mother’s pre-war maid. Her husband worked in my father’s factory. They asked absolutely nothing for hiding me.
I began to cry, hitting out at Manya and biting. Manya brought me to her flat in 3 Mapu Street, not far from the house we had lived in before the war. For the first two days I would eat nothing; I just sat there crying. On the third day I asked, ‘Vandens’ (water). That was the first word I used, as I started to remember the Lithuanian language, which I had known from the moment I had first started to speak.
Manya was very kind to me; she talked to me gently and affectionately and smiled at me all the time. I grew used to her and stopped crying and thinking about my mother. One day, out of the blue, Manya said that we were going back to my mother. She took me to another flat, where a woman I did not recognize opened the door and said she was my mother. At that moment I believed her. It turned out that Manya was afraid to keep me with her, because her brothers were collaborating with the Germans. That was why Manya entrusted me to Bronya and Antanas Karaliauskas, who did not have any children of their own. They gave me the name Renate Karaliauskavichiute in the hope that my mother would not survive.
At the beginning Bronya and Antanas treated me well. Mother came to visit me from time to time, but Bronya used to make sure that I should not see or hear my real mother. Once Mother came by when I was at home on my own, but I did not open the door, saying that we were afraid of thieves and did not open the door to strangers. After the war Mother told me that she had been taken aback by my answer, but on the other hand she had been happy to hear my voice.
However later, when Antanas was taken by Germans for some service from which he never came back, things had changed. Bronya began drinking heavily and forcing me to drink vodka as well: it was revolting. If I refused to drink, she used to force my mouth open and pour the vodka in. It was terrible; I tried to spit it out without anybody noticing. Ever since, I have been unable to bear even the smell of alcohol.
But the most awful thing was that Bronya used to abandon me, a girl of 5, leaving me on my own for several days. During that time I would feed on bread and butter, which I used to spread in thick layers on my bread and then sprinkle with sugar. If my behaviour was not to Bronya’s liking, she would beat me or make me kneel on dried peas in the corner. That used to hurt a great deal. I don’t know what crime I had committed, although I was quite a mischievous child. I used to think that God was punishing me.
Bronya had taught me to pray, and used to take me regularly with her to the Catholic Church. She believed that prayers would save me from death. Ever since then, despite this having no connection at all with religion, I love visiting churches and listening to church music.
At the end of the war I remember an incident when there was a lot of shooting. We were running to the shelter. I was ill with whooping cough and kept coughing and stopping to get my breath, unable to run any further. Bronya came over to me and smacked me hard on the face. Perhaps in that situation there was nothing else to be done, but I still remember that slap on the face.
When the fighting was coming closer to Kaunas at the end of the war, Bronya took me with her to the country where I played with the Lithuanian children. No one in the village suspected that I was a Jewish girl. One event from the time spent with Bronya in the village I will never forget. There was heavy shelling and a bomb hit some buildings. We ran to look what happened: there were bodies of children without arms or legs scattered in a field. I could not understand why one boy without a leg was so white and did not scream.
After Lithuania had been liberated from the Germans, we went back into Kaunas. Father’s sister, Hiena Labensky, returned from Russia and went to see Bronya so as to take me back, but Bronya refused outright to let me go, saying that she would only give me back to my mother. Afew days later my aunt’s husband, an army doctor, Simha Labensky, appeared in the flat in his army uniform. My uncle offered Bronya money for having looked after me, but she demanded a huge sum and my uncle left. The next day I looked out of the window and saw some men in militia uniform. I said to Bronya, ‘Let’s jump out of the window.’ At that moment Simha and his friend Liubecki, disguised as militiamen, came into the flat. My uncle placed a large sum of money on the table and picked me up and we all left together. Bronya fainted. My uncle was carrying me and, just as two years previously with Manya, I started shouting, biting and scratching.
I did not like ‘Mama Bronya’. After the war when she used to come and visit us, I did not go up to her to give her a hug. Mother scolded me on more than one occasion for being so cold towards Bronya.
My uncle took me to my aunt, who hugged and kissed me and said that she was my real mother. I believed her. My uncle and aunt were living in a large flat belonging to a Jewish family who used to give temporary shelter to Jews from different backgrounds. All those Jews with long beards I found frightening and ugly. When they used to come to the flat I would hide under the table saying, ‘Another Jid is coming’.
Later I was taken to Vitebsk, where there was a military hospital in which my uncle worked. I did not feel comfortable there and was afraid of everyone and everything. Children in our yard, sensing my fear, used to taunt me. My uncle told the chief doctor at the hospital about me; his advice was to teach me to give as good as I got. That was what my uncle did, telling me I should stand up for myself. The next day I punched a boy on the nose, which started to bleed. I thought I had killed him. I could still remember from the ghetto that when people began bleeding that meant that they were dying. It turned out that the boy I had punched was the son of the chief doctor, who after shaking my uncle’s hand said that everything would be all right now. That was indeed how it turned out; I stopped being frightened, slept calmly at night and went out into the yard without a care in the world. When the war was over, we moved to Vilnius.
My energetic mother had also succeeded in sending my brother to a village to what she had thought was a good family. Apart from my brother, the family was also sheltering a few other Jews for short periods and an escaped POW. Someone informed on them and the Polizei came to look for him. When the POW caught sight of the Gestapo people, he ran into the shed and set himself on fire. The head of the household was arrested and never returned. His wife was warned by the Gestapo that the same would happen to her if she went on hiding POWs or Jews. Terrified, she took Izya back into Kaunas where she abandoned him in front of the Catholic church. My brother, Izya, disappeared forever. My mother was told that people saw Gestapo men arresting a Jewish boy at that place.
After the war some Jews in Israel managed to obtain the status of one of the ‘Righteous among Nations’ for this woman. An article was published describing the rescue of a small child with the surname Badesh, whom they had to hand on to another family, but who survived. Someone telephoned me one day and said that my brother was alive. You can imagine how agitated we all were, but it turned out that they had simply read an article about that woman full of ridiculous assertions and lies.
I even went to Kaunas so as to meet with her and ask what had really happened to my brother. For a long time she refused to see me, until eventually I was able to obtain a meeting with her daughter through a lawyer. She kept contradicting herself, saying that her mother had seen Izya after the war, working in a garage; she did not admit that her mother had abandoned Izya to his fate.
Mother was transferred to Stutthof and survived. After the liberation she worked for nine months in a barracks in Germany. She sent a letter to Bronya, who told my mother that I had been taken away from her; my mother was in despair, thinking that I was no longer alive. Nevertheless she went to Kaunas to look for me. At the station in Vilnius, by chance she bumped into an acquaintance, a person called Kibarsky, who told her that I was living there with my aunt.
Meanwhile I had been settling down and had started to call my aunt ‘Mama’. I was very fond of my uncle; it was a real ‘love affair’. Then all of a sudden, yet another woman appeared saying, ‘I am your real mother’. I got angry and said, ‘I don’t want any more Mamas. My Mama was young and beautiful and well dressed, and you . . . ’ Mother naturally looked terrible, dressed in a makeshift smock sewn together from soldiers’ greatcoats. She refused of course to give in, and with a great deal of patience, perseverance, presents and loving care managed to win over my heart.
Mother married a second time. We lived in Vilnius where I studied medicine. I married Wolf (Zeev) Sharas. In 1971 we arrived in Israel. Here I immediately started working in a health centre as a paediatrician. I have two children and four wonderful grandchildren. Mother worked as a bookkeeper. She is 93 now, mentally alert and blessed with a wonderful memory. She lives in a flat on her own.
To this day I have not forgiven the Germans for their evil deeds and I have always refused to go to Germany.
First published in 2011 by Vallentine Mitchell
London, Portland, OR