‘Like opening a wound’: Holocaust survivor shares experiences

Or later, Lewin, stock-still, sedated and smuggled out of the ghetto in a suitcase carried by her petrified mother.

Lewin had to pause several times as she spoke, choking back tears.

“I’m sorry that I have to do this,” she said of her talk, wiping her eyes. “It’s like opening a wound over and over again,” but telling her story is the only way she knows to use her experiences to bring good to the world, to cut through the hatred she still sees many places, including Vermont.

Lewin spoke last week to about 45 people at the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe about the atrocities of the Holocaust and the impact on her native Lithuania.

Lewin, 79, who used to teach at the University of Vermont, has told her story many times — at Stowe High School, Peoples Academy, Harwood Union High School, and the seventh-graders at Hazen Union in Hardwick, who came to the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe last week and stayed hours past their allotted time, asking questions and learning more about the Holocaust.

Death camp

Lewin was born to Jewish parents Jan. 11, 1940, in Lithuania. When she was six months old, the Soviets invaded Lithuania, seized Jewish property and exiled hundreds of Jews to Siberia. When Lewin was about a year and a half old, on June 22, 1941, things got worse — Germany invaded Lithuania, chasing out the Soviets, killing some of the Jewish people who lived there, and giving the rest until Aug. 15 to move into the ghetto in Kovno.

Lewin, her parents, her grandparents, and a handful of aunts, uncles and cousins, including the infant Shoshanna, ended up in the ghetto, along with about 29,000 other Jewish Lithuanians.

After the ghetto was sealed Aug. 15, 1941, Nazi troops asked for male volunteers to help translate documents. Lewin said 526 men from the Kovno ghetto volunteered, were taken outside and summarily shot. Among them was Lewin’s uncle.

Lewin’s mother was among the first in the family to realize Jewish people from the Kovno Ghetto were being killed. But by October, it became clear to everyone, when the Nazis organized a “roundup,” calling all ghetto occupants to the center and deciding who lived or died.

Ten thousand people, including Lewin’s grandparents, an aunt and uncle, and some cousins, perished in the first roundup, and the next month, 10,000 more were slaughtered.

“This was a jail; this was a death camp with barbed wire all around,” Lewin said.

It was also a work camp. Men went to work in factories, while women were forced to make and sort Nazi uniforms and clothing.

The women were taken to a warehouse every day to work, and before long, Lewin’s mother found the key to the family’s salvation there. She met a priest there who was taking Jewish children to Christian homes to hide them, and promised Lewin’s mother that, if she could smuggle little Henia out of the ghetto, he’d find her a place to live.

So Lewin’s father built a secret wall in their home, and every day while her parents were at the work camp, Lewin and Shoshanna, her little cousin, would hide and play there.

An old Christian friend volunteered to take Henia, so one day, as her mother was going to work with the women’s brigade, she sedated Henia and put her into a suitcase.

She was stopped along the way, but traded her gold watch and the red leather boots she loved in exchange for the officer not opening the suitcase.

When her father’s friend picked up the suitcase with Lewin in it, a Lithuanian police officer stopped him to check his papers, but when a Jeep full of Nazis asked him for directions, he let him go.

“The irony of being saved by a Jeep full of Nazis” was not lost on Lewin.

“I was three and a half years old,” Lewin said. She doesn’t remember “how my mother was able to get me to understand” that staying in the Christian family’s home was only temporary, even though she had to call her foster family Mama and Papa and go to church.

“I promised to keep a secret. She promised to visit,” Lewin said.

At Christmas that year, Lewin’s foster family threw a party, and Lewin remembers Santa handing her a favorite toy — a stuffed bulldog — that’s she’d left behind in the ghetto.

“Santa’s shoes were my mother’s,” Lewin remembered with a tearful chuckle.

A while later, her foster family, dressed in Sunday best, drove past the ghetto, and instructed Lewin to wave at a certain time. Her father would be able to see her, but she wouldn’t see him.

“I can still feel it,” she said. “I can still feel the emotion of waving and not seeing my dad.”

Incredibly, both of Lewin’s parents survived the Holocaust. Her father escaped by jumping out a seventh-floor window after his finger was crudely amputated.

He’d set up a meeting place with Lewin’s mother if either of them managed to get away, and “when my dad didn’t come back, my mother’s turn came,” Lewin said.

She donned a nun’s cape to camouflage the Star of David she was forced to wear at all times and found her husband on a potato farm. The two lived in a root cellar until the farmer found them and invited them to come in for a meal.

Shortly after the war ended, the Soviets occupied Lithuania, and to escape their oppression, the family — Lewin and her parents, who reunited with Shoshanna — fled to a displaced person camp, then to Israel.

“We were told we’re always going to be ‘the other,’ no matter where we go,” and Israel was the only place “where Jews will not be treated as ‘others.’

“There, no one will call you a ‘dirty Jew,’” Lewin said, choking back tears. “I still get emotional” remembering that.

By the time Lewin was 13, her family had moved to Montreal, where they remained until her mother died in her 80s. Lewin’s father died just a few years after that.

Lewin became a Hebrew teacher, and in 1996 returned to Lithuania to try to find her foster family. When she saw a policeman in uniform, “you can imagine what my stomach felt like,” she said.

Hatred on the rise

Lewin says she sees anti-Semitism most places she goes, and it’s increasing.

“It’s unbelievable,” she said. “It really hurts.”

When swastikas show up in communities, including Stowe Middle School and Peoples Academy Middle Level, that indicates to Lewin that the hatred that killed some members of her family hasn’t been eradicated.

“I tried for years and years to not think about it and not talk about it,” but “we see these things happen again and again.”

“Hate is on the rise,” said David Fainsilber, rabbi at the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe.

Before Lewin spoke, a somber line of people lit 11 candles — six for the 6 million Jewish people slain during the Holocaust; five for the 5 million others killed, including homosexual people and people with disabilities; and one for the righteous others who helped stave off the atrocities.

“If you believe that history is something that belongs to the past, you are mistaken. … You do not understand the reach of the terror and the fear of the Holocaust and its implications. We need to feel those events as part of ourselves,” Fainsilber said.

“We have a part in curbing hate and increasing love.”