between the two states was open. My parents could leave Bielsk Podlaski in Poland and travel to Vishey in Lithuania if they so wished.
It was most likely early in 1941, possibly March or April after the winter snows had melted, when Yitzchak, my father, crossed from Poland to Lithuania. He was travelling alone, for my mother wanted her parents to approve of her choice of husband before she brought herself and us children to see them – similar to how she handled Dvora, her mother-in-law, when they had reconciled all those years earlier. My mother may have been standing up for her perceived rights, or may have been seeking an apology, but the explanation I later heard from her was that because the fuel business needed one of them to be there, they couldn’t leave together.
How could they be planning a reunion during the war? They would have had no indication that the gears of the Holocaust were already grinding up the Jews in the German half of Poland, for by 1940 the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos had trapped the Jews of those large cities into a death spiral – 1941 was a year before the Wannsee Conference that introduced the term ‘Final Solution’, but the Nazi intention was quite clear; just the efficient German mechanics for the process needed to be refined.
With Germany and Russia being allies, my parents would have heard or known little of this in their part of Poland. For them life went on and my mother could consider a visit to Lithuania to see her parents in this period of calm. My father during his visit would have impressed my grandparents, Chaim and Mina. Well dressed, educated, wealthy with his own business and a family of renown in Bielsk Podlaski, he would not have needed long to impress the farmer and his wife.
My mother must have been satisfied with her husband, Yitzchak’s, reception and so it was May or June of 1941 when we went to see my grandparents for the first time. I recall it was sunny and not cold, so summer was underway. My mother would have had a passport indicating she was a Lithuanian going home to see her parents. There would have been no indication she was Jewish, as the Russians did not require yellow stars on the clothing. The Russians may have stamped the papers or the border may have been unmanned, but I don’t recall any hold-up on the way. The border wasn’t far away. We dressed and packed lightly for the planned short trip.
There was a bustling river crossing at the Polish–Lithuanian border and, being an inquisitive boy of seven, I watched with fascination as our hired boatman steered our vessel through the strong current so we were not swept downstream and were able to reach the jetty on the other side. Boats were going back and forth as the river wasn’t very wide. Was it the Neiman River we crossed that day?
It was a peaceful day, for my mother was to make peace with her parents after an absence of seventeen years. The headstrong eighteen-year-old girl was now the smartly dressed thirty-five-year-old mother of an eleven-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son. She was experienced in running the family business and her household, and had married into a good family. She was able to hold her head high when she returned to Vishey.
On the other side of the river, my grandfather, Chaim, a full-bearded outdoor man in his sixties, waited with a droshky with which he then took us to Vishey. My mother sat beside her father and we children travelled with the suitcases in the back. I remember Chaya took her school bag with her. It was a leather satchel with an ornate flap and a curved handle. I don’t recall what she had in it.
When we reached Vishey, my mother saw her mother, Mina, for the first time in all those years. I have no memory of how the reunion took place.
Chaya and her satchel
I was only seven, but still have some memories of the house in Vishey. Half of the ground floor was a stable. I slept above the stove in a nook into which I had to be lifted, the pripetshik. This is the Russian word for the shelf above an oven, adopted into Yiddish and later immortalised in the Yiddish song ‘Oyfn Pripetshik’ which is usually translated as ‘On the Hearth’. It was the same nook Tila had been lifted into after her fall through the ice years earlier, and where she was found dead the following morning.
I didn’t know this. I still remember it was warm and snug from the fire below. Even though it was early summer, the nights were still cool. I remember the garden – a brown horse, a cow, goats and many chickens and, of course, the lake. It must have been a delight for me.
I don’t recall how long we were in Vishey, but I suspect the trip would have been planned to be for just a week or two. My mother needed to return to her role in the business. It would have been unlike her to holiday for long or to neglect her husband or her duties, for throughout her life she never failed to fulfil her commitments.
My mother would have found that her brothers and sisters – my uncles and aunts – had grown up and moved on in the seventeen years she was absent. The three younger sisters, Rivka, Malka and Bruria, were no longer children. Bruria had made aliyah years earlier and was living in Palestine. Her brothers, Daniel and Yosef, also were no longer in Vishey. Of the seven surviving children of Chaim and Mina, she may have only found her younger brother, Shmuel, still there.
It was important for the family reunion that she should see her siblings before returning to Poland.
8
My uncle, Daniel, the eldest Lazovski son, lived in Yurburg, a town in Lithuania 150 kilometres directly north of Vishey. Yurburg was a pretty town built on the slopes of a modest mountain on the northern shore of the Neiman River. It had a wooden synagogue, but much of the town was of brick construction of a more northern European style with pitched roofs rather than the barn-like design of Vishey.
Yurburg (Jurbarkas)
Yurburg is the Yiddish name for Jurbarkas and, like Vishey, was close to a border, but Vishey, being down south, abutted Russian-occupied Poland, whereas the north of Lithuania was right on the border with East Prussia. This was a State of Germany separated from the rest of Germany following the Treaty of Versailles after World War One. The German invasion of Poland ensured East Prussia was once more a seamless part of the German nation. Yurburg was only 10 kilometres from this border with Germany. Here, there were nearly 2000 Jews, about 40 per cent of the population. They owned sixty-nine of the seventy-five businesses and eighteen of the nineteen light industries.
Daniel was a motor mechanic and driver, and had his own leased workshop. He was single, as was Aunt Rivka, who had also moved from Vishey and was living somewhere near Yurburg.
Of all the Lazovski uncles and aunts, only Uncle Yosef and his wife, Sara, had children. Yosef had married Sara Glazer from Yurburg and they had two sons. Azriel was ten and Lolek nine, both older than me when I met them in April 1941. Yosef was also a motor mechanic and leased a garage near the Glazer family home in Yurburg where they all lived with his parents-in-law. In the 1939 Jurbarkas telephone directory, there is a Jankelis Glazeris listed, but no Lazovski. The town had 116 telephones, forty-one belonging to Jews. Vishey had fourteen telephones in total, but none to my grandparents’ home.
Lithuania had avoided the fate of Poland in 1939 as a concession to the fact the Germans and Russians were bedfellows. The Germans, following personal threats from Adolf Hitler, had already humiliated Lithuania earlier in 1939 by occupying the country’s major port area on the Baltic.
The Lithuanians considered themselves neutral, but in reality, ninety per cent of their trade was with Germany; the people were mostly sympathetic to the Germans and felt they were subjugated under the Russians, whom they detested.
However, the German and Soviet allegiance also meant the people
