Shifra’s Story

I want to tell the story of my wife’s cousin, Shifra, one of the child survivors of the Holocaust.  I received this information directly from Shifra, but the below story also is included in exhibits at Yad Vashem (the Israeli Holocaust Center in Jerusalem) and the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.    

Shifra was born in 1937 in Kovno, Lithuania, which for centuries had been a spiritual and cultural center for Eastern European Jewry.  On June 24, 1941, the Germans occupied the city.  By the end of July, 1941, they had murdered 10,000 Jews, one quarter of the Jewish population.  The remaining Jews were then given one month to move into the ghetto, which was sealed off in August.  Shifra went into the Kovno ghetto with her parents and other relatives.  One of her uncles had married a gentile woman; she was able to revert to her former “non-Jewish” identity and remain outside the ghetto with “clean” Lithuanian papers.

On October 28, 1941, the Germans ordered all Jews to report to the Ninth Fort, a stronghold just outside Kovno.  At the Fort, the Jews were separated randomly into two groups.  Shifra, her parents, her 3-month old brother (just born inside the ghetto), one uncle and two aunts were taken to one side.  Shifra’s grandparents and eight uncles and aunts were in a group taken into the woods.  Shifra remembers hearing shots.  No one returned from the woods.  9,000 Jews (half of them children) were shot to death at the Ninth Fort on that day.  No one knows how or why the two small children, Shifra and David, were permitted to survive and return to the Ghetto with the family members and others who had escaped death.  While Shifra didn’t fully understand what had happened, she sensed why, from then on, she and her brother had to spend their days hidden behind the sofa, within a double wall built by their father, rewarded by their mother at the end of the day with a piece of candy if they had been quiet.  

The Kovno ghetto became a virtual concentration camp.  The German held frequent “Aktions,” when soldiers would come to the ghetto, arresting Jews for transport to concentration camps (primarily Dachau) or otherwise randomly killing them.  Ghetto inhabitants were put to forced labor, mainly in military installations outside the ghetto or other jobs related to the Nazi war effort.  Some worked in the ghetto workshops.  Shifra's parents worked in the ghetto kitchen and were able to bring home potato peels to feed their children.  Her Uncle Faivush and Aunt Goldie sold ghetto garbage to farmers for pig feed.  They also were active in the ghetto underground, from which they received information in early 1943 that the Nazis were planning to empty the ghetto of children and kill them.  Through the Lithuanian aunt who lived outside the ghetto, the family quickly made contact with a farmer whom Shifra’s grandparents had known before the war and begged him to hide Shifra and David.  The farmer reluctantly agreed. 

On the next garbage day, Shifra (age 6) and David (age 2.5) were smuggled out of the ghetto.  After promising to stay very quiet, each child was put into a burlap garbage bag, and the bags were then put on a wheelbarrow under the heaping sacks of garbage.  Faivush and Goldie took the barrow to the ghetto gate where a guard plunged a pitchfork into the load to check if anyone was hidden beneath.  Luckily, it missed the children.  Faivush and Goldie pulled the barrow outside the ghetto to the barn where garbage was stored, marked the children’s bags, and left them.  The children stayed in the bags, buried under the garbage, all day.  Once it was dark, the farmer came, dug them out, hid them in his wagon, and took them to his farm.  

At the farm, the children spent their days scared and alone, hidden in a small room.  To make matters worse, the farmer’s daughter threatened to report her parents for hiding the two young Jews if they would not let her spend time with her Nazi soldier boyfriend.  Whenever he came to the farm, Shifra and David had to go out and hide flat in the strawberry fields until it was safe -- two small children, laying silently on the ground for hours, in the sweltering summer sun and the freezing Lithuanian winter.  This is how they survived the next 18 months.  But at least they had survived; on March 27, 1943, the Nazis had executed the special “Aktion” in the Kovno ghetto, rounding up more than 2,000 children and shooting them to death.

On July 8, 1944, with the war lost and the Red Army approaching Kovno, the German authorities decided to abandon the city.  In one final spiteful gesture, they set fire to the ghetto.  The remaining residents stayed hidden in underground bunkers they had built.  However, most of the bunkers weren’t airtight or structurally sound and many people choked or were smothered to death by the smoke and gas that permeated the bunkers from the fires. Others were killed when the burning ghetto buildings collapsed over the bunkers, trapping those hidden below.  Overall, the fiery destruction of the ghetto caused the death of some 2,000 Jews. Of the 30,000 Jews who initially had been confined in the Kovno ghetto, only 90 remained to climb out of the bunkers to see the Red Army enter the city on August 1, 1944.  Among those 90 survivors were Shifra’s parents, Goldie and Faivush, and Faivush’s wife (Faivush had been trained as a structural engineer, and the family’s bunker was one of the few that held).  When the concentration camps were liberated, only 2,000 Kovno Jews were found alive.  Together with those who had survived the war in the ghetto or in hiding, they accounted for eight percent of the original population of the ghetto.

The family immediately went to retrieve Shifra and David.  From the farm, they returned to the house they had abandoned when forced to move to the ghetto 3.5 years earlier.  In the backyard, Shifra’s father dug up a box that he had hidden containing important documents, money and, most important, photographs of those who would never come back.  They then began their journey to the promised land -- Palestine.  En route, David contracted diphtheria and died in February, 1945 in a refugee camp in East Berlin, four months short of his fifth birthday.  Shifra, too, became very ill, and the family remained in Germany for five years until she was strong enough to travel.  Shifra and her family finally arrived in the young State of Israel in May, 1950.

Today, Shifra is an Israeli citizen.  She has three children and ten grandchildren.  She calls them her revenge against the Nazis. 

What can we learn from the story of Shifra and her family? What are the lessons of the Holocaust? 

• The depth of man’s capacity to commit evil is without limits;
• We must never allow ourselves to remain defenseless against that evil (the very basis of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution); and
• The Jewish nation cannot be destroyed; it will rise from dust and ashes.  It is immortal.

Thank you for reading this piece of recorded history.  The survivors of the Holocaust are leaving us now.  We must keep alive the lessons they leave behind with us.  And we must make sure that we understand and remember what we learn.  NEVER AGAIN!