20 Stories in 20 Countries
A sampling from the 1,230 Centropa interviews and 25,050 digitized family photographs now in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archive.
ESTONIA
I mean, who did not know the name Shumiacher!
Bluma Lepiku
Grandmother Dora, twice a widow, then rented a house and opened a kosher restaurant and inn for traders and sales agents. She was a terrific cook. To this day I haven’t come across a better one. A number of men who went to eat there proposed to her on the spot, so she would bring out her two sons and introduce them. And that was the end of that. She never remarried.
As for my father Yakov, well, as a violinist he was superb. I mean, who did not know the name Shumiacher! In fact, one day a young Jewish woman came from Tartu to carry out some family business, so she had lunch in Grandmother’s restaurant. She heard the violinist in the next room, fell in love before she even saw him, and asked to be introduced. That woman, Luba Gore, became my mother and I was born in 1926.
Bluma Lepiku was born in 1926 in Tallinn. During the war her family fled into the Soviet Union. They returned to Tallin, where Bluma married, worked in as the controller in a toy factory, and remained active in her Jewish community.
Bluma Lepiku was interviewed by Ella Levitskaya in Talinn in 2006.
GERMANY
How do you know which way I’m going?
Rosa Rosenstein
I was working for my father in a factory building in Berlin Mitte, one of those with large windows. My desk was at the window. There was a men’s wear business across the way. A young, good-looking man sat at the sewing machine. We would often smile at each other. I didn't know who he was, and he didn't know who I was. One day a man came by and he brought me a box, a kilo of sweets. “This is sent from the young man over there.” That's how it started.
A few days later, I was in a nearby bookshop. I turned around and this young man was standing there. He asked if he might accompany me home—he was heading the same way. I said, “How do you know which way I’m going?” We laughed. His name was Maximilian Weisz; we called him Michi, and we were married in the Oranienburgerstrasse Synagogue. Two little girls walked before us, sprinkling flowers. Two five-year old boys carried my train behind me, but they kept fighting with each other and almost knocked me over.
Rosa and Michi had two daughters and remained in Berlin until they fled to Michi’s hometown of Budapest, They sent Rosa’s mother and their daughters to relatives in Tel Aviv. Michi was taken by the Hungarians into forced labor and perished. Rosa survived the Budapest ghetto and after the war married Alfred Rosenstein, who had lost his family, too, and came from Vienna. By this time, Rosa’s daughters were teenagers and decided to stay in Israel. For the rest of her life, Rosa traveled between Tel Aviv and Vienna.
Rosa Rosenstein was interviewed by Tanja Eckstein in Vienna in 2002, when Rosa was ninety-five years old.
BULGARIA
Mario Brontsa hired practically every Jew who could play, blow, or bang on anything.
Leon Lazarov
They used to call our Jewish neighborhood 'the musical neighborhood,' because just about everyone played something. I played the violin and taught my cousins; some even became pianists. There were a lot of people interested in music in our provincial town back then. After all, what were the choices?
In 1936, I started working as an assistant conductor in the Jewish Choir in our Jewish community center. We performed songs in four languages that had nothing to do with each other: in Ladino, Bulgarian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Believe it or not, we had eighty people in the choir.
This picture is the Jewish Symphony Orchestra in Sofia in 1939. No one had ever thought that such an orchestra was possible. We were, after all, amateurs. But it was a symphony orchestra indeed. Mario Brontsa hired practically every Jew who could play, blow, or bang on anything and he had worked with great musicians. Now he had us—dentists, shopkeepers, engineers, lots of students and economists. This orchestra was a real phenomenon. And we formed it right before the persecution of Jews had begun.
Leon Lazarov was, like a great many Bulgarian Jewish men, conscripted into forced labor and remained in forced labor for four years. Toward the end of his internment he met Stella Beny while she was exiled from her home in Sofia to Kujstendil (as were four thousand other Jews). The two fell in love and married in 1944. Soon after, most of their Jewish friends, around eighty percent of all Bulgarian Jews, emigrated to Israel. Leon remained, became an economist, and he and Stella divided their time between Sofia and Prague. Their sons also played music. One plays and delivers lectures in Sofia on electronic music, the other remained in Prague, and went into manufacturing. Leon and Stella’s grandsons work as artists and writers in Prague.
Leon Lazarov was interviewed by Leonina Israel in Sofia in 2003.
POLAND
The girls in our school told us if we wanted to date them we’d have to speak with them only in Hebrew.
Michal Friedman
Kovel really was a Jewish town, and I was a very good soccer player. We had several competing Jewish teams and also Polish teams, like the Police Sports Club and WKS, or the Military Sports Club.
In my soccer team, the Hasmonei, the goalkeeper Kola Chmielarski was a Pole who spoke Yiddish as well as we did.
Our team was supported by some of Kovel’s criminal gangs and, one time, when I scored a hat trick—three goals in one game—those guys from the underworld rushed onto the field, tossed me in the air, and yelled, “Molodets! Attaboy!” Then they took me out for a beer.
Aside from soccer, my passions were Hebrew and girls, and the girls in our school told us if we wanted to date them we’d have to speak with them only in Hebrew. How I remember Szewa Werba, the prettiest among them.
I had to court her in Hebrew. After all, we have the greatest erotic poem in the world, the 'Song of Songs.' And I knew the 'Song of Songs' almost by heart.
I graduated from the gymnasium at the age of 17. It was 1930.
Michal Friedman served in the Polish Army in 1939, then after Poland’s collapse he fled into the Soviet Union, joined the Red Army, and later the Polish Army. After the war he married, had one son, and became a military lecturer and publisher. During the anti-Jewish purges in 1967 he was fired, then became a Yiddish and Hebrew literature translator and a teacher of Yiddish and Hebrew.
Michal Friedman was interviewed by Hanna Grupinska in Warsaw in 2004.
BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
We were just about the only Jews in town.
Josip Papo
This is the wedding of my parents, Rifka Levi and Albert Papo, in Sarajevo on 26 June 1919. The women are wearing traditional Sephardic headpieces. The men are wearing a dark fez as Muslims wore red ones.
My father and mother met in Sarajevo. Back then young Jews went to dances in the Jewish community. My paternal grandmother told my father that when he shakes hands with a girl to touch the palm of her hand. If her hand is smooth, then she’s lazy and won’t work. If he feels calluses, then she has a rough-worn hand and she’s a hard-working woman. So, Rifka had rough hands and dad proposed. They moved to Makarska on the Dalmatian coast and opened a retail shop. We were just about the only Jews in town and there was certainly no antisemitism.
During the war, we had no problems at first, although I was thrown in jail in 1941 for being a communist, not a Jew. The Ustasha Croats wanted to shoot me. The Italian officer overseeing them wouldn’t hear of it. Once the Italians capitulated, our family went to the Partisans.
After the war, Josip Papo’s parents returned to Makarska while he studied law, married, raised a family, and practiced law until 2010 in Belgrade.
Josip Papo was interviewed by Ida Labudivic in Belgrade in 2003.
SLOVAKIA
I may be of small stature, but as a setter in volleyball I was notorious.
Ota Gubic
This photograph of me and my classmates was taken in Prievidza in the 1930s. I attended the Jewish school. I wasn't some sort of exceptional student—I got As but I didn't study much at home the way my brother did, who always had his head in his textbooks. I was more into sports.
I attended the Maccabi Sports Club and was a very good volleyball player. I may be of small stature, but as a setter in volleyball I was notorious for being strong on the attack. I loved volleyball in high school as well, and it stayed with me for decades.
Our Maccabi club had about 20-25 members and we had some space at the Jewish elementary school where we practiced in the evenings. I only went through four grades of high school, and in 1936, at the age of 14, I left to learn the printing trade.
Ota Gubic was born in Prievidza in 1922. During the war he was taken into forced labor. He and his brother slipped away and joined the partisans. After the war, Ota Gubic worked as a typesetter in Karlovy Vary. He met his wife Terezia through Hashomer Hatzair and they married in 1947 and had two children.
Ota Gubic was interviewed by Barbora Pokers in Karlovy Vary in 2005.
ROMANIA
I thought: “This one isn’t married. I will marry him!”
Rifca Segal
This is me, Rifca Segal, sitting in the front row, the third from the right. This was in 1936. Look how quiet I was! The picture was taken in my classroom in Sulita. I think I was in the third or fourth grade. The town had around 2,000 people and I know more than sixty percent were Jewish. Maybe more.
I was a very good pupil. I graduated four grades of the Jewish school in Sulita and then went to high school in Botoșani. But after 1941, I was no longer able to study at the Romanian school—all Jews were expelled. So once the Jewish High School was founded in Botoșani I studied there.
Our Hebrew teacher was a rabbi, Motal Frenkel. I thought: “This one isn’t married. I will marry him!” He was very handsome, and he didn’t wear a beard in spite of the fact that he was a rabbi. He went to Israel after the war, and I heard later that he grew a beard, all the way down to the ground. Why, if he wore a beard when I was young I wouldn’t even have looked at him!
Rifca Segal [née Calmanovici] was born in Sulita in 1928. Her family was evacuated to Botoșani in June 1941. After the war she stayed in Botoșani, married, and worked as an accountant. As the Jewish community continued to shrink in the postwar years, Rifca became the last teacher in the Botoșani’s Jewish school, which she closed in 2003.
Rifca Segal was interviewed by Emoke Saltzman in Botosani in 2005.
RUSSIA
All this while he remained an Orthodox Jew and still found time to act in several films.
Galina Borisovna Natarevichl
Grandfather Iosif Lazarevich Raitsykh was born in Astrakhan and graduated from a prestigious school in Baku named for Czar Alexander III, studied medicine in Munich, then worked in the Prince Oldenburgsky Hospital in Petrograd.
In 1917, he married Sara Yankelevna Shamesh from Kharkov and they met because Grandmother had left Kharkov (her parents had been totally against it) and she came to Petrograd, where she found a job as the personal nurse for a family called Shuster. They were very rich and quite ill, so this was her full-time job. Grandfather brought Sara back to his home in Baku.
They lived quite well in a grand apartment with eight rooms and there was even a room for cold food where they delivered ice almost every day. That’s because it would get very hot there.
Other than Russian, Yiddish, German, and Hebrew, Grandfather spoke both Azeri and Armenian with his patients. He also worked for the state overseeing sanitary warehouses. This job took him sometimes to Persia, and every summer he would work in a medical clinic in the mountains of Azerbaijan. All this while he remained an Orthodox Jew and still found time to act in several films. I have these two pictures of him acting and, yes, he was quite corpulent.
One picture is from 1926 when he was playing in a silent film in Baku, In The Name of God. It’s about a peasant who is taken advantage of by religious people, and the Party, of course, rescues him. The other picture was taken in 1936 in a studio in Leningrad, when he was playing in Peter the Great, by Vladimir Petrov.
Galina Borisovna Natarevich, born in in Perm in 1941. She worked in an office in St Petersburg, married and raised a son.
Galina Borisovna Natarevich was interviewed in St Petersburg by Anna Nerush in 2002.
SERBIA
Father Tumpej didn’t just give me a name. By saving me, he gave me a life.
Matilda Kalef Cerge
Father Andrej Tumpej in front of his church with those who sang in his choir during the war. Matilda Kalef Cerge is in the front row, fourth from left; her sister Breda is third from right (a hand is resting on her shoulder), same row. Breda learned to sing in this choir and went on to become the most famous mezzo-soprano in Yugoslavia. Breda entered Father Tumpej’s protection in 1941 as Rahela, and he changed in her name to Breda in her fake ID. After the war, Breda told us, “I couldn’t change my name back. Father Tumpej didn’t just give me a name. By saving me, he gave me a life.”
After they had taken away almost all our family, my mother, completely beside herself, took us to [the Belgrade suburb of] Banovo Brdo, where she begged a Catholic priest, Andrej Tumpej to take us in. Father Tumpej gave us false papers as the out-of-wedlock children of our mother, Antonija Ograjensek, [her maiden name] who had been born Catholic before she converted.
Next to the church is where the nuns lived. They were very polite, and they were thrilled because we knew the Old Testament, which we had learned in Hebrew school. There was no pressure to convert.
Father Tumpej made it possible for us to go to a regular school, and the school director accepted us knowing we didn't have the kinds of school documents we would need from our former school. He simply accepted us on his personal responsibility, meaning, of course, he must have known.
Andrej Tumpej was a man in the true sense of the word.
Matilda Kalef Cerge was interviewed by Rachel Chanin in Belgrade in 2005 and in 2011.
CROATIA
When the occupying Italians were told they had to turn Mostar over to the Croatians, they insisted on taking all the Jews down to Dalmatia to keep us safe.
Albert Eskenazi
My father was taken away from us in Zagreb in 1941; we never saw him again. My mother took my sister and me to Mostar, where the Jewish community cared for us. When the occupying Italians were told they had to turn Mostar over to the Croatians, they insisted on taking all the Jews down to Dalmatia to keep us safe. We ended up in this hotel in Hvar, the Slavija, where we stayed from February until June 1943.
The owner, Tonci Maricic, gave us everything. Tonci made things work. After liberation many Jews came to him, and he came to us in Sarajevo and Zagreb. This friendship lasted as long as he was alive. Things got worse when we were transferred to the island of Rab, but when the Italians capitulated, the partisans rescued us.
Albert Eskenazi remained with the partisans until liberation. In 1948, he emigrated to Israel, and during a trip home, he met his future wife, Sarina Katan. They married in Yugoslavia and had two sons. He worked in a zinc processing plant for three decades and, upon retiring, Albert Eskenazi began working for the Belgrade Jewish community, where he worked until 2004.
Albert Ezkenazi was interviewed in Belgrade by Ida Labudovic in 2003.
TURKEY
The colonel immediately had everything organized. He gave us one and a half days off.
Nesim Levi
When I turned nineteen, I was drafted as a soldier into the Turkish Army. It was April 1943. There were a lot of non-Muslims; we were treated quite well and there was no discrimination among the soldiers. I never moved up in the ranks; I was a private until the end.
About this picture. Yom Kippur was approaching. When we went on duty for construction (to pour cement at the airport), they had assigned this friend of mine to be a water distributor because it was lighter work, and he was this really thin kid. So, he went and asked our lieutenant for a day off so we could fast, and he explained to him it was a religious duty. The lieutenant went and informed the colonel, and the colonel immediately had everything organized. He gave us one and a half days off.
So, in the evening we ate our pre-fast meal in the late afternoon in a special mess and the next day this picture was taken right in the airport we were building in Malatya. The space was allocated to us in the open air, specifically for our davening [praying].
The soldier standing was a rabbi, and his name was Harebi [Rabbi] Izak Rofe. There were around eighty to one hundred Jews and we all fasted.
Nesim Levi opened a clothing store in Istanbul, married, and had two children.
Nesim Levi was interviewed in Istabul in 2005 by Miriam Sulam.
GREECE
I went all over town holding up pictures of my family, asking people who returned from Auschwitz if they could help me find my family. They told me they had been burned.
Mirou-Mairy Angel
Here’s a picture of my three younger siblings: Jema, Isidor, and Rene. Although my mother was well educated, she did not speak Greek well; but that was hardly unusual among the Jews of her generation. When she was born, Salonica wasn’t even in Greece.
Before the deportations began in 1943, a neighbor gave false papers to both me and my brother Albertos, while my father, mother, and four younger siblings fled to the mountains. But since my parents hardly spoke Greek, they were caught, deported, and all of them were murdered.Albertos and I survived in Athens on our false papers and with incredible luck. I kept asking him about our parents and he told me they were fine. When we came back to Salonica after the war, I went all over town holding up pictures of my family, asking people who returned from Auschwitz if they could help me find my family. They told me they had been burned. I screamed at them and said they were crazy. Then Albertos told me, no, those people weren’t crazy. I beat him with my fists and sobbed.
Mairou-Mairy Karasso married Alfredo Angel in 1946. She told Nina, our interviewer, that she was crying during the entire wedding ceremony, as she kept hearing her mother, who had told her often, ‘Just wait and see what a wedding I will make for you!’ Mirou-Mairy Angel was interviewed by Nina Hatzi in Athens in 2006.
BELARUS
I was given a nearly blind horse and a rifle that dated back to the time of the civil war. I didn’t find a single spy.
Kofman Raikhchin
Kofman Raikhchin was born in 1924 in Petrikov, in Belarus. The town stood along the Pripyat River; close to forty percent of the population was Jewish. There were well over a million Jews on Belarussian territory in 1941 and over 800,000 were to be murdered—almost all of them shot by the Waffen SS and the German Army itself. Here is what Kofman Raikhchin told us about June 1941 and his escape.
It was early June 1941. My brother and I had just finished the tenth grade. We felt quite adult. He and I spent several days walking around town with our former schoolmates, all of us talking about the future and making big plans. Then on 22 June 1941 (Sunday), at noon I heard some noise out in the street. We had no radio at home, but our neighbors heard Molotov’s speech and ran out of their houses.
Now we knew. We were at war. Together with our classmates, we all went running as fast as we could to the local military enlistment office. They enlisted every boy except one. Me. I was only seventeen years old.
I was allowed to join the Komsomol [youth] Battalion and our task was to go around the neighboring villages and ask the peasants if they had noticed any enemy spies. I was given a nearly blind horse and a rifle that dated back to the time of the civil war. I didn’t find a single spy. Day by day the front line was coming closer.
On 5 July, the first barge for evacuating people sailed away down the Pripyat River. Then, early in the morning on 19 July, Zaretsky came to our house on horseback. He talked to my father in Yiddish. “Velvl, you have to leave immediately; you have to save your children.”
So, we packed, moved to the station, and boarded a freight train. That was, by the way, the first time I ever rode on a train.
Kofman Raikhchin’s family made their way to Uzbekistan where he worked as a shepherd. He then helped doctors battle malaria and on his eighteenth birthday he signed up to fight. The photo taken here was taken in Kazan in 1943, when Kofman was recovering from a battle wound.
Kofman moved to Leningrad to study in the Leningrad College for Fine Mechanics and Optics, and then worked in the defense industry for thirty-five years. He married Natalia Ginzburg, a teacher.
Kofman Raikhchin was interviewed by Olga Egudina in St. Petersburg in 2006.
Hungary
Mom, you'll see, we'll meet again. You'll see, we'll meet again!
Erszebet Barsony
My son Erwin, 15 years old, was very tall, 1.92 centimeters (6 foot 3 inches). When they came to take us away, a soldier admired his shoes, so he demanded them. Erwin went to the rail yards barefoot. After eight days in horrid conditions, they deported us. And after three days, on 12 July 1944 we arrived in Birkenau.
The first thing they did was separate me from Erwin and they told everyone in which group to stand. There was such confusion in my head I couldn't even comprehend it. I was standing there with my emotions numbed.
Then Erwin suddenly turned up, hugged and kissed me, and told me in tears, 'Mom, you'll see, we'll meet again. You'll see, we'll meet again!' He could think more clearly than I could. That poor boy, he tried to comfort me. This was a horror. I never saw my 15-year-old son again.
My son, who had been playing the violin for nine years, was planning to go to the conservatory, and his teachers had great hopes for him! He wanted to be an artist, a violinist. Nothing has become of him.
After nine months in concentration camps, Erzsebet Barsony was liberated from Bergen Belsen. She returned home to learn that her son Erwin had been taken into forced labor and chose to stay with an elderly man he knew from home. They were murdered together. Erzsebet remarried and worked in a fabric shop. She passed away while giving her interview to Centtopa. She passed away while giving her interview to Klara Lazok and Viktoria Kutasi in 2005. She was 95 years old.
CZECHIA
This question of why did I return and not someone else, this feeling of guilt, we’ve probably all got it.
Alena Munkova
Terezin was an amazing education for me. First of all, I wouldn’t be the person I am now, but that’s normal. But mainly I was introduced to values there that I would never have had the chance to know. For example, what friendship can do for a person, but not only that. How important the influence of art is.
There, the people that had come to Terezin, and they were professors, artists, all of them truly tried to convey what they knew. There's no way that could happen in a normal situation.
Everything was experienced intensely because there you couldn't count on having time. I mean, you didn't have the feeling that time was uselessly running between your fingers. The intensity of the time was also given by the fact that we were hungry—all the time. Between the hunger, the not knowing who was being put on transports to the East, that made everything so intense. I never experienced such intensity before, or since.
I was 15 or 16 then, and everything the children were doing there, whether they were drawing something, or writing, was full-on.
The entire leadership of the Ghetto tried to do as much as possible for us. Because in their view the only ones that had a chance of survival were the children and the teenagers. In the end, it wasn't like that but that was the hope they clung to.
The question of why did I return and not someone else, this feeling of guilt, we've probably all got it.
Alena Munkova married a fellow Terezin prisoner and worked as a script writer and journalist after the war.
Alena Munkova was interviewed by Terezie Holmerová in Prague in 2006.
NORTH MACEDONIA
I figured I’d be lucky if I finished the war as a sergeant. I did a little better than that: at twenty-four I was made a brigadier general.
Beno Ruso
I joined Hashomer Hatzair in Bitola because Pepe Kamhi was my idol. He was the fastest runner, the best looking, a real leader. Another reason: I was in love with his sister Roza. When they opened our ken, our clubhouse, there was a good-sized library in it, and being as poor as we were, we had no books at home, so I went there every day to read. And that is where I learned about the world, even before I saw the next valley.
Pepe was unlucky. When the war came, he wasn’t able to get away and the Bulgarians took him and everyone else in his family, and my mother, to the trains that ended up in Treblinka. Roza and I managed to flee.
When the war began and I found the Partisans, I figured I’d be lucky if I finished the war as a sergeant. I did a little better than that: at twenty-four I was made a brigadier general, and I fought in every battle until the day we surrounded the Ustasha near the Austrian border in May 1945.
When I returned to Bitola, I found Roza and we married immediately. But we didn’t celebrate. In fact, we mourned that day because we were almost totally alone.
I remained in the Yugoslav Army until my retirement and in that time I met with Tito three times. The first time was in the 1960s to discuss military issues. The second time was in 1974 when we met and talked about the old times during the war. And the third time was in 1980, when I was asked to be one of his pallbearers.
Been Ruso was interviewed by Rachel Chain in Skopje in 2005.
LITHUANIA
He returned to Lithuania, where nobody was waiting for him. I was also lonely.
Geta Jakiene
In 1946, after we returned from Central Asia to Lithuania, I went to work as a waitress. One day, a friend of my father’s brought a young friend to the restaurant. We were introduced and I took to him right away. He asked if he could walk me home and I said yes but, being a decent girl, I did not ask him in. We stood on the threshold for a long time. The next day we went for a walk. His name was Kalman Zak.
He was born in 1925 in Shakai. His father died young, leaving his mother with twelve children. All of them except Kalman were shot. Kalman managed to hide, later surviving a ghetto and a concentration camp. He returned to Lithuania, where nobody was waiting for him. I was also lonely. Kalman and I started seeing each other. Both of us were raised Jewish and decided to wed according to Jewish tradition.
We spoke Yiddish at home, and we observed as many Jewish traditions as we could during the Soviet years. We marked all the holidays, attended synagogue, and our children had their brit milahs [ritual circumcisions] and bar mitzvahs. We were members of the Kaunas Jewish religious community. We told them all about what happened to our families.
Geta Ushpitsene was born in Shakai in 1922. Her father was murdered during the German occupation; she, her mother, and siblings fled to Central Asia. After the war, she married Kalman Zak in 1947 and raised two sons at home.
Geta Jakiene was interviewed by Zhanna Litinskay in Kaunas in 2005.
LATVIA
I can say it this way: where life is good,
I am not needed.
Feiga Kil
Feiga Aizman was born in 1935 in Riga. Her father was a brain surgeon who was drafted into the Soviet Army and was killed on the last day of the war in Berlin. When the Germans invaded Latvia in 1941, Feiga’s mother took her children into the Soviet Union. Their train was bombed, Feiga was separated, and she was taken by a stranger into Ukraine. That train was also bombed and everyone on it was lined up and shot at a mass grave. Feiga, six years old, fell into the ditch unharmed. A local woman dug her out, hid her, and brought her to an orphanage. Feiga only knows the woman’s name as “Aunt Galya.” Feiga was reunited with her family in 1949. This is how Feiga ended her interview.
Latvia became independent in 1991 and our Jewish community was re-established. It’s a second home for me. We have a club for seniors: Rahamim. It’s led by Channa Finkelstein. We have a choir so we meet and sing. We’re like a family. But I also help. After all, there are people older, lonelier, and sicker than I am. So, I look after this woman, but I won’t tell you her name. She is completely alone. I take her for walks, I do some cleaning for her, I go shopping, and I do a little cooking. You see, I want to do good for people. That’s why I am always there when someone is in trouble. I can say it this way: where life is good, I am not needed. If you do good for people, God will reward you, and sooner or later people will be punished for bad things. Am I not right?
We caught up with Feiga in 2021 through her grandson, Semjon, who also lives in Riga. Here’s what Semjon told us:
In 2017, Grandma came down with sepsis and doctors told me that even if Grandma had been an Olympic athlete, she would have only a tiny chance of surviving. All I could say was, ‘Listen, doctors, you don’t know my grandma.’ It took her six months,
but Grandma walked out of that hospital. Then last year, Grandma got Covid! It was terrible. She was eighty-five. The doctors told me that I could forget it. But once again, I had to re-educate the doctors. I told them, when Grandma was better, she wanted to make breakfast every day for my children. And that
is what she does.
Latvia Feiga Kil was interviewed by Ella Levitskaya in Riga in 2005.
AUSTRIA
When I talked about my time in hiding, I felt like I was suffocating.
Lucia Heilman
This is Reinhold Duschka, the man I owe my life to, along with my daughter Monika (behind us, in the middle) and my granddaughter, Lilli. Three generations of us, three generations that would not be here were it not for this brave man. The picture was taken in 1991 at a ceremony honoring Mr. Duschke as a Righteous Among the Nations.
My mom and I never lost touch with Mr Duschka; he stayed friends with us until he died. But it was quite late before I could tell my own children, or anyone else, about what I had gone through. Even at the time this picture was taken, in 1991, I wasn’t talking about it. When I talked about my time in hiding, I felt like I was suffocating. But in time I started talking. And now I don’t stop. I speak with school children everywhere.
Lucia Heilman (née Treister), like her mother Regina, studied medicine, and became an internist. Lucia married Alfred Heilman, who survived the war in Lviv/Lemberg, and they had three children together, one of whom died in infancy.
Dr Lucia Heilman was interviewed by Tanja Eckstein Vienna in 2006.
