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Oral history interview with David Levine

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1998.A.0119.1 | RG Number: RG-50.471.0001

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    Oral history interview with David Levine
    Transcript
    And marker one.
    First of all, could you tell me when and where you were born?
    I was born April the 25th, 1929 in Kovno, Lithuania.
    And can you tell me a little bit about your childhood
    before the war began?
    It was rather normal.
    I went to school.
    I went to what we had--
    called a public school, but it was a Jewish public school
    as opposed to the general public school.
    My parents were middle-class people,
    and my father had a small business.
    And so did my mom.
    And I had one sister, and we lived in a rather middle-class
    neighborhood in an apartment.
    And I had a dog.
    That's about all I can say.
    My interests at a time when I was
    a child, especially in the ages between maybe 7 and 10,
    was to swim in the summer in a river, skate in the winter,
    and play soccer and ping pong.
    And this was what I liked to do as a child.
    And in addition to that, I was an avid reader,
    and I would read many books during a year.
    Describe to me what you recollect
    yourself of when things changed and the war began?
    Well, there were actually two changes.
    The first change was when the Soviet Union, the Red Army,
    occupied Lithuania, and that change I did not feel.
    My parents did because they lost their businesses due
    to confiscation of private property, but I
    myself did not feel any lesser life.
    On the contrary, there was more for children
    in the Soviet system during different palaces, and groups,
    and sports clubs, as well as--
    schools were upgraded to some extent,
    so personally, I felt very little.
    However, a year later, when Hitler's forces attacked,
    the Soviets, of course, retreated very quickly,
    and within two days, the German armies had occupied Kovno.
    And of course, and that's where it began.
    My first notice of that was that we lived in a building
    right next to the river, on the river side,
    and the airport was about maybe 2 or 3 kilometers
    on the other side of the river.
    And I was evoked by explosions.
    When I looked out the window, i saw
    wide columns of smoke rising from the airport.
    My parents immediately realized there was war,
    and we turned on the radio.
    We realized that the Germans had attacked
    and that they were marching towards our city.
    As I said, two days later, they occupied Kovno,
    and the first order of their business was to issue edicts
    against the Jews and started to tell us what we can and cannot
    do.
    The orders came one after the other very quickly.
    We had to give up our radios and our vehicles,
    those who had them, even bicycles and motorcycles.
    We were not allowed to have any transportation
    or any communication equipment.
    All we had, of course, was radios at the time.
    Also, we had to give up cameras.
    Personally, I was still only 12 years old at the time,
    and of course I was extremely scared of what
    is about to come, not that I understood all that much
    but what I heard grown-ups talk.
    And this fear was constantly with me,
    and I could always feel some kind
    of energy going through my body, which I could only describe
    as my stomach shaking and so on every time
    I saw a German soldier.
    The other thing that I was-- what completely amazed me
    at that time was the behavior of the general Lithuanian
    population towards the Jews.
    It wasn't just that the Germans had--
    did to us with their edicts, and laws, and rules,
    and regulations but rather that the general population,
    the Lithuanians, picked up arms, first against the Soviet
    soldiers as they were retreating--
    they were shooting them in the back--
    and then against Jewish neighborhoods and Jews
    in generally.
    Whenever they saw anyone in the street,
    they shot first simply to kill and not because they weren't
    allowed to go on the streets.
    And some neighborhoods actually had
    pogroms where dozens of people were taken from their homes
    and massacred.
    Several of these people were related to me
    by marriage, my uncle's family, who was completely
    massacred during the first two days of the occupation.
    And so that pretty well set the stage of what was to come,
    and even though I was only 12, I began to understand,
    to realize that survival is going to be very difficult.
    In addition to that, of course there was a scarcity of food
    immediately.
    There was whatever we had in the house we ate.
    It was almost impossible for us to go out to buy food
    because in the stores they wouldn't sell us any.
    So somehow we had to gather whatever
    we could with our own wits to try to get something to eat,
    or else we'd starve to death.
    And that is part of what I used to do
    because I was small and young.
    I would go out and try to generate some groceries
    somewhere and bring it home.
    At that time, it was pretty clear to me
    what the next months or years would bring.
    Tell me what happened to your uncle's family.
    They lived in a section of the city that was called--
    in Lithuanian it was called [NON-ENGLISH]..
    In Yiddish it was called Slobodka.
    And they lived very close to or to a rabbinical college
    or a yeshiva, although they were not extremely religious people,
    but they were observant.
    But they were not part of the yeshiva.
    When these pogroms started, this is
    where it started, around to yeshiva area,
    and many of the rabbis and many of the people that lived around
    there were the ones that suffered
    the consequences of the pogrom.
    And because they lived that close,
    they also took them out of their home,
    and they shot them in the streets.
    And that was his father, his mother,
    and two of his brothers.
    One escaped and came to us, and then he
    told us what had happened.
    And all I know is what he had said because I
    was not there at the time.
    So when you say you pretty well knew what was going to happen,
    can you tell me a little more about that?
    Well, I pretty well understood that we
    are in for a bad time with the Germans
    as well as the Lithuanians.
    What we did not understand-- and especially me,
    being as young as I was--
    that the day end would be what we call today
    a Holocaust and that six million Jews
    would die throughout Europe.
    That was not something that we understood.
    That was not what we expected.
    We knew that some of us would die because we saw it happen.
    During the first week, a number of--
    Let's stop.
    Mark two.
    So go ahead and finish this.
    Well, my uncle himself, whose family had died,
    two days later was captured and taken
    to a place with several thousand other people.
    It was called up Fort Number Seven.
    And we called them the--
    just to give names to the people that disappeared or got killed,
    we sort of gave a name to every group of people disappeared.
    And the first ones, of course, was the massacres,
    and the second one was that they were just arrested and taken
    somewhere.
    We didn't know whether they would live or die,
    and we called them the first arrested, in other words,
    the first group that was arrested.
    And my uncle was among them, the one who had lost his family,
    and the reason is because he went to investigate.
    And-- mark.
    Mark.
    Do you need to get away?
    I'm fine.
    Now can you describe for me your recollections
    of the formation of the ghetto?
    Yes, it was rather a simple way.
    We were told that by the 15th of August, 1941
    we had to evacuate our homes and apartments
    and that we had to move to a predesignated area
    across the river, that same area where my uncle's family had
    died earlier.
    And it was called Slobodka, and it
    was called the Slobodka ghetto.
    And they had formed, actually, two ghettos because that
    was a main street or road that ran through the city,
    so they had made one large ghetto and one small ghetto
    with a bridge that crossed from one to the other.
    And we had to, ourselves, find a place where to live.
    Of course, there were a number of people, Lithuanians,
    who lived in this area.
    They had to move out.
    In some cases, we traded apartments or traded places.
    They would take the place.
    Of course, we could take nothing with us,
    except what we could carry.
    Like I said before, transportation was forbidden.
    So whatever we could find in the empty apartments
    or whatever we could carry with us
    is what sustained us for the rest of the time in the ghetto.
    Personally, we found a place at the very end of the ghetto,
    in the very farthest part, and we
    found a two-bedroom apartment that was empty.
    And we moved in there.
    Of course, almost the entire family that was left
    was moved in there.
    There were as many as, I believe, 14 people, perhaps 16
    people that lived in that apartment,
    in those two bedrooms.
    And we stay, and of course, whatever we had we left behind.
    The only thing is since--
    a little innovation is that to carry some of this stuff
    that my mother needed for that new place-- of course,
    we made several trips back and forth.
    We took a table and turned it upside down
    and made sort of like a sled out of it,
    and we put some cardboard around the legs
    and tied it with strings.
    And we put some stuff in there and then
    pulled it all the way across, perhaps,
    as much as 7 or 8 kilometers, and that was an ordeal.
    But we managed to take some things that we needed over,
    and we moved into the new apartment in the ghetto.
    And that was the way the ghetto started because everyone
    will have a different story to tell on how they got in
    and what happened because those Jews
    who already lived there didn't have to do anything.
    They stayed in their own homes that they
    had lived in for many years, and just life
    continued for a little while because the ghetto
    was surrounded with barbed-wire fences all the way around.
    There were gates to come in and out.
    And immediately after that, the Jewish community
    started to form some semblance of organization,
    with a police force, and ghetto police, and committees,
    and what I suppose you might call the mayor of the ghetto.
    And that was Dr. Elkes.
    And we tried to duplicate some form of normal life,
    but it didn't last very long because one of the things that
    happened then was that they formed brigades of workers that
    were going out to work in areas, and most of the people
    who worked where at the airport because the Germans
    started building an airport that could handle
    military planes because that airport was very
    small before them and building runways.
    And that is what many hundreds of Jews
    were doing during the first several months of the ghetto
    until some things started happening very quickly.
    And of course, the first thing that happened
    was the elimination of the small ghetto
    that I had mentioned before.
    There were perhaps as many as 2,000 or 3,000 people
    that lived in this small ghetto, and all of them
    were taken to the Ninth Fort at one time.
    I believe that was at the beginning of October,
    either the 4th or the 6th of October,
    and they were taken there.
    And at one point, they were brought back because--
    I don't know why.
    They were taken there and brought back,
    and they were telling us that they had seen--
    they had seen graves, pre-dug graves
    or what they thought were graves,
    but they had brought them back.
    So we weren't very concerned about that.
    But several days later, they took them out
    and didn't bring them back, and whoever
    was left in the small ghetto was forced into the large ghetto,
    and that small ghetto stayed empty for a while
    until the 28th of October.
    And that is when the first--
    what we called in Yiddish a [NON-ENGLISH] or the large
    selection, and that is when half the people of the ghetto were
    separated from the other half and taken to the Ninth Fort.
    It happened the 28th of October.
    And the night before, the guards outside the barbed-wire fences
    were increased, and we were told that all of us have to leave
    our homes and gather in a place called [NON-ENGLISH]..
    And no one may stay in the house,
    and all the doors must be left open
    because they were going to search for contraband
    or hidden perhaps weapons, perhaps communication
    radios, gold, silver, furs, whatever they could find.
    We were not allowed to take anything with us
    except the clothing that we were wearing,
    and that is what we thought was going to happen.
    Well, they took us out to that place,
    and we stood there for perhaps--
    we gathered there at 6:00 in the morning,
    and we stood there, perhaps, three or four hours, waiting
    for the third shift to come back from the airport who
    worked at the airport.
    And of course, since those that worked the airport most--
    many were just men.
    When they came into this place where we were gathered,
    they started looking for their families, their wives
    and their children.
    And in many cases, they couldn't find one another.
    Then the Germans arrived, the SS,
    and they set up sort of like a platform.
    And they told us that we had to march by them in a single file
    by family, every family by itself.
    At the beginning, we weren't quite sure what was happening,
    but after an hour or two, it became clear
    that they were separating the old, and the children,
    and the lame.
    And those couples that had, let's say,
    two or three small children went to the right,
    and those couples that were with a teenage child or two
    went to the left.
    And at first, it wasn't clear which
    was the good side, which was the bad side,
    but it became clear after a while
    that the left side was the good side.
    My father, and my mother, and I walked through,
    and we were sent to the left side.
    My aunt, whose husband was already dead,
    killed at the beginning--
    she had a little girl, and she walked
    with her unmarried brother and my grandfather, who
    was her father.
    They went to the right.
    Many of my relatives went to the right.
    We lost half of our family during that selection.
    As those of us who went to the left side were taken,
    on the other side they had made a--
    OK, you were just telling me--
    As the main body of people became less
    because they moved through the line
    where the German, whose name I'll never forget,
    his name was Ralke, and he is the one
    who made life-and-death decisions
    on who would go on what side.
    Those who went to the left, to the good side so to speak,
    went all the way around and came back
    to where they came from to the Democratic Platz.
    The others were taken over the other side.
    So as those who had not yet gone through the selection
    there was a piece of room between those who already gone
    through, those who had not, and occasionally some
    would realize this was the good side
    and they would sneak over, even though there
    were Lithuanian guards guarding all the way across the line
    demarking those who had not yet gone
    through the selection and those already
    who had gone through to the good side.
    That went on until very late that night.
    And when it was over, those who had gone to the right side,
    to the bad side, were taken to that small ghetto
    that I described earlier.
    And there they were held.
    Us, we could go back to our homes.
    And when we came back to our homes,
    we weren't quite sure what to make of it.
    And the wish was that they would be living in the small ghetto
    and ours would become, because we are people, the healthier
    and the older children, we would become a workforce
    and they would become someone that had to be helped.
    But that was just the wish.
    We, deep in our hearts, we knew that this was not
    going to happen.
    And we had gone to sleep.
    We were very tired.
    At 4 o'clock in the morning my father woke me.
    And of course at that time our household
    was reduced from 16 members to nine.
    Seven had gone to the other side.
    And my father woke me and said that they
    are beginning to move the people from the small ghetto
    out towards the hill towards the Ninth Fort.
    And since my mother was not in very good shape,
    he said that he will stay with my mother and watch her.
    Because she had gone into a stupor and she
    just sat there and would not speak
    and would not eat or anything.
    She couldn't sleep.
    And she hadn't slept at all.
    And he asked me to go back to take a look what was happening.
    I did go back.
    And because they wouldn't let us close
    to the fence of the small ghetto I was standing--
    That was the Jewish ghetto police
    who kept us about 10 meters away from the fence.
    But I saw columns of people walking up the hill.
    And the first 100 meters or so the road they were walking
    was very close to the fence of the large ghetto.
    And they were walking right by and then
    it turned away from it.
    Those people realized what was happening,
    and those who had very small children,
    babies that were rather light and they carried them,
    began to throw them over the fence, the babies,
    hoping that--
    hoping someone would pick them up and care for them.
    One baby got hung on the barbed wire and I saw it,
    perhaps more did.
    I saw one that hung on the barbed wire and the child
    was screaming from fear and pain.
    And a Lithuanian guard shot the child point blank in the head
    and it splattered all over.
    We knew what was happening at that time.
    I went back home and didn't say anything to my parents.
    They didn't see what I saw, and to this day I never told them.
    Because they never knew.
    They are dead now, both of them.
    But as the morning progressed, we lived very close to the hill
    and we could hear the machine guns starting to work in bursts
    and we knew what was happening.
    Every time the machine guns would start shooting,
    I could feel my stomach turning inside out.
    I could feel the pain and that I will never forget.
    That was something that has stayed with me forever.
    There are many things that happened during the four
    years of ghettos and concentration camps
    that I have forgotten or I don't think about it.
    But this day is one of the two days
    that stays with me forever because I witnessed all that.
    My mother, who was sitting and still not speaking,
    suddenly got up the next day--
    because it took more than one day to kill 10,000 people--
    she got up and said, Oh, I hear the machine guns,
    she said, but I know they are shooting over their heads
    because they are just trying to make us believe
    that they are killing them.
    But they are just scaring us.
    They want us to stay in line so they
    are shooting over their head and making us think that they
    are killing those people.
    Of course, let her believe that.
    That was her way of coping with the tragedy
    that she lost her sister, her brother, and nephews
    and nieces, and her father, my grandfather that
    disappeared in that selection.
    Some of the things that her sister left behind she
    kept for the rest of the time that we were in the ghetto.
    She would not let anyone touch it
    because she says, when my sister comes back
    she's going to want that.
    That was the end of the innocent time in the ghetto.
    And that two days, 10,000 people,
    or nearly half the population of the ghetto, were killed.
    That was a tragedy that will remain with me until the day I
    die.
    Then you were 12.
    Then you had to work and you had to try to find food,
    among other things.
    That's right.
    That's correct.
    Tell me about the kinds of things you did.
    Well, when the 10,000 people were killed, of course,
    there were empty spaces left in the ghetto,
    or what the Germans and Lithuanians
    thought were empty spaces.
    So they cut a piece of the ghetto
    off and made the rest of us move in towards the front
    of the ghetto.
    So where we lived we had to move out.
    So we eventually found a small, empty little house
    we moved into and we again started
    to try to make some sense out of the rest of our lives.
    I grew up very quickly in those few months.
    And I knew that part of our survival
    would have to be that everyone has to pitch in
    to provide something to eat.
    I joined at first the workforce, the brigade
    to we used to go outside to work.
    And there we would take things with us
    to trade with some of the Lithuanians outside for food.
    So we're talking about daily life and training.
    I personally worked in for a time
    it was called the children's brigade.
    Our job was to pull weeds out of gardens.
    So that was a good place to work because we pulled out
    the gardens.
    Usually there were carrots and potatoes
    and all sorts of different vegetables, radishes.
    So we could at least eat some there when they didn't see us.
    And occasionally we could even take some and bring it home.
    In addition to that, we used to take some things to trade.
    And occasionally you would get a stick of butter
    or a piece of bread or a sack of flour.
    One time I remember I got a chicken for a tablecloth.
    And the chicken was live and we had to kill it.
    But the woman gave me a small ax and I
    had to chop the head of the chicken.
    And I did, but the chicken got up and started
    running around without a head.
    And finally it died and I put the chicken inside my pants
    and tied my pant leg around so that nobody
    would see the chicken.
    And when we walked back to the ghetto gate,
    I carried a small sack of potatoes that I had gathered
    and the chicken that nobody did see.
    But they started searching us.
    And all the time while I was walking I
    was so happy that I would bring home a chicken from my mother.
    We hadn't seen a chicken perhaps by that time maybe a year.
    And I was so happy that my mother would see a chicken.
    And when I got to the gate they started searching us
    and they found the chicken and took it away.
    I was heartbroken.
    They let me keep the potatoes, but they took away my chicken.
    Something that you remember, something that I remember.
    But generally speaking, we had a relatively period of quiet
    in the ghetto.
    Every day people were being killed and being shot
    and dying.
    The underground was working, and that we heard about.
    They were taking up arms against the Germans in the forests
    and in the highways.
    And the Germans were shooting back and taking revenge
    on some of the Jews in the ghetto.
    Because they had a standing order
    that if anyone kills a German, 100 Jews
    would die if they could prove to themselves, which
    they didn't really have to.
    They could kill Jews anytime they wanted to
    and they did it sometimes.
    But other than that it was relatively quiet.
    They had taken 500 people to send them
    for work in Riga, Latvia.
    Because all the Latvian Jews had been completely
    destroyed and massacred the same as in the beginning,
    the same as in Lithuania.
    The one thing is that in the first 7 to 10 days of the war
    all the Jews in the small towns were massacred completely.
    All died.
    All my relatives, my grandparents
    were killed by the Lithuanians, not the Germans.
    They took them out in the middle of a square and machine guns
    were waiting and just mowed them right down the middle
    of the square.
    And then whoever volunteered to carry the body for burial would
    get to keep their clothing and whatever else they were they
    had with them.
    So this is how they got Lithuanians
    to do the work, in addition to the fact
    that their hatred towards the Jews
    was such that they did it very gladly.
    And so in another time they took several people to Estonia
    to work, and my sister and her husband
    and her husband's mother went to that area.
    And so this was the last of our relatives in the ghetto.
    And after my sister and her husband and child--
    She had a child, but what happened
    was the child was supposed to go with them
    and so her husband's mother substituted herself
    for the child because they knew the child wouldn't survive.
    And the child stayed with us.
    So my mother raised or took care of that little boy.
    And that was it.
    By that time we were only four left from our family.
    The rest of them were gone.
    But as time went on, things sort of quieted down.
    I finally got a job working in a shop inside the ghetto.
    We had shops that were making wooden shoes
    and toys and clothing.
    And there was a tailoring shop and all sorts
    of different things.
    And so many Jews were employed to work in what
    they called the werkstatten.
    And I finally got a job working in there because you had to.
    And you got a certain certificate
    that you could stay in the ghetto and work there.
    And they had two shifts, day shift in night shift.
    And my father also got a job working there,
    so my father and I worked the same but not the same unit.
    We worked in different units but in the same place.
    My mother, on the other hand, she
    would still go outside to work in some brigades.
    Because one of the things had to trade for food and that
    of course, we had to work.
    So we switched back and forth so somebody could stay behind
    with the child.
    So when I worked night shift, they worked day shift,
    and then we would switch back and forth so somebody
    could care for the baby.
    And that pretty well went on for about a couple of years
    until the beginning of 1944.
    And that was another thing, one of the other days
    that has completely stayed with me forever.
    You know there were many things that happened in those two
    years that were pretty bad.
    But things that were so often that you don't remember
    the incidents one of the other.
    But when something horrible happened, that stayed with us.
    That was almost at the end of the ghetto.
    Many people already had left.
    Another group of people had been taken over
    to the airport they were building.
    Rather than walk them every day they just took the people
    and moved them over there in barracks.
    And by that time the number of people in the ghetto
    was less than 5,000.
    And our family was still there.
    My father, my mother, me, and that little boy.
    We still stayed in the ghetto.
    And one day, and that was March the 27th 1944,
    I was working night shift that day
    so I was home in the morning with that little boy,
    with my nephew, and my parents had gone to work.
    And the night before again they had doubled or tripled
    the guards around the ghetto, so we
    knew something was coming up.
    But we didn't quite know what could happen.
    There was only less than 5,000 people there,
    only a few children left, and what could happen?
    But the thing that we didn't even contemplate happened.
    I heard screams, and I looked out the window
    and there were buses.
    There were three buses lined up in front of--
    The window of our apartment faced the gate of the ghetto,
    and I saw buses lined up on the ghetto.
    And there were Ukrainian soldiers
    that had joined the Nazis and Germans the SS that
    were taking small children and putting them on the buses.
    Instinctively, I knew what was happening.
    They were taking the children.
    We later called that what we call the Kinder
    Aktion, the selection of the children.
    In addition to that, they also took
    some older people that were incapacitated
    as well as the children.
    So why don't you just back up just a little bit
    to seeing the buses and knowing what was happening.
    It was March the 27th 1944.
    That was the day that what we call
    was the Kinder Aktion or selection of the children.
    I worked night shift that day.
    And all of a sudden, I heard a commotion
    and I heard a noise outside the window.
    Our window faced the gate of the ghetto.
    When I looked out the window, there
    were buses lined up in front of the gate.
    And I could see that the Ukrainians and Germans
    were taking the children into the buses.
    They were taking babies, children aged 10 or 11.
    And I had a child.
    I had my little nephew.
    He was only 2 and 1/2 years old, and I
    knew they were going to come.
    And I could see that, and so what I did very quickly
    I pulled a suitcase out from under my bed
    and I put him in a suitcase.
    And I told him that you may not cry, you may not speak,
    and you may not say anything or shout.
    Because if you do, the Germans will take you and you will die.
    He understood that, even though he was only 2 and 1/2.
    He knew exactly what was happening.
    He had a feeling.
    And I put the suitcase back under the bed
    and I jumped on top of the bed a couple
    of times to cause the dust to settle
    on it so it would look like the suitcase had not
    been opened recently.
    And I went back to the window to see what happened.
    Within a minute, a Ukrainian soldier
    came through the door of the apartment
    and he asked were there any children here.
    And I said, no, there aren't any.
    He said, I'm going to look.
    And if I find any, he said, not only will I take the child
    but you will come of course.
    Beginning he examined my papers to see I was only 14.
    I was strong enough to be able to work,
    but he looked at my papers and said
    that since I worked he'd let me alone,
    but he said that if he finds a child I will go with him.
    And I said, well, there aren't any.
    He looked and looked, but he didn't find the little boy,
    didn't say anything.
    He was distracted because suddenly he heard a baby cry.
    And he walked out into the hall and there
    was somebody who had stuffed a baby into a linen
    closet in the hall.
    And I never knew whose baby that was.
    I had never seen that baby before.
    The baby was perhaps a year and a half old little girl.
    And he grabbed that child and walked out,
    so he left me alone.
    I went back to the window.
    And as he had taken that little child
    and put it in the bus and then the child was crying.
    And of course once he got on the bus the voices were muffled.
    And then I heard screams and crying, and I looked back
    and there was another Ukrainian soldier
    and he was dragging a woman, a mother,
    and she had two little girls.
    And she wouldn't let go of the two children.
    She just held on to them and they held on to her.
    And he was beating her with the butt of his rifle
    and she was bleeding from her mouth
    and from her nose and blood going down.
    I could see her face.
    Even today I can still see it.
    But she wouldn't let those two little girls go.
    One must have been about three and one about five.
    And when they get close to the bus he couldn't take them away
    and so the German came over.
    He was an SS lieutenant, and he said, what's this commotion?
    What's going on?
    And he said, she won't let go of the children.
    So I could hear him say--
    First of all he laughed with this cynical and terrible
    laughter.
    And then he told her that, OK, if you love your children so
    much I'll let you take one and the other one we'll take.
    And of course he's asking a mother
    to select one of her two little girls.
    She immediately quieted down.
    She stopped struggling.
    And the two little girls understood
    what he said because they knew exactly what was happening.
    And both started talking to her, saying, Mother, take me,
    take me.
    And she stopped the struggle and took the two little girls
    by their hands and walked on the bus with them.
    And of course she died with them that day.
    When the day was over, 1,183 children
    were taken and killed that day.
    Those were the last Jewish children in Lithuania
    outside of those perhaps a few dozen that
    were hidden previously and a couple that
    somehow got hidden during this selection
    like I hid my little nephew.
    And that was the end of the Lithuanian Jewish people.
    Most had died.
    At the beginning of the war, in the first week
    there were 180,000 Jews, perhaps 140,000
    were killed at the beginning, and the rest little by little
    were killed through selections, massacres, and simply
    shootings and starvation.
    And of course the children that we kept as long as we could
    died then that day.
    My nephew, of course I--
    It's difficult to say this, but he lived another four months
    or so and then he and my mother both died and in the gas
    chambers of Auschwitz.
    Had it not been for him, my mother
    probably would have survived.
    She was a strong young woman.
    She was only 42 years old when she was killed.
    And in part, all the years I have sort of blamed myself
    because if I had not saved that little boy my mother
    would have survived.
    I had a choice also.
    That was begin--
    That was pretty well the end of the ghetto.
    Because after that they--
    Whatever hope we still had was gone after that day.
    And we were resigned to our final destination.
    We never believed that the rest of us would survive.
    It wasn't long after when the Soviet Army started
    to advance towards Lithuania and they decided
    to liquidate the ghetto.
    We walked from the ghetto several kilometers to a train
    where we were loaded and taken to a place called
    Stuthof, where my mother and the child were taken off the train.
    And my father and I continued on this train.
    We were never taken off the train.
    We continued on towards Dachau.
    Later learned that she and the child were taken to Stuthof,
    where they lived several weeks and then
    those women who were strong and by themselves
    were taken to work somewhere in Poland or in East Germany
    somewhere.
    The rest, those children were taken to Auschwitz
    and the fact is I have the date when they died.
    They died July the 15th of 1944.
    And my father and I continued on and finally wound up in Dachau,
    near Munich, where we spent the rest of the war time.
    OK, we're just about to run out.
    I want to put one more roll on and ask
    you a couple of other short questions.
    Tell me a little bit about the council.
    I don't know a lot about the inner workings of the council.
    I just know that whenever the Germans needed
    to select people to send out, like to Riga or to Estonia
    or to other areas, they would come to the council
    and they would ask them to provide the names of people.
    Now, nobody knew whether these people would survive,
    whether they would actually go to work
    or whether they would die.
    And that would be a burden on the council
    to actually themselves be the judges of who should live
    and who should die.
    And that put a great burden on them.
    As far as the council itself is concerned,
    the inner workings and how they--
    isn't something that I know very well.
    I know some of the people that served on it,
    but nobody was really angry with them
    because everybody understood that they really
    don't have much of a choice.
    What I do know, for instance, is that before what
    they call the Great Aktion the question was whether or not
    the council should cooperate with the Germans
    and ask everyone, all the Jews, to come out
    to the Democratic Platz.
    But they didn't know.
    There were some who said yes and some
    said no, we shouldn't have to make that decision.
    So they went to one of the rabbis, who
    thought about it for days because they knew ahead
    of time, they weren't just told the day before.
    And this rabbi, the way I understand it, what I know
    was for many days he was studying the Talmud to see
    whether the council has the right, or the moral right,
    to ask the Jews to make the sacrifice.
    Or whether to tell nothing, let the Germans
    themselves do what they want.
    Or should they help the Germans?
    Which would be better for the Jews?
    And finally the rabbi's decision,
    they all agreed the decision would be that of the rabbi--
    I can't remember his name right now,
    but perhaps some of the other interviewees will remember.
    He rendered a decision and said that, yes,
    they should help the Jews.
    It would be better for the entire ghetto population
    if there is order.
    And what about the Jewish police?
    The Jewish police was--
    It's the same in any police force.
    Some took their jobs too seriously,
    but most were pretty decent people
    who saw that as as an easy work for them
    as compared to going out and working on
    the airport that the Germans were building,
    or to go to other working brigades.
    So they took that job although they
    knew that this isn't going to be very, very
    popular with some people.
    But from what I know and the policeman that I encountered,
    they were pretty decent people, most of them,
    with the exception of a couple who
    took their job too seriously and became very, very and selfish.
    Especially those who worked where
    they had the gate police that worked
    at the gate of the ghetto.
    And of course some would ask whoever brought some stuff in,
    they would ask for a piece of the action.
    So if you brought in five pounds of flour,
    you would have to give them a pound or so just
    for letting you by or getting the Germans out of the way
    so you could go in.
    So that is something that happens
    in every society where you have a little bit of power
    and authority to use it.
    But normally they were decent people.
    And tell me what happened to the children.
    What happened is that at a time I
    knew there was something wrong with the buses
    but I didn't put my finger on it.
    But I later learned that the exhaust of the bus
    was redirected, the exhaust gases
    were redirected inside the bus.
    The driver was separated from the rest
    of the bus with a partition, and as the children
    went in the bus, their voices were
    muffled because they started breathing in the exhaust gases.
    By the time these children were taken to the Ninth Fort
    where they were buried, most of them were dead.
    And those who were still alive or not quite dead
    were buried alive.
    Because during that day I did not hear any machine gun fire
    so they had to be disposed of or killed in other ways.
    And that is most likely the way they were killed.
    And did you ever talk to any Lithuanians who
    maybe worked at the Ninth Fort or had any contact
    with any perpetrators?
    Lithuanians who--
    Who maybe helped with any of the killings?
    Well, I never talk to any, except two years ago I
    was invited by the Justice Department
    to come as a witness in Philadelphia
    where they had caught a Lithuanian who
    was a lieutenant in what the Germans called
    the schutzmannschaft, which translated loosely
    were guard units, but really they were killing units.
    And he had come to America under false pretenses
    and he had falsified his records where he was during the war.
    And when the Soviet Union fell and Lithuania
    became independent, the Justice Department
    started looking for documentation
    on who were the people that immigrated to America.
    They caught this particular one, and I
    was one of the two ghetto witnesses of who he was.
    But I never talked directly to him.
    I was just in court presenting my side of the story.
    And had you ever seen him when you were in the ghetto?
    No.
    This was not a criteria for being a witness.
    And in the ghetto, since you were pretty young,
    do you ever remember an incident that was fun?
    Do you ever remember a great time that you had?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    I formed myself--
    You can't see it now, but I was a good athlete
    when I was young.
    And I was a good soccer player and I had formed my own team
    with a group of boys.
    And there were other teams formed
    and we were playing even games for championship of the ghetto.
    And my team won the championship,
    so that was a big deal.
    In fact, the team was named after me.
    So I created a team, I named it, so I used my name.
    And that was fun.
    Beginning to talk to girls and hold hands with girls
    my age was something that happened
    under the circumstances.
    I remember these little girls, and one is in New York today,
    and that we hung out together with some of my friends
    who are alive today.
    And when we get together we reminisce about those times.
    It's interesting that the only time
    we talk about what I talked about here today
    is when I talk to people like you.
    When we talk to one another, we always talk about the times
    that we could laugh at, times that we enjoyed,
    songs that we sang, poems that we composed.
    Looking at the moon and thinking perhaps here's
    the moon up there.
    Look, the same moon it shines over America.
    Would it be possible perhaps to just jump over?
    These sort of things.
    And we remember that when we get together.
    But we have to be together the same people that
    were there and--

    Overview

    Interviewee
    David Levine
    Interviewer
    Sandra Bradley
    Date
    interview:  1997 May 20

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    3 videocassette (VHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
    Conditions on Use
    No restrictions on use

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Sandra Bradley, a film production consultant for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, conducted the interview with David Levine on May 20, 1997 in preparation for the exhibition "Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto," which opened in November 1997. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received a copy of the interview on July 11, 1998.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:41:39
    This page:
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