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Oral history interview with Abraham Rodstein

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1998.A.0119.7 | RG Number: RG-50.471.0007

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    Oral history interview with Abraham Rodstein
    Transcript
    Mark.
    I'm not close enough.
    Good.
    Yeah.
    You going to cut?
    Yeah.
    Marker two.
    Tell me when and where you were born.
    I was born in Siauliai, Lithuania on October 16, 1928.
    Tell me a little bit about your childhood.
    My father was a successful business person.
    We had a movie house.
    We had a cafe and a bakery.
    And we lived in a very nice part of town.
    I was the only child, very pampered.
    I had a caretaker, a nanny.
    And my mother never worked.
    We had a lot of help in the house.
    And we lived very affluent.
    And tell me how you remember that things changed.
    In 1940, the Russians, the Soviets occupied Lithuania.
    And one morning, we woke up, and we saw the Russian army
    in charge of the country.
    And a lot of things changed then.
    They took away my father's business,
    made him an employee in his own business.
    And after a very short time, we realized
    that if we don't move out of that town,
    they'll eventually arrest my father, the Soviets,
    and send him off to Siberia.
    In order to prevent or delay that occurrence,
    we moved to Kovno in about the fall of 1940.
    And our life became changed, because my father
    got a job someplace.
    We had enough money from before.
    So economically, we were rather well-off.
    But everything changed.
    I started going to a public school, where I always
    went to private school.
    I also had to become a Pioneer.
    This could be [INAUDIBLE] to a Boy Scout.
    I wore this white shirt and a red tie
    and belonged to Communist Youth Organization, because that
    was politically correct.
    And the school I went to was not a private school anymore.
    As I said before, it was public school.
    And the whole life became on a different level.
    In order to be politically correct, the young Pioneers,
    they sent everybody in the summer to camp
    in summer of 1941.
    And it so happens that the camp they sent us
    was Palanga, which was a seaside resort where
    I used to go every year with my mother in a very, very
    luxurious way.
    And here they put me in to big tents with many people,
    sharing bathrooms.
    And I wasn't used to anything like that.
    So at the age of 12, I figured I have to try to escape.
    And I figured the only way to escape
    is to somehow fool them into that I
    have appendicitis attack.
    And maybe they'll send me home.
    That, I did.
    And it so happens that the surgeon in the camp
    was somebody who knew me from childhood.
    Even though he realized that I am faking it,
    he managed to send me home.
    That was in the summer of 1941, just a few weeks
    before the war started.
    That may have saved my life, because when
    the Germans overran that part of Lithuania, which
    was very close to Germany, I believe
    that most of the children in that camp were destroyed.
    Tell me about the actual start of the war-- what you saw,
    what you heard.
    In about the summer of 1941, things were very tense.
    But the Russians were still in full control.
    And we really didn't know much.
    One morning, we heard all kinds of gunfire--
    bombs, guns.
    And maybe by the next day, the Germans occupied Lithuania.
    It was not-- there was very little resistance
    from the Lithuanians against the Germans, A,
    because the Russians are too strong, B,
    because the Lithuanians are very much pro-German,
    and they welcomed it.
    What other changes-- did you notice any changes just before
    or just after the Germans came in, in terms
    of the Lithuanian--
    After the Germans came in, and even before they fully came in,
    the Lithuanians started to commit tremendous atrocities--
    actually cutting off Jewish heads,
    and putting them on fences.
    And they were horrendous to such a point
    that, when the Germans came, we found
    a relief because they stopped that indiscriminate slaughter.
    Did you witness any of this?
    I, personally, did not witness it.
    But I heard people.
    I spoke to people who did witness it.
    And so at your age, how did you feel, in general then?
    Started being afraid.
    That became the primary modus to operate, fear--
    fear, uncertainty.
    We never knew what's going to happen.
    And so then the decree went out for the ghetto to be formed.
    Tell me about yours--
    A final time later, the decree came out
    that all Jews have to move into the ghetto.
    And it was very funny, because they actually
    permitted you to trade houses with Lithuanians
    who lived in that part of town.
    The house which I lived in belonged to a cousin
    of my father's.
    And it was a very, very beautiful house.
    So it was very easy to get a reasonably nice place
    in the ghetto as an exchange.
    And that took place.
    And we actually moved into a house in the ghetto.
    And those people who owned that house occupied the house we
    lived in.
    Was that even trade?
    No, it wasn't an even trade.
    But it was the best you can do.
    Do you remember actually moving in?
    Do you remember--
    Oh, yes.
    Tell me what you took.
    They did not restrict us from taking any belongings.
    But due to the fact that the new place was much smaller
    and the living space was allocated,
    we wound up one or more families per room, not even per house.
    So you really took as little as you had
    to, just the bare necessities.
    And it immediately became obvious electricity
    wasn't sufficient for all those people.
    Sanitary conditions were insufficient.
    And the first thing people did is build an outhouse.
    And the actual move--
    how did you get there?
    I do not recollect.
    We have only a little bit.
    Why don't you describe to me the living space was you remember?
    As I remember it, my mother, father, and myself,
    plus two or three more people got one room only.
    And we had to make bunks in order to accommodate everybody.
    And there was the kitchen.
    There was maybe one kitchen.
    And you wound up having to cook over there maybe
    for 20 or 30 people.
    So I remember that we made little stoves out
    of sheet metal.
    And we used to make--
    and we used to be able to cook on kindling wood.
    That, I remember very vividly.
    And so every room, more or less, had their own cooking
    facilities.
    What about heating?
    In the very beginning, there was enough heat.
    That particular-- there was a stove, I think, in every room.
    And that was used for heating.
    And also, the cooking facilities gave out enough heat.
    And due to the fact that there were many people in one room,
    it wasn't that cold.
    But that was, of course, in the summer and the fall.
    When the winter came, things became very bad.
    And we started burning furniture.
    OK.
    I think we're just about to run out of time.
    Mark.
    In the early days of the ghetto, were you
    aware of the actions before the big action?
    Yeah, they always had something going on.
    Tell me what you remember of that.
    I think they had some old actions where they rounded up
    people, where they rounded people up.
    And they used to send them away from the ghetto,
    supposedly to war camps in Estonia, some elsewhere.
    And tell me about the big action.
    The big action-- that, I can remember.
    It was in-- I think it was October 28.
    I think it was '43, if I'm not mistaken.
    Or--
    '41.
    '41.
    OK.
    I was wrong with the year.
    Everybody supposedly supposed to have been--
    they did it in the guise of a census.
    And people were supposed to all gather early in the morning
    in a place called Democratic Place.
    And I remember very vividly it was a gray, cold, drizzly day.
    And we went to this big, open field in the morning.
    And they had these tables set up.
    And they started to make the selections, to the right
    and to the left.
    Whoever invented the right was saved for the moment.
    Whoever went to the left was resettled out of the ghetto.
    What happened to your family on that day?
    We managed to stay intact.
    One of the reasons we stayed intact, I believe--
    we had an inkling that the ghetto police is not
    going to be touched.
    The house I lived in was also occupied
    by a high-ranking person from the ghetto police.
    His name was Gudinski.
    And the ghetto police was identified
    via an armband, which had I think a Jewish star
    and some stamping.
    I was a very good craftsman.
    And I actually stole at night this armband of his.
    And I copied it with oil paint on a piece of canvas.
    And my father put it on.
    And I figured then that nobody is going
    to look at it that closely.
    So if I make it appear correct, it's going to be correct.
    And that was one of the reasons which we may have been saved.
    I don't know.
    Did your father wear that the whole time
    when you walked to the place?
    Or was he scared to?
    He was scared.
    He just put it on at the place, because we were
    scared of the ghetto police.
    You were scared that you would get discovered.
    That's right.
    The ghetto police-- not everybody was bad,
    but not everybody was good.
    As a rule, the ghetto police were not terrible.
    But we really didn't know whom we can trust.
    And even the person who lived in the same house where we did,
    I really didn't--
    we didn't know if we can trust him.
    And you have to realize that, when an action like that
    takes place, chaos--
    shouting, yelling, shoving, and pushing--
    is one of the main ingredients by which the Germans were
    able to make people behave a certain way.
    And that chaos, which took place,
    also meant that minute details are overlooked.
    I didn't know it then, but I feel
    this is what must have been taking place.
    Tell me how you stole his armband.
    Oh, it's very simple.
    His coat was hanging in a common vestibule.
    Did he have many of them, or did he-- ?
    I really don't remember.
    I remember it was a leather coat.
    And that armband was pinned on, on the sleeve.
    And do you remember how long you had it,
    how long you borrowed it?
    What you weren't quick with it?
    I did it overnight.
    And tell me what you knew of what happened
    to the people who went to the--
    As far as we knew, the people were
    sent to work in Estonia, which was not a ghetto anymore.
    But it was a concentration camp type situation.
    And the conditions were very harsh.
    And many people perished.
    And they must have also taken some people to the Ninth Fort
    and destroyed them.
    I don't remember the details.
    I cannot recollect.
    And you didn't know about it at the time.
    And you didn't see them going.
    No.
    You really didn't see anybody going.
    You just were separated away.
    And eventually, when evening came, we went back to our place
    where we lived.
    And did you-- from where you lived, could you
    hear a machine gun?
    Or did--
    I don't believe so, no.
    I didn't.
    If they did machine gun, they did not
    do it right there and then.
    And what about the-- your father somehow
    was at the railroad and sorting clothes or something.
    That was at the previous time.
    We used to wind up working in Kovno on the main railroad.
    And Lithuania was a place where they
    used to bring German Jews and Austrian Jews
    to be liquidated on the Ninth Fort.
    And we used to do plain labor on the railroad.
    And we saw once a whole contingent of German Jews
    who came in.
    And they were brought in in regular cars,
    not in cattle cars.
    The Germans tried to maintain that lie all the way,
    because they figured it's probably much easier to deal
    with the people this way.
    When those people came and we saw them,
    we try to tell them that--
    try to blend in amongst us.
    We have no idea what's going to happen to us tomorrow.
    But today, we seem to be safe.
    And if they would have blended in amongst us,
    they could have gone back to the ghetto at night
    and be safe for the moment.
    The German Jews were very arrogant.
    They didn't believe us, because they really
    put themselves apart.
    They used to call us [NON-ENGLISH]..
    And themselves, they used to refer
    to as German of the Hebraic persuasion.
    And they actually wound up being killed the same evening
    at the Ninth Fort.
    And subsequently, when we worked on the railroad,
    we used to wind up sorting out clothes,
    which the German very neatly packed up and did
    whatever they wanted with them.
    And my father knew certain people
    from Germany and from Austria from before the war.
    And we actually came up with clothing with the names
    which we recognized.
    Back to how the ghetto then settled down into a routine
    after that.
    Yeah.
    The ghetto settled into a lull, into a routine.
    And there was a lot of work being done for the Germans
    in the ghetto.
    We had shops.
    And we also had a trade school.
    The trade school was designed in order
    to somehow convince the Germans that, if they let the trade
    school go on, the children who are going to learn the trade
    are subsequently going to be able to provide useful labor
    for the German army.
    And the man who actually started this whole school
    used to be the director of ORT.
    ORT is an American organization before the war in Lithuania.
    His name was Orlinsky.
    And that was a school where they taught you
    how to be a locksmith, carpentry,
    and other things, trades.
    I was lucky enough to also having
    gone into that trade school.
    When I was there, I learned how to be a locksmith.
    I also learned how to do very fine carpentry.
    And after a while, I was good enough
    that I went to work in the shops, which was obviously
    a safer place.
    While I was in the shops, I did a lot of dollhouses.
    My expertise became dollhouses for higher ranking Germans
    to the point they used to bring photographs of their houses.
    I used to scale them and build a dollhouse
    to mimic their house--
    furniture, electricity inside, very, very elaborate setups.
    And tell me why it was safe if you--
    Well, when you are in this type of a mode, you were useful.
    You did things.
    So as long as that regime in the ghetto administration,
    the German regime remained as is, you felt safe.
    I don't know if it was safe.
    Obviously, eventually it was proven it wasn't.
    But it felt safe.
    What about fun in the ghetto?
    The ghetto had an orchestra.
    And it so happens that the first violinist
    of the orchestra of the ghetto didn't have a bow.
    And I gave him the bow which I had
    when I was a child, because when I
    was a child, besides going to regular school,
    I also went to music school.
    And I took the violin and the piano.
    And somehow, my bow and my violin wound up in the ghetto.
    So my violin played in the ghetto orchestra.
    And we had-- I think, if I remember correctly,
    they had some theater.
    We tried to maintain inside the ghetto a semblance of a life.
    OK, we have to put another roll in.
    Sure.
    Four.
    In the ghetto, what about books?
    We hid many books when we moved into the ghetto.
    And in the very beginning of the ghetto,
    I was a very avid reader, and I read voraciously.
    I read Hebrew books, I read Yiddish books,
    I read Russian books, Lithuanian books.
    And we got quite--
    I got quite a education in reading.
    Because in the very beginning, there
    was nothing to do so we read books and played cards
    as children.
    Were books forbidden in the ghetto?
    Yes, they were forbidden.
    But we did bring in books, because the inner life
    of the ghetto was really run by the Jewish ghetto
    police rather than the Germans.
    The Germans left up most of the administration of the ghetto
    to the Jewish people themselves.
    They just-- they actually had decrees,
    and the Judenrat used to execute the decrees.
    The ghetto police used to keep order in the ghetto.
    But otherwise, all the special actions took place,
    the Germans didn't frequent the ghetto that much inside.
    And were the ghetto police pretty much good guys?
    As a rule, the Kovno Ghetto police
    were reasonably decent people.
    Some of them were bad, but I cannot recollect any atrocities
    having been committed by the ghetto police in Kovno.
    And early in the ghetto, were the valuables taken away?
    The valuables were taken away.
    And the Germans actually put in so much fear in us,
    they said that if we don't turn in the valuables,
    they have special dogs and special equipment
    to sniff out the valuables.
    And one day, we had to return the valuables.
    They put up tables, and people actually
    went and gave all their valuables away.
    I know we did.
    Some people who didn't believe them
    probably didn't turn everything in, but the fear was so great
    and the belief that they can sniff everything out
    was so proper, that people turned them out.
    And did you do any organizing for food,
    any trading, any smuggling?
    Yes, we did a lot of trading for food
    with the Lithuanian peasants.
    My father had a tremendous amount of very good clothing,
    suits, shirts, and whatnot, and we traded it for food
    with the peasants for quite a while.
    Do you remember how you did it, where you went and--
    We actually traded it by going to the fence.
    And they made holes in the fence,
    and you used to give them goods and they
    used to give back potatoes and turnips and bacon and whatnot.
    And so, in terms of your health, were you--
    did you have enough food?
    The Kovno Ghetto, I don't believe
    that people actually starved.
    We didn't have any luxurious food,
    but we had enough of potatoes, legumes, and food
    of that nature that people had enough to sustain themselves.
    The Kovno Ghetto did not have the mass starvation, which
    places like Lodz or Warsaw had.
    And what about celebrations?
    Did you have religious--
    We managed to celebrate our holidays.
    We were never-- my family was never very religious.
    So religion as such never played a big role,
    but we celebrated holidays in a traditional way.
    And that, people still managed, somehow, to continue.
    And how did you--
    were you able to cook special things?
    Well, the celebrations were really
    defined by a little bit more food than maybe--
    food which was a little bit more special.
    Other things to do with your work,
    you worked on the children's brigade at a farm once?
    I worked on the children's brigade.
    The name of the farm was [? Marva, ?]
    and my father was actually the foreman of that brigade.
    And we used to be taken by truck to the farm,
    and we used to weed gardens, the tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage,
    potatoes, and whatnot.
    And that was a reasonably good place to work,
    because while you were doing it you had enough food.
    The people who oversaw us were not the Germans.
    They were actually farmers themselves
    who essentially contracted us to work for them,
    and they paid the Germans certain monies.
    And so did you eat food while you were--
    Yes, yes.
    We could-- we ate food.
    We eat vegetables, and also, we managed
    to have the Lithuanians cook some cooked food for us
    for exchanging things.
    One of the--
    I was very enterprising at that time,
    and the peasants liked the very, very colorful kerchiefs.
    So I used to make kerchiefs.
    I used to take white bed sheets, cut them up into squares,
    and I got hold of some paint.
    I used to make templates and make multicolored kerchiefs,
    and that was a means of changing it for food.
    And you did also some work with making valises?
    When people started to be resettled,
    they didn't know really that they
    were going to be resettled to a certain death.
    So all of a sudden, people needed suitcases,
    valises, and they were not available.
    So I have-- when I worked in the woodworking shops,
    I used to make valises out of plywood,
    put together four pieces of plywood,
    put together two backs, sew it at a certain place
    to make a lead.
    And I got hold, I remember, of hundreds
    of feet of piano hinge.
    I don't even remember where I got it.
    And I used to hinge them and make valises and sell them.
    Also, one of the items which became very important
    were flashlights.
    Before the war, in Lithuania, the flashlights
    were sheet metal, a round flashlight, very similar
    to the ones we have here.
    The Germans didn't have round batteries.
    Their batteries were square.
    So adopting the old Lithuanian flashlights
    to a method which accepts the new batteries became
    a very lucrative business for me, and I used to do that.
    Were you assigned to do it?
    No, no, no.
    That was very, very quiet.
    That was clandestine work.
    And so who did you sell to?
    To the people in the ghetto.
    It was a tremendous-- bartering was the--
    whatever you sold, you didn't sell for money.
    You bartered, item A for item B--
    bread for flashlights, butter for something else.
    This is how things went on.
    Also, combs were not available.
    So I used to make combs out of wood.
    Because when I worked in the workshops,
    I had access to machinery and to tools.
    And something about blowing fuses?
    Yeah, well, due to the fact that all the houses were overloaded
    and they were never really designed
    for the amount of people which lived in them,
    electricity was very scarce.
    And one of the items for boiling water
    we used to make immersion heaters, which
    was nothing else but two pieces of metal,
    and you separate them with an insulator,
    and you hang a cord on it.
    And if you have a tiny amount of salt or sodium in the water,
    you create electrolytic action, which essentially
    brings the water to a boil.
    And that became another item which I used to make.
    And I figured, if I blow fuses in the houses,
    they'll call me to fix it.
    So I used to blow fuses.
    I had a little gadget which made shorts.
    And for fixing, I used to get bread, butter, potatoes.
    OK.
    What about hiding?
    Did you ever hide?
    Yeah, we had a lot of places, including ours.
    We had the hiding place, which was known
    in Yiddish as a [YIDDISH].
    And we had one, too.
    And whenever things got to be very tense,
    we used to hide over there.
    In retrospect, under closer scrutiny,
    it would have been discovered very easily.
    Describe it to me.
    I think we had a--
    essentially, one of the rooms, I think,
    or in the shed or something, was made a false wall,
    and you could open it up and go in.
    And that used to connect, somehow, to the basement.
    And we had over there, we made banks out of wood,
    and we could stay there for a while.
    I think we made use of it a couple times.
    I think we're almost--
    we're close to running out.
    The hanging?
    That I remember very vividly, the hanging of Meck.
    That was-- I don't remember the date,
    but I remember that we all had to gather.
    And I saw them building up a scaffold--
    or the scaffold--
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Toward the end, did the ghetto change and--
    The ghetto became, really, a concentration camp.
    Even though physically it still looked like the ghetto,
    but as far as the German administration,
    it was run as a concentration camp already.
    And what defined that?
    I think what happened-- the SS, I think,
    took over the administration of the ghetto,
    and the whole atmosphere changed drastically.
    In what ways did it change?
    Number one, prior to that, they deported many people.
    The ghetto became very small.
    And I think that they sent people
    out to Estonia, to Latvia, and elsewhere very often.
    And eventually, it became really a tiny--
    a very-- I don't remember how many thousands of people
    stayed, but it was a far cry from how we started.
    How did you feel as it got smaller and smaller?
    We felt impending doom.
    But we always felt impending doom.
    We never felt-- fear was an emotion which didn't go away
    from me for four years.
    So it was more fear, more uncertainty.
    And so then at the end, the Kinder Aktion, you don't--
    I think that I was tall enough and big enough
    to have really weathered the Kinder Aktion.
    But I cannot remember any minute details, because by that time,
    I was already I think about 15 years old.
    I was rather tall for my age.
    And I've worked in the shops.
    And at that time, I already worked outside of the ghetto.
    So you were just outside--
    I was outside of that, because I remember
    I used to go to work on the bus depot
    to fix buses, all the woodwork.
    So then after that, that was in March--
    1944.
    And then?
    By June, I think it was just about the summer of 1944
    when the Soviets started approaching Lithuania.
    And the German decision was to quote, unquote, "evacuate us."
    And this--
    Describe it to me.
    As far as I know, we knew that the ghetto
    is going to be liquidated, and we
    had to appear at a certain place just with whatever
    we could carry on us.
    And we were put into freight cars.
    And they close the freight cars, and we started traveling.
    Was the ghetto burning when you left, or no?
    I remember the burning of a hospital.
    I don't remember exactly what happened when we left.
    Tell me about the burning of the hospital.
    To the best of my recollection, they just
    closed up the hospital.
    They put the hospital on fire, and they
    burnt everybody inside, doctors, nurses, patients, and whatnot.
    And how did you see it?
    How did you--
    Oh, that you could see.
    But I cannot put it chronologically at a specific
    time.
    I don't remember.
    And other personal memories that you
    have of that time, like mischiefs that you got into,
    or girls that you sneaked off to see?
    Were there any incidents?
    I was too young and too hungry that that particular aspect
    of life did not really come up.
    What about mischief that you got into?
    I don't think I got into any mischief
    because we were very busy trying to survive.
    Any other recollections that you can
    think of from that time period that I haven't asked you about?
    Well, one of the things I can remember,
    which is rather important, most certainly in my later life,
    is in the ghetto there was a person who
    used to be a mathematics professor before the war.
    And he insisted that I study math with him.
    Of course, for free, because that
    was going to give him some sense of reality.
    And he told me, if you survive, you'll use it.
    And if you don't survive, then it's unimportant.
    I basically had a good aptitude for math.
    And when I was at the end of the ghetto,
    I was proficient in math to actually college level.
    I was one of the few people who got into the concentration camp
    with a knowledge of differential calculus.
    When did you-- how did he teach you?
    Oh, just-- the socialization inside of the ghetto was there.
    People spoke to people.
    I mean, there was no separation of people,
    because after you came from work,
    people just congregated together.
    And that may have been one of the reasons why there were very
    few, if any, suicides in the ghetto,
    because there was always a community spirit.
    And people didn't feel singled out in their misery.
    So in general, people helped each other.
    People helped each other and people supported each other.
    And due to the fact that there was a cohesive community,
    people did not feel abandoned, because whatever
    happened happened to a group rather than to individuals.
    OK.
    And what about-- do you remember having to wear the yellow star?
    Oh, yeah.
    That's the-- I had to wear two yellow stars, one on the front,
    one in the back.
    That started in the very beginning
    after the German occupation.
    And that also became a rather interesting business of mine,
    because I used to make yellow stars out of plywood
    and connect the front and the rear with a string
    so people could put it over the back and the front.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    Let's cut.

    Overview

    Interviewee
    Abraham Rodstein
    Interviewer
    Sandra Bradley
    Date
    interview:  1997 June 02

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 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 Abraham Rodstein on June 2, 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 08:41:41
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn511024

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    Time Coded Notes (2)

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    Also in Oral history interviews of the Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto collection

    Contains oral history interviews with sixteen Holocaust survivors recorded in preparation for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's exhibition, "Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto," which opened in Nov. 1997. Collection includes interviews with: Brigitte Altman, Miriam Gershwin, Eta Hecht, Henry Kellen, Tamar Lazerson, David Levine, Jacob Lewin, Esther Lurie, Ted Pais, Avraham Pnina, Abraham Rodstein, Ivar Segalowitz, Avraham Tory, Helen Yermus, Celia Yewlow, and Berel Zisman. The interviewees discuss their experiences of living in the ghetto in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, during the Holocaust

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