The Other Schindlers (15 page)

Manli has said, ‘I am often asked why he did it’, and she explains:

Two cousins in Lithuania, Irena Veisaite and Margaret Kagen (see p.
88
), were rescued separately by Roman Catholics who were true humanitarians. Jews had been in Lithuania since the fourteenth century. In 1939 Jews made up one-third of the urban population and yet during the Holocaust more than 90 per cent of Lithuania’s 240,000 Jews were killed, mostly by Lithuanians on Nazi orders.
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Stefanija Ladigiené (1902–67)
. Irena Veisaite was born in 1928 in Kovno and was protected by several Lithuanian families. Her last place of hiding was
provided
by Stefanija Ladigiené in Vilnius, whom she called her second mother. She was the widow of a general, Kazimieras Ladyga, who had been shot by the Russians. She was a very good woman – intelligent and well educated, who had worked as a journalist and was involved in the Resistance. Irena was sent to her in March 1944 by a couple who had rescued her from the Kaunas Ghetto. Stefanija told Irena she had taken her in to compensate for the injustice that had been done to Jews by her compatriots. Irena was overwhelmed by Stefanija’s kindness to her as when she first arrived she was very pale and hungry. ‘Food was very scarce – she gave her more pasta than her own children – later she kissed her and Irena cried because it was such a long time since someone had kissed her and been kind to her.’
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Irena Veisaite was rescued for purely humanitarian reasons:

Irena arrived at Stefanija’s home after a series of unfortunate adventures but, as she originally wrote to me, she ‘was saved by several Lithuanian Christian
families
’.
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She had a very pleasant childhood in a large middle-class family. In 1938 her parents divorced and just before the war in 1941 her mother was in hospital. Her mother was arrested while there and sent to prison. Irena then described how as a young girl of 13 she was sent to the Kaunas (Kovno) Ghetto with her parents and Aunty Polla Ginsburg, where she stayed for two and a half years.

In 1942 friends of her parents from Belgium, Ona and Juozas Strimaitis, managed to get a message to her that they were looking for her and wanted to help her go into hiding. The wife had worked with her father. They encouraged her to escape from the Ghetto. It was a difficult decision, but she did it. She left
the Ghetto with a working brigade, with her yellow star just pinned on for easy removal later. At the particular moment that she left the column of Jews, she could have been shot at any moment. However, she was two hours late to the meeting point and there was no one there. She therefore went to the Strimaitis’ home and spoke to the caretaker. She was extremely scared because he could have betrayed them all. They gave her false documents and a passport and it was decided she should go to Vilnius where nobody knew her. One of the documents she was given said she was the daughter of a director of a
gymnasium
.
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On 7 November 1943, aged 15, Irena travelled to Vilnius on a very crowded train. She was to have stayed with a dentist who was Mr Strimaitis’ sister, but the family were very nervous so she was moved to a surgeon, the brother of Ona Strimaitis, Pranas Bagdonavicius, who knew her family as well. He told people she was from the country. She was registered at his address and went to church. She spoke good Lithuanian, unlike many Jews who were used to speaking Yiddish, and spoke it with an accent. All was well until some friends came round with a book on Van Gogh and she said how much she liked his work. Perhaps this was unexpected from a country girl and people began to suspect she was Jewish. Her host’s fiancée heard the rumours so Irena had to be moved on.

By 1944 she was put with a woman who had a daughter of a similar age, whose husband had been deported. The woman was unkind to her and warned her not to touch her daughter’s food. She also made unpleasant remarks about Jews. A kind neighbour found her some work in an orphanage for children under 2 years old. The director, Dr Izidorius Rudaitis, was told she was half-Jewish and she worked as a domestic help. She had only been there a week when the Gestapo arrived. She went to the toilet and decided to stay put to protect her rescuers. The Gestapo had come looking for Jewish children they had been told were in the orphanage. The director denied it and winked at Irena. The Gestapo went away and she felt much safer. However, two months later the Gestapo came back, to the house she was staying at. Her woman rescuer told her to leave immediately by the back door as they came through the front door. She went back to the dentist where she stayed for one day.

It was after all these traumatic experiences that in March 1944 Irena was finally sent to Stefanija. She had six children but only three were living with her at the time. Irena arrived late in the afternoon and Stefanija told her own children to treat Irena like a sister from the country. Although she was a very devout Catholic, and was very tolerant, she was a strict mother to her children.
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After Lithuania was liberated by the Russians on 13 July 1944, Irena stayed with the family and started going to school. On 14 March 1946 Stefanija was arrested, tried by a KGB three-man board and sent to Siberia. She was only
allowed to return in 1956 after Stalin’s death. In 1967 she died in Irena’s arms. She was only one of many tens of thousands of Lithuanians who were exiled to Siberia. Historians have calculated that between 1940 and 1952 up to one-third of the Lithuanian population was lost to massacre, war casualties, deportations, executions and immigration.
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Irena stayed in Vilnius and is now a Professor of Philology, World and German Literature at its university. In 2001 she led a seminar at the Stockholm International Forum on Holocaust Education and in answer to a question on the motivation of teachers; she replied:

Professor Veisaite was also the founding chair of the Open Society Foundation of Lithuania. It was founded in 1990 with the aim of fostering democracy in the former Soviet Republic, and she chaired it from 1993 to 2000. Lithuania is trying to examine the truths of the past and Irena has said this is not a Jewish project. She added:

The Lithuanians are accepting their role in the Holocaust and accordingly, in 1995, the new President of Lithuania, Algirdas Brazauskas, appeared in the Knesset in Israel to deliver a formal apology for Lithuanian collaboration with the Nazis. Meanwhile, Veisaite was active with various projects. She participated in the
creation
of the House of Memory which ran an essay competition for the whole country called ‘Jews: Neighbors of my Grandparents and Great-Grandparents’, which encouraged children to interview their elders and several volumes of winning entries have been published. She initiated the creation of the Centre for Stateless Cultures at Vilnius University. She also helped to initiate a travelling exhibition: ‘Jewish Life in Lithuania’. She is anxious to promote tolerance and an understanding of beliefs and practices different to one’s own but with complete non-acceptance of intolerance.
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Irena wrote about Stefanija’s family in 1997: ‘My relations with the whole family remained extremely close up to the present. I feel that her children are my brothers and sisters, and their children – my nephews and nieces.’

Irena has concluded:

Iris Origo DBE (1902–88)
was a writer with an American father and
Anglo-Irish
mother. She grew up in Italy after her father’s death when she was 8. He had expressed the wish that she be brought up in Italy or France – ‘free from all this national feeling which makes people so unhappy. Bring her up somewhere where she does not belong, then she can’t have it.’
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She was educated in Florence, where she later met an Italian aristocrat, Marchese Antonio Origo, whom she married on 4 March 1924. They settled on a neglected Tuscan estate, La Foce, which they restored and maintained under German occupation.
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Mussolini had come to power in 1922 and the Origos benefited from his policies to keep people on the land rather than moving to the towns.

When Italy entered the war as an ally of Germany, Iris worked with the Italian Red Cross in Rome dealing with British POWs until she became pregnant in 1942 and returned to La Foce. She was in a very difficult position because her own country was at war with her adopted country and she was married to an Italian. Her husband Antonio, who in the early years approved of Mussolini’s
agricultural
policies, took some time to understand what fascism really meant. Iris, initially uncertain, came to detest it long before he did. As a writer, Iris recorded her wartime experiences in her adopted country in diaries which were published after the war. They provide a valuable insight into how life changed around her.

Writing of the pre-war period 1935–40, Iris was aware of the changes occurring in Europe, even in her isolation at La Foce, and describes the impact of the radio at that time: ‘Previously, non-combatants had been, for the most part, only aware of what the press of their own country told them, or what they saw with their own eyes. Now, we were all constantly exposed to these confusing,
overwhelming
waves, from friends and enemies alike.’
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In this period she wrote of her shock at a telephone call she received from a woman acquaintance in the immediate pre-war period. ‘She and I had been asked to send a nominal invitation to an old Czechoslovak professor and his wife, which would enable them to get a transit visa through Italy and thus escape from Prague and rejoin their sons in England.’ Her acquaintance was complaining about having
been asked to get involved and complaining that this ‘might have got us into trouble’. Iris tried to explain that the professor and his wife were old and ill and this was their only chance to rejoin their sons. The woman was quite unmoved: ‘I have no sympathy with such people. Why didn’t they get out months ago, when their sons ran away?’ Iris managed to ring off. A few minutes later the woman rang back demanding to know what Iris was going to do about it, and warning Iris that Italy was not neutral and she could get her husband into trouble. ‘Why, it’s the sort of thing one would hardly do for a member of one’s own family!’

Iris was very upset and she wrote:

Fortunately, Iris Origo did not allow this acquaintance to influence her. In the late 1930s, with ‘the Juggernaut approach of war’, she still visited England regularly. She wrote that through her close friend Lilian Bowes Lyon (1895–1949), cousin of the late Queen Mother, and some Quaker friends she ‘was able to share the efforts of some people who, already then, were devoting their energies to enabling a few Jewish scholars, old people and children, to make their escape from Germany before it was too late’.
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The children came on the Kindertransport and most never saw their parents again. Iris sponsored six Jewish children and paid for them to go to Bunce Court School in Kent, run for Jewish refugee children. Quakers were instrumental in the running of the school. When one boy from Berlin left in 1947 aged 16, he stated his intention of becoming a painter and eventually became a pupil of David Bomberg. His name was Frank Helmet Auerbach.

Bunce Court had evolved from a German progressive boarding school called Herrlingen, sited in the Schwabian Jura mountain region, created and run by a remarkable Jewish woman called Anna Essinger. In 1933 she realised she and the school had no future under Hitler and, aged 54, she moved it to England with the help of the Quakers, bringing seventy pupils with her.
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Eventually it housed many children whose parents were exterminated in the concentration camps. Walter Block wrote of Bunce Court: