THEY ESCAPED THE NAZIS AS CHILDREN. NOW THEY CAN'T GO HOME BECAUSE OF HEZBOLLAH

They Escaped the Nazis as Children. Now They Can't Go Home Because of Hezbollah

Dozens of Israeli evacuees from Shlomi near the Lebanon border, including about 20 Shoah survivors, have been living in a Jerusalem hotel for the past seven months

May 05th, 16PM May 05th, 22PM

Galina Sidenko, 89, enters the room with heavy, cautious steps. She sits down beside a table covered by a white tablecloth and turns into the little girl Avigail of the Segal family.

"At home I was called Galia, but I'm registered as Avigail," she says, proudly presenting her yellowing Lithuanian birth certificate. "We were named after my grandfather, Avrum. I was called Avigail and my cousin was named Avivit.

"For a year we even went to a Hebrew kindergarten until the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania and closed it. When I was a child I knew Hebrew, but I've completely forgotten it."

Our conversation takes place in a room at Jerusalem's Prima Park Hotel; it's in the synagogue area in the basement, a nice quiet space. Galia has been living at the hotel for nearly seven months, ever since she was evacuated on October 18 from Shlomi, a town on Israel's northern border. She's at the hotel with 56 other Russian-speakers, most of them elderly.

Like Galia, 20 of them are Holocaust survivors who, as children, fled with their families deep into the Soviet Union, escaping annihilation at the hands of the Nazis. Now, 80 years later, they were evacuated again, waiting for the war against Hamas and Hezbollah to end so they can return to their homes.

Galia was born in the Lithuanian city of Siauliai to an affluent family that owned a children's clothing store. In June 1940, the Red Army invaded the Baltic states as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, took the store and evicted the family from their spacious apartment. Galia believes that if the Soviets had more efficiently instilled their rule before the Germans arrived a year later, her family would have been sent to Siberia, where many richer Lithuanians and Jews were sent.

Instead, Galia's father started working for the postal service, and the manager of a post office saved the family when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in the early summer of 1941.

"On June 22, I woke up at 4 A.M. to the sound of sirens and bombs. I was very scared. It has stayed with me to this day. We already had some displaced people from Tilsit," Galia says, using the German name of the city now called Sovetsk in Russia's Kaliningrad enclave that lies between Poland and Lithuania.

"My mother was frantic because the Germans were coming, but she told my father, 'Go, we'll get by. Somebody will save us.' My father went to the post office; a bus taking evacuees was supposed to leave from there. He came back a half hour later. His manager, a Russian name Starodubtsev, said to him: 'Are you crazy? Go get your family!'"

There wasn't room for everyone on that bus of salvation. Galia's great uncle remained in the city and died; no one knows how. "It seems that Lithuanians killed him; he wasn't in the Siauliai Ghetto," Galia says.

One of her mother's sisters had just come from Moscow on a visit with her adolescent son and daughter. She went to meet her parents, Galia's grandfather and grandmother, in a town about 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of Siauliai, even though the family begged them to stay home on the eve of a possible German invasion. All of them were executed in a pit outside the town.

A familiar panic

Galia, her grandmother, mother, father and baby brother embarked on a journey hundreds of miles to the east. The bus first took them to Latvia.

"The road to Riga was … I don't know how to describe it to you. You couldn't imagine it," she says. "It was full of dead bodies – of people and horses. An image is etched into my memory from my childhood: a woman lying on the ground, her baby crawling over her. She apparently was dead and he wasn't walking yet."

Galia remembers how near the city of Jelgava, Latvian forces opened fire on the bus, but the Red Army intervened and saved them. She remembers the freight cars in the train as they headed from the Russian city of Pskov to the Yaroslavl region northeast of Moscow.

They ended up in a remote collective farm in the Gorskovsky region (now Nizhny Novgorod) about 400 kilometers east of Moscow. There they were housed in a "kulak's house," a hut owned by a farmer who had been imprisoned or executed as part of Stalin's persecutions.

Galia's father was drafted into the army and joined the so-called Lithuanian Division, where one-third of the soldiers were Jewish and Yiddish was a major language. Her mother remained the only breadwinner in the family. Galia's main memory of the war years in the poor village where they found refuge was hunger.

"I don't know how we survived. My brother and I were swollen with hunger when my mother decided to sell my father's velvet coat. She had kept it because she thought that if she sold it, he wouldn't return from the front," Galia says.

"But ultimately, she went to a richer village 25 kilometers away and traded it for 16 kilograms [35 pounds] of flour. She stretched those 16 kilograms into the spring of 1942. She'd make a kind of porridge from it. By the spring we were eating grass, simply any green grass we saw. I saw bread only twice during the entire war."

Galia's father returned from the front only after he and the Red Army had reached Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) on Germany's eastern fringes. At the end of the war, the family returned to Siauliai, where Galia spent most of her life. She married "a young handsome man, skilled and a Russian." They had two daughters.

Galia, who spoke Yiddish and Lithuanian as a child, learned Russian after she was evacuated east. She worked her entire life as a Russian teacher at a Lithuanian school.

In the 1990s, one of her daughters immigrated to Israel, started a family and settled in Shlomi. In 2007, Galia decided to join her and her Israeli grandchildren.

Until last October, Shlomi was quiet, but on October 10, Hezbollah fired rockets at the town and sirens broke the silence. Galia felt like that frightened 6-year-old girl of June 22, 1941.

"When I heard the first siren, I couldn't believe it. It simply paralyzed me," she says. "That war and the sirens remained in my heart. And when I hear that sound, I simply die."

Two wars of bravery

Galia lost her husband two years ago. Since then, she has been living "as if somebody took all the air out of me," she says.

In the Jerusalem hotel, the evacuees are living under the care of Luda Hatskilevich, a social worker from Shlomi who coordinated the evacuation and is there for the evacuees most days of the week. The sense of loneliness may have dissipated a bit.

"Luda does everything she can for us," Galia says. "We have lectures, we have an actor who does workshops, as well as a rabbi and a psychologist. We also have concerts."

Still, she says she can't stop worrying about her daughter and other family members who remained up north. One of her granddaughters just finished a stint as a reservist in the army, Galia says proudly.

The distance from their families is a common feature for most of the elderly evacuees at the hotel. The grandchildren are grown up too and are on their own. The grandparents have been waiting months to come home. In the meantime, they have plenty of time for memories.

Sarah Teplitskaya, 85, was only 2 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Her family lived in the city of Pervomaisk near Odesa. She says she remembers the evening her father was drafted into the Red Army.

"There was the blue twilight, the kind they have in Ukraine. I remember we were sitting outside along the wall of the house. My two brothers sat on each side of my mother and I was in her arms," Sarah says.

"Planes were flying overhead and I remember my mother asking: 'My daughter, are you afraid?' I answered, 'I'm not afraid of anything anymore.' I was already talking fluently."

Sarah's mother managed to escape with the three children, first to Kazakhstan and later to Uzbekistan. "I remember sitting on a clay floor and crying from hunger," Sarah says. But she doesn't remember the sounds of World War II.

"I was very young then. I don't remember the explosions, but I do remember the sounds here," she says.

"I walked down a street and heard them. I didn't know if it was us or them firing. There was gunfire when we were evacuated. We drove off under fire. Luda collected people. She grabbed one woman in the street as she was coming down with the garbage."

Sarah says that at no point did she feel fear. "At some stage there was talk of our neighbors trying to invade," she says, referring to Hezbollah across the Lebanese border.

"I prepared whatever I could find in the apartment: a hammer, a knife and anti-roach spray so I could wait for them behind a door and defend myself. It's ridiculous, of course, but that was my reaction. I didn't have any fear."

Emanuel Rochlin, 86, remembers the down pillow his grandmother grabbed when the Germans started bombing the factory near their house in the city of Orsha in Belarus. She also grabbed her family. They headed east and eventually crossed the Ural Mountains.

The Jews of Orsha who didn't flee east during the German invasion were murdered. The pillow, which his grandmother left with an acquaintance, survived the war.

Emanuel's father also fought the Germans and survived. The family returned to Orsha, where Emanuel lived most of his life, a model Soviet citizen and a member of the Communist Party.

"When my wife said in 1990 that we should go to Israel, I wanted to divorce her. For me, Israel was a fascist country that killed Arabs and all that," Emanuel says, reconstructing the Soviet propaganda after Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War.

But his wife and adult children thought differently, which is how, in the early '90s, he found himself rebuilding his life in Shlomi. Today, when asked whether the current war takes him back to the war that marred his childhood, he says there is nothing in common.

"We aren't afraid of war," he says. "After all, we're in Israel. It's safe here – much more than in Kyiv, for example."

2024-05-05T13:21:23Z dg43tfdfdgfd