June 21, 1969

Despite the scars of childhood and war, Chaim Lazar lived a full, optimistic, and happy life. But from time to time he would stop and look back, and like many Holocaust survivors, ask himself how it came to be that he, of all people, survived. Below is a long passage from 1969, when he was fifty-five years old, in which he recounts several incidents that cannot be rationally explained, in which he was saved at the last moment. Fate? Divine providence? Or simply luck? Who can say?

Tomorrow at dawn, twenty-eight years will have passed since Hitler's army — the German forces — attacked their ally Soviet Russia, breaking out the German-Russian war, and with it began the total annihilation of Eastern European Jewry. Starting from the Baltic states through Poland, through the Jews of the occupied Russian territories, and ending with the Jews of Western and Central Europe.

I remember the last night. It was also a Saturday night, the eve before the storm broke. It was a warm summer night, which I spent in the company of friends, strolling through the city. And although the atmosphere in the city had been tense in recent days, with everyone expecting something to happen and fearing something bad was coming, no one imagined, as they lay down to sleep, that in the morning they would be woken by air raid sirens and the roar of enemy German aircraft and the echoes of explosions sowing death, destruction and ruin. No one imagined that events were about to unfold that would prove so fateful for our people — perhaps the most fateful and gravest in our history across the last two thousand years.

Every person has their own fate. In the first days of the war, and before it, several incidents occurred which, over time, as conditions worsened and I recalled them, filled my heart with a deep conviction that I would outlive the enemy and emerge from the war alive. Perhaps everyone felt that way. Surely many had their own signs that deepened their belief that they too would survive — and yet, to great sorrow and pain, their faith was disappointed, and what happened to them was what happened to the multitudes of the Jewish people. But this did not diminish my belief or shake it, neither in those days nor now — for these were, for me, well-founded proofs that I would outlive the war.

The first incident occurred on a Saturday, exactly twenty-eight years ago today:

I was living in Vilna in a single room with my friend and companion Josef Sodersky. Despite the fact that our worldviews were diametrically opposed — he a Communist and I a Beitar member — a deep friendship existed between us, and his image lives in my memory to this day. We spent many days, evenings, and pleasant nights together. (It would have been fitting for me to write about him someday and preserve his memory.)

We had an arrangement: every week, one of us would travel home to our hometown of Ponivezh. When he traveled, he would stop by my home to bring greetings from me, and I would do the same for his family.

On this particular Saturday, the eve of the war's outbreak, it was my turn to travel. At noon, when we returned from work and he was preparing a few things for me to deliver to his family, I suddenly said: "Josef, you know what? I don't feel like traveling today. Maybe you'll go in my place, and I'll go in two weeks." Without hesitation, Josef agreed to go.

We accompanied him to the train station. With us was a third friend, a Polish engineer named Tadeusz Staskevich, who had been a childhood friend of Josef's and with whom I had also become friends since our days in Vilna. We said goodbye to Josef, waved as the train began to move, made plans for the following week, and none of us imagined we would never see him again. Word reached me later that when the war broke out, Josef tried to make his way back to Vilna, but along the road he was murdered by the Lithuanians.

Incidentally, he used to tell me that once, when he was still a boy, a schoolboy at the gymnasium, he had gone to a Gypsy fortune-teller to find out what would become of him, and among other things she told him he would not live past the age of thirty. We used to laugh at this story and mock all fortune-tellers, Gypsies especially — and again, we did not imagine that this prophecy would come to be fulfilled.

Had I been the one to travel home, it is certain that I too would not have returned. I would have stayed at home with the family — Father, my sister Sarah and her husband, may God avenge their blood — and surely my fate would have been theirs. Or perhaps I would have urged them and convinced them to flee toward Russia, as many did who managed to escape and pass through all the circles of Russia's hellish suffering: hunger, cold, and disease. As acquaintances later told me, Father did not want to flee toward Russia, saying he no longer had the strength to flee a second time and endure again in Russia what he had endured during the years of the First World War.

Why did I not want to travel home that Saturday? What made such an idea arise in my mind — an idea contrary to our established arrangement, and also contrary to the constant desire to see the family and hear news of them, especially during those hard times since the Russians had ruled Lithuania? I did not know then, and I do not know to this day, what came over me that day. Was it the decree of fate?

And here comes the second incident:

After Josef's train left the station with him aboard, I said to Tadeusz: "What will I do alone in Vilna all evening and Sunday? Since we're already here at the train station, I'll go to Kovna to visit my sister Ada, and spend the weekend with her and her family."

In those days the trains were already impossibly crowded. As was the Russian custom, long queues stretched from the ticket windows, and afterward one had to fight hard to manage to board a carriage and secure a seat, if you were lucky. We went to the ticket counter for Kovna. The queue was enormous. I kept trying to send Tadeusz away, urging him not to wait with me until I got a ticket, as it would take a long time — why should he waste his time? But he wouldn't budge. The queue moved at an infuriatingly slow pace, yet still crept forward, like the hands of a clock that for some reason also seemed to crawl.

A long hour passed. I was getting closer to the ticket window. Two people ahead of me. I was already holding the money in my hand. And then, just as my turn came, I stepped away from the window and said to Tadeusz: "I'm not going!" Tadeusz looked at me as though I had lost my mind. What was the point, then, of standing here and wasting all this time in such discomfort? Why had I changed my mind? "I don't know. I'm not going!" I answered.

After that I saw Tadeusz only twice more, in the first days of the war, when he told me of the massacres in the Lithuanian towns and the very hard times that had come for the Jews. But he had no advice to offer me.

Had I gone to Kovna, I would surely have stayed with Ada and been taken along with her husband Moshe by the kfunes — the Lithuanian abductors — who went from house to house taking men who never returned. Moshe was taken in the first days of the war. It is also possible I would have tried to make my way to Father's house in Ponivezh, in which case my fate would have been the same as theirs.

The third incident happened to me in the early days of the war, at the start of the second week:

Since Josef and I were living in a rented room and leading bachelor lives, we had no food stores at home, and when the war broke out all the shops and restaurants closed and we were left with nothing. My money had also run out, as it was near the end of the month and I was expecting a salary in a few days. All my attempts to obtain food came to nothing, and I began to live with hunger.

One day on the street I met Yehudit Berman, a Beitar member from the small town of Shirvintos in Lithuania, situated between Vilkomir and Vilna near the Polish border. Her parents were respected homeowners in the town — a well-off family with businesses, known throughout the area. It turned out Yehudit was studying at the university in Vilna and was living not far from me. The war, which had cut everyone off from their homes and left many with nothing, had not yet touched Yehudit. She was in constant contact with home through the university caretaker, a friend of her parents, who also supplied her with food items that were completely unobtainable in the city at that time. She told me that many refugees from Poland who had come to Lithuania after Poland's fall were now staying at her parents' home. According to her, there was plenty of food and accommodation for all, and the security situation in the town was fine — no one had harmed the Jews. She was of course planning to return home, waiting for her parents to send one of their farmer friends to Vilna with a wagon to take her back, and she invited me to join her. There would surely be room for me in their home, and her parents would be glad to receive me. There was no point in staying alone and isolated in big Vilna, without friends, without means, with such difficulty obtaining food, she said.

For the next few days we were together. She would share her food with me, and together we planned our departure from Vilna and the journey to her parents' home. Her proposal appealed to me: first, a small town might indeed be easier to manage in, especially with her family's home open to me; and second, it was closer to my home in Ponivezh — about halfway — and if I succeeded in reaching her town, I could plan from there how to continue on to reach home.

On the appointed day we packed our belongings, taking only the bare minimum so as not to appear to be carrying packages — which would signal that we were heading out. Those were already very dangerous days. Lithuanians and Germans were snatching Jews off the streets, and those taken did not return home. The prevailing account was that they were being sent to labor camps in the east. We hired a carriage to take us to the edge of the city. Outside the city, in a grove, the farmer and his wagon would be waiting to take us with him. One problem remained to be solved: at the city exit there was a checkpoint, and anyone leaving or entering was required to identify themselves — but the university caretaker had advised us to leave through a series of winding back alleys. With no alternative we set out. The carriage moved through the half-deserted streets of the city. It was a warm summer noon. Every time we spotted a policeman, soldier, or simply a non-Jew who aroused suspicion nearby, our hearts stopped beating. We tried to assume expressions of indifference to what was happening outside — the faces of happy, smiling lovers absorbed only in each other, as though we were the only ones on the street, in the whole city, in the whole world.

Suddenly I turned to Yehudit and said: "Listen, I'm not going with you!" Yehudit was stunned. She nearly went into shock, struck speechless. How could this be? For days we had been planning the journey together, preparing for it, counting down to the longed-for day — and now we were practically already on the road to freedom. And suddenly, such strange ideas, such a complete reversal, such a disappointment!

Yehudit dissolved in tears and pleading — that I should not leave her, that I should come with her, that this was salvation for me — but I held firm. When her entreaties did not help, she demanded an explanation. I told her that in our times one cannot know what tomorrow will bring. Perhaps yesterday things were still good at her parents' home and today they are not. Perhaps last night they had food to eat, and perhaps today they themselves are going hungry. Today they are still sitting in their home and tomorrow they may be searching for a roof over their heads. How could I burden them with my presence? And when Yehudit did not accept my explanation, I promised her that when she arrived home and found everything was alright, she would let me know and I would come immediately. We stopped the carriage, embraced and kissed warmly, and parted in tears, as if the heart knew we would not see each other again.

By that point we had already passed more than half the city, and now I had to make my way back through considerable danger of being caught. The road seemed endless, as though I were treading in place, feeling I would never arrive. But I arrived.

Two or three weeks later, terrible news reached me. All the Jews of the town of Shirvintos had been taken from their homes, marched outside the town with the community's leaders and their families at the front — among them Yehudit and her parents — and when they reached the grove, they were all shot dead. That could have been my fate, had I not changed my mind at the last moment.

Here is the translation:

And another incident:

The nights became a terrible nightmare for the men. As darkness fell, Lithuanians would knock on the doors of Jewish homes, conducting searches, rioting, and plundering anything of value — taking with them all the men found inside. One night they visited the family with whom I was staying. The men of the family had already been seized long ago, while on their way to work, confident that their proper documents would protect them — but the documents were of no help. Only the women remained, and I in my room. I knew that here my freedom would come to an end. The Lithuanians would take me with them and send me to a labor camp. In truth, what difference did it make to me where I was — here or in a labor camp? Either way, I was alone here. Yet for some reason, I did not put much faith in the rumors about the existence of those camps.

The knocking on the door grew louder and more insistent. I looked around for a hiding place and found none. I positioned myself behind the door that separated my room from the dining room, letting the door conceal me. I knew the door would not save me, but there was no other option.

Several rowdy Lithuanians stormed the house. They turned the entire place upside down, pulling all the clothes and objects from the wardrobes, drawers, and beds, searching for money, gold, and other valuables — and for men. The women of the household insisted there were no more men in the house, but the rioters threatened them and demanded to be shown where the men were hiding.

My heart stopped beating. I held my breath. There they were in my room, turning it inside out. One of them grabbed the door handle as if about to close it — and then, of course, I would be lost. And here a miracle occurred! He released the handle, let out a colorful curse upon the heads of the accursed Jews, and called to his companions to move on to other apartments. With a tremendous slam of the door, they left the house.

From that moment on, whenever I recalled these inexplicable incidents, I carried throughout all the years of the war a deep inner certainty that I would indeed survive. The Germans and the murderers of every kind would not overcome me. It was, of course, a false belief — without foundation, without any real basis — yet every similar incident that happened to me strengthened my faith.

And I fulfilled what is written: "By your faith you shall live."