RelatioNet EL PE 39 MA LI
Ella Peretz

Interviewers: Noam Janella and Brit Ben Amitai.

Address: Kfar-Saba, Israel.
E-mail: britbenamitai@walla.co.il


Survivor:

Code: RelatioNet EL PE 39 MA LI
Family Name:Peretz
First Name: Ella
Father Name:Shlomo Peretz

Mother Name: Sheyna Peretz
Year of birth: 1939
Town In Holocaust: Marcinkonys
Country In Holocaust: Lithuania.

The Interview:

Ella Katz was born in 1939 in Lithia in a town named Marcinkonys as Ella Peretz to her father Shlomo Peretz and her mother Sheyna Peretz. She was two and a half when the Germans arrived in her hometown in 1941 and took the Jews of her town (about 600 Jews) to a ghetto that was near a train station between Vilna and Drozna. In April of 1942, when the Germans put all the Jews in the ghetto, they wanted to use the train station in order to take the Jews to extermination camps in Auschwitz.

During the interview she points out:" Then I was two and a half, I can't remember any thing. It's all from stories; you can't remember anything at that age can you?" She then begins her story: All the Jews from her home town were put into the ghetto, the men used to go out to work for the Germans. There was a high level of congestion at the ghetto. One day on November 22 the Germans told all the Jews to pack their belongings and to come to the center of the ghetto. The goal of the Germans was to send the Jews by train to the concentration camps in Auschwitz. To prevent the Jews from running away, the Germans built a high wooden fence around the ghetto that was impossible to jump over and they placed Germans and Lithuanians soldiers with guns. Around the ghetto there were also machine-guns. At that time there were already rumors that the trains led the Jews to gas chambers, to their death and because of that the Jews in her town decided to resist and not to get on the trains. Marcinkonys was the only town that never stepped on the trains and attacked the Germans in an attempt to take their weapons. But since the Jews were empty handed and the Germans and the Lithuanians had weapons, the power was in their hands and they began shooting the Jews. At that time, Ella was standing near her father and her mother. Her mother shouted to her father: "Take the child!", her father took her into his arms and shouted to her mother to run after him. They ran towards the forest that was behind the ghetto. During the shooting her mother was shot to death and was killed on the spot. Her father ran towards the wooden fence and tried to break it. Since he was a young and strong man he succeeded, but at the same time his daughter, Ella, fell from his hands. He left her there but eventually he came back to take her and kept running into the depth of the forest away from the Germans. This is how Ella was saved by her father.

The Germans murdered almost half of the Jews who were in Marcinkonys that day. Ella's father continued running until he got to a cow barn, he entered with his daughter and hid there for several hours until the shooting stopped and it became dark. After he left the barn he kept advancing into the forest because it was only possible to hide there. At the same time, Ella tells us:" And I, a small child, I cried, I wanted my mother, I was hungry".

In the forest, her father met a Lithuanian wood-cutter that he had known even before the days of the war. Her father asked him for help but the Lithuanian said coldly: "Go away or I'll throw my ax at you!". Ella points out that the Lithuanians were even worse then the Germans because during all of those years in Marcinkonys they had lived in good relations but now, the Lithuanian had turned against the Jews.

Her father continued running. He met the rest of the Jews who had succeeded in running from the shooting in the ghetto in the forest. He met Ella's grandmother, Ella's aunt and some more cousins. Over all, they were a pretty large group, about 60 people who were divided into 3 groups of families who slept together, and ate together. Ella adds that there wasn't another way to be saved besides running to the forest, which meant that the only survivors from the Marcinkonys ghetto were the ones who ran to the forest. They lived in the forest for two years, they suffered from the Lithuanian cold which in the winter reaches minus 40 degrees, as well as from a lack of food especially in the winter. Against all odds, Ella tells us that they were never sick. Life in the forest was very difficult, to wash Ella they melted snow, and because they didn't have food the men walked towards the Lithuanian villages near the forest and stole food from them, a piece of bread that had mold in it, potatoes etc.

The forest in Marcinkonys.

Because the German looked for them all the time the Jews who had escaped from the ghetto, part of whom were Ella and her family, were concentrated near the swamps in the forest, and there were a lot of swamps there. The Germans knew that there were Jews hiding in the forest and they wanted to kill them, but they were scared of coming near the swamps because they were scared of drowning in them. The setting near the swamps caused another problem, a mosquito problem, which were huge. "They stung me", says Ella. One of stories she had been told was that her grandmother sat near her all the time with a wooden branch and got rid of the mosquitoes that came to sting Ella. During those two years the Germans had been consistently chasing the Jews. Every time that the Germans came close to them they managed to run away. One day during one of the escapes they put a block of wood over one of the swamps so they could pass over it. Her father was holding his backpack and Ella and started crossing the swamp. While crossing he lost his balance and fell into the swamp with Ella: "They barely succeeded in pulling me out of the swamp", so she tells. In the forest, they were scared of being caught so they tried not to make noise and avoided lighting fire. Their luck was that they knew the forest well because they had lived near it in their home town, Marcinkonys, for years and they used to work in it before the war. They ate mushrooms and strawberries during the summer and in the winter they didn't have anything to eat. Despite the food problem, they all survived.

At the end of the war, Russian partisans came to the forest and announced to the Jews that the war was over. When Ella and her family came out of the forest they didn't continue living in Lithia. They started their journey to Israel. First, they moved to Poland where her father got married again and after that they moved to Germany and stayed there for three years because there were camps for Jewish survivors. The Joint built camps that gave food to the survivors, there was also a school there and Ella learned in it: "Thanks to that, when I arrived to Israel, at ten years old I knew Hebrew. Look, nobody believes I wasn't born in Israel." But for her family, Germany was only a step. Although most of her cousins moved to USA, her father and his wife wanted to come to Israel because her step mother's brother lived here and Ella's uncle did too. Her grandmother was old and died after the war.

Ella grew up in Israel. In "Kfar Malal" and went to school there.

Her town

Lithuania is the southernmost of the three Baltic States – and the largest and most populous of them. Lithuania was the first occupied Soviet republic to break free from the Soviet Union and restore its sovereignty by the declaration of independence on 11 March 1990. The capital, Vilnius, is a beautiful city on the banks of the rivers Neris and Vilna.

The Lithuanian landscape is mostly flat, with a few low hills in the western uplands and eastern highlands. Lithuania has 758 rivers, more than 2800 lakes and 99 km of the Baltic Sea coastline. Forests cover just over 30% of the country.

Eighty four percent of the populations are ethnic Lithuanians. The two largest minorities are Poles, (6% of the population,) and Russians, (5% of the population.) The Lithuanian language belongs to the family of Indo-European languages. Other minorities are Jews Muslims and Karaists. In all, 1.6 present of the population.

During the Soviet and Nazi occupation between 1940 and 1944, Lithuania lost 780,000 of its citizens. Among them, ninety five percent of the Jewish community (190,000).


The Jews in Lithuania:

Jews had lived in Lithuania since the fourteenth century. From the seventeenth century onwards Lithuania's rabbinical academies were world-renowned, and during the nineteenth century the country was a center of Jewish culture, religion, and of Zionism. After World War I Lithuania became an independent state. As part of the non-aggression and territorial agreements made by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union before World War II broke out in September 1939, Lithuania was annexed to the Soviet Union. On October 30 of that year control over Vilnius was returned to Lithuania from Poland. At that time, Lithuania's Jewish population grew by about 100,000 to 250,000. This number included about 15,000 Jewish refugees who had fled to Vilnius from Nazi-occupied Poland. Most of Lithuania's population was angered by the Nazi-Soviet pact, which took away their country's independence. They let out their anger on the country's Jews with attacks on them and their property.

On June 15, 1940 the Soviet army moved in and took control of Lithuania; About seven weeks later Lithuania was officially annexed to the Soviet Union. Lithuania's Jews were affected profoundly when it became a Soviet republic. Many of their businesses were nationalized, and Jewish political, cultural, and welfare organizations were closed down. On June 14, 1941 the Soviets expelled tens of thousands of Lithuanians whom they considered to be "enemies of the people." Among them were some 7,000 Jews. Although the Jews suffered under the Soviets, the Lithuanians considered them to be supporters of the Soviets.

On June 22, 1941 Germany invaded its former ally, the Soviet Union, and Soviet-held territories such as Lithuania. Most of the Lithuanian population welcomed the Germans, as they felt that the Germans would grant them independence, and many, willingly collaborated with the German invaders. Even before the Germans finished the conquering of Lithuania, the Lithuanians carried out pogroms against the Jews in at least 40 localities. Jews were killed, injured, and raped, and rabbis were brutalized.

Just weeks after the Germans arrived, they instituted a systematic campaign to exterminate all of Lithuanian Jewry. Many of the stages of the annihilation, including rounding up the Jews, guarding them, and transporting them to the extermination sites, were performed by the Lithuanian army and police.

During the summer of 1941 most of the Jews of the provinces were murdered. From September to November most of the Jews in the big cities (who had been imprisoned in ghettos when the Germans arrived) were also slaughtered. By late 1941 only 40,000 Jews were left in Lithuania. these were localized in four ghettos (in Vilnius, Kovno Siauliai, and Svencionys) and
several labor camps. During the summer and fall of 1943 the ghettos in Vilnius and Svencionys were liquidated, while those in Kovno and Siauliai became Concentration Camps. Approximately 15,000 Jews were sent to labor camps in Latvia and Estonia, where they perished, and some 5,000 Jews were sent to Extermination Camps.

Before the Germans retreated from Lithuania in the summer of 1944, they transferred about 10,000 Jews from the Kovno and Siauliai camps to concentration camps in Germany. Those who tried to resist were murdered. By the time Germany surrendered to the Allies in 1945, only a few thousand Lithuanian Jews had survived.

Ella, our survivor, lived in a small town in Lithuania called Marcinkonys.

During the war, the Nazis decided not to pass over the extermination of the Jews living in Lithuania, even in a small town such as Marcinkonys.

Up to November 2, 1942, there were approximately 600 people living in the improvised Ghetto in Marcinkonys that was used as forest-worker huts. The Germans forced the Jews to work at a local canning factory. They were also forced to perform other works, but compared to the Ghettos in some of the larger towns in Lithuania, life was somehow easier.

On November 2,at about the same time all the other Ghettos in the area were liquidated, the local German police had received orders to liquidate Marcinkonys Ghetto as well. Thanks to the fact that the local Jews at Marcinkonys had heard about the liquidation plans, and about the horrible treatment of the Lithuanians, the leadership of the Jewish community decided to avoid a similar fate, and to rebel.

In order to execute the liquidation orders, the local German police and some Lithuanian forest-workers surrounded the fence of the Ghetto and demanded the Jews to concentrate in the center of the Ghetto. One of the leaders, Aaron Kobrowski, and several accomplices had a plan to kill the leader of the group of the Nazis. The leader of the Nazis felt something was wrong and ordered to open fire at the Jews. The occupants of Marcinkonys tried to escape but many Jewish men, women and children were murdered. Some of the Jews succeeded to escape, survived and even fought back in the surrounding woods for the next two years, when they were liberated by the Red Army.

The mass grave in Marcinkonys forest that was built for the memory of the 600 Jews murdered during the Holocaust.

תקציר בעברית

אלה כץ נולדה בשנת 1939 בעיירה מרצ'ינקוניס שבליטא בשם אלה פרץ, לאביה שלמה פרץ, ולאמה שיינה פרץ.

היא הייתה בת שנתיים וחצי כאשר הגרמנים הגיעו לעיירתה בשנת 1941, והכניסו את יהודי העיירה (כ-600 יהודים) לגטו שהיה ליד תחנת הרכבת בין וילנה לדרוזה. התנאים בגטו היה קשים, הייתה צפיפות נוראית והגברים נשלחו לעבודות כפייה.

ב-22 בנובמבר 1942הגרמנים קיבצו את כל יהודי הגטו במרכזו, ותכננו להשתמש בתחנת הרכבת כדי לשלוח אותם למחנות ההשמדה. היהודים בעיירה החליטו להתנגד והחלו לברוח לכיוון גדרות הגטו ומשם לכיוון היער שהקיף את הגטו, בעוד הגרמנים ועוזריהם הליטאים, שעד הגעת הגרמנים למרצ'ינקוניס חיו בשכנות טובה עם היהודים, יורים בהם. אמה של אלה נרצחה. אלה הייתה בזרועות אביה שהמשיך לרוץ לכיוון הגדר, שבר אותה, ותוך כדי כך אלה נפלה מזרועותיו. הוא המשיך לרוץ, אך לבסוף החליט לחזור ולקחת את בתו.

בתוך היער הוא פגש את כל יהודי העיירה שהצליחו לברוח, כ-60 יהודים, ביניהם דודים, בני דודים וסבתה של אלה. בשנתיים הבאות הם חיו ביער, סבלו מקור נוראי בחורף ומחוסר מזון. הגברים נאלצו לגנוב אוכל מכפרים ליטאים שהקיפו את היער כדי שהניצולים יוכלו להתקיים. בנוסף, החיים ביער היו מלווים בבריחה מתמדת- הגרמנים חיפשו ללא הפסקה את היהודים ביער, לכן אלה ומשפחתה התמקמו כל פעם ליד ביצות גדולות ביער כי הם ידעו שהגרמנים מפחדים להתקרב אל הביצות מפאת הפחד לטבוע. הם פחדו להיתפס, לכן הם ניסו לא לעשות רעש ונמנעו מהדלקת אש. מזלם הגדול היה שהם הכירו טוב את היער היות ורבים מהם עבדו שם במשך שנים בתקופה שלפני המלחמה.

בסוף המלחמה פרטיזנים רוסים נכנסו ליער והודיעו להם על סוף המלחמה. מאותה נקודה והלאה החל מסעם של אלה ואביה לארץ ישראל. ראשית, הם עברו לפולין- שם אביה של אלה נישא בשנית, לאחר מכן עברו לגרמניה שם שהו שלוש שנים במחנות מיוחדים של הג'וינט לניצולים יהודים מהמלחמה, ומשם הגיעו לישראל.