Kestenberg Archive

HS was born in Ciechanowiec, Poland, but her childhood memories begin in Podbrodzie (now Pabrade, Lithuania) where her family moved when she was small. Her father was a teacher in a secular Hebrew-language school. When the war broke out, all the Jews were forced to live in a ghetto. They suffered from food shortage; HS remembers staying in line for bread. Subsequently most of the Jewish inhabitants of the town were killed in nearby forests or in the Poligon camp. HS's family together with some other people hid in the attic of a temple, but after some days the Germans discovered them. They took them to a forest and shot all the family, except HS. She pretended she was dead and then she escaped. She was nine years old at the time. A Christian woman helped her to get to another Jewish ghetto. She lived there until a non-Jewish farmer took her from the ghetto. She stayed with his family, doing the housework. This saved her again from death, but the Germans were searching for escaped Jews and her benefactor asked her to leave his place. HS had to hide in the fields and forests. From 1941 to 1944 she went through many villages and many people. She gave herself a Christian name and hid her Jewish identity. After the war she was sent to an orphanage for Jewish children in Vilna and then to another orphanage in Lodz, founded by Hashomer Hatzair. She learned Hebrew and got a Zionist education. In 1947 she sailed to Palestine aboard the illegal immigration ship the Exodus 1947. ; The British Royal Navy seized the ship and deported all its passengers back to Europe. HS lived for one year in Lindefel in a refugee camp in Germany, run by the British. Then she immigrated to Israel. She worked and studied in Kibbutz Evron near Nahariya. In Israel nobody was interested in her past. She had a hard time coping with the apathy. Her own children don't know much about her story of survival.