In this podcast episode, released during Hanukka 2023, we talk with Ofer Lifshitz about a tiny memory booklet, as small as a young girl’s fist, that belonged to a teenage girl named Gita Rubanenko.
Gita was born in 1929 and lived with her parents and sister in a town called Kovno in Lithuania. Kovno, also known as Kaunas, was before the war the capital and largest city of Lithuania. In 1939, Kovno had a vibrant Jewish community with approximately 32,000 people, about one-fourth of the city’s population.
In June 1940, Kovno's everyday life was horribly disrupted when the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania. When Nazi Germany took over a year later, and Gita was twelve years old, life for the Jewish community became impossible. Many were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen and Kovno Ghetto was established to hold the Lithuanian Jews. During the summer of 1941, German occupation officials concentrated the remaining Jews, some 35,000 people, in a ghetto, an area of small, primitive houses and no running water. Kovno ghetto was officially sealed on August 15, 1941. Gita and her family were trapped inside.
Life in the ghetto was harsh and during several ‘Aktions’ thousands were again murdered. Still, those surviving, like Gita, tried to maintain a form of daily life and human dignity. In July 1944, the ghetto was evacuated and most of the remaining Jews were deported. Gita’s family was sent to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland).
Conditions in the camp were brutal. Gita’s parents and sister were murdered. Gita survived. And with her her ‘knizhicka’. In this small booklet, Gita recorded what she witnessed throughout the war. Not with elaborate words, but more like dry facts.
After the war, Gita returned to Kovno and later emigrated to Israel, where she married and had children. She kept the knizhicka with her until her death in 2020. Her daughter, Hasia Mandel, gave it to Yad Vashem for safekeeping after her mother had passed away.
Uniquely, Hasia and her two children Elhanan and Sharon (Gita’s grandchildren) can be heard in this podcast episode, reciting from the knizhicka.
Featured guests:
Ofer Lifshitz was until recently content producer and editor for the Gathering the Fragments Project of Yad Vashem, the World Holcoaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. Ofer now works at Tel Aviv University.
Podcast host is Katharina Freise.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14