Vilna, The End of the Road: A WW2 Jewish Holocaust Survival True Story by Sarah Shimonovitz

Author:Sarah Shimonovitz [Shimonovitz, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

13

Once again, I went wandering about, through fields and forests and clearings, until I arrived at the edge of the partisans’ forest. I walked east along the edge. I had not yet lost hope of meeting someone from Vilnius. Along the way, I bypassed the villages that went deeper into the steppe. And so, while I was walking, I found myself in a marshy area. The mosquitoes bit me and drew blood. I expected to have difficulty getting out of the mud, so I returned to dryer land. I didn’t see any houses around. It started to rain. Everything around me was wet. I found a hiding place under a fir tree with branches that tilted down, like a kind of umbrella.

It rained for two days and two nights. All that time, I sat under the tree like an Indian fakir, leaning against its friendly trunk. Oh, if people were only as friendly as that tree! I became completely silent paralyzed. My only companion was my mute hand basket, on which I sat, soaking wet.

But it didn’t rain forever, and eventually, it stopped. Spring arrived and the sun was shining. It began to warm up and I crawled out from between the gray branches. At first, I stood like a pole, barely moving my legs. Then I sat in the sun, rubbing my legs and my entire body, and wrung and dried my things out. I slowly started to become a little human again. I washed a little in a nearby stream and put my hair and limbs into a semblance of order. I couldn’t continue sitting there. There was no point.

I likened sitting under that tree for those two days and two nights to sitting inside a grave. The strange silence also seemed to me to be of that world. As such, I dashed off, trying to walk on dryer terrain, and onward, in search of people. I hadn’t found the Vilnius partisans, and I knew that I may possibly never find them. Therefore, I turned to those who I did meet. I went into a house nearby the forest and bought bread from the people there, who looked at me suspiciously. I was a stranger in the area, not a local. They sold me the bread with blatant reluctance. Then I returned to the forest to look for the partisans again. I carefully checked all the roads and trails leading to the forests I stopped by a wider road and tried to walk along it. I noticed people’s footprints, but they were immediately swallowed up by the grass. Then I stopped. There was a fence in front of me.

Piled up there, were uprooted and broken trees. Some were twisted, as if they’d been hit by lightning. A little further on, there were more fences, some that seemed to have popped up on their own, as if naturally, and others put there by man. I remembered that someone at the Lapinskis told me that the partisans had planted landmines along all the routes leading deeper into the forest.

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