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Our brave cousin Rachel
BY: BUDD MARGOLIS and MARJORIE MARGOLIS Special to the CJN
Our family never knew much about our European relatives.
With dissolution of the USSR in 1989, however, access to records became possible, and in 2004 we hired a Lithuanian researcher to explore the Margolis family records.
This researcher introduced us to her personal hero and our cousin, Dr. Rachel Margolis, a retired biology professor at the University of Vilna. A former partisan during WW II, Rachel was the only member of our European family who survived the Nazi onslaugh.
Rachel’s father thought he could save her from the Holocaust by paying a Christian Lithuanian family to take her in and hide her. But Rachel, then 18 or 19, had other ideas. She fled her hiding place to join the rest of her family in the Vilna Ghetto. Once settled there, Rachel joined the FPO, an organization with contacts in the resistance movement.
On Sept. 11, 1943, four days before the ghetto was liquidated, Rachel and a dozen other FPO members escaped and joined the partisans. The partisans fought the Nazi war machine by blowing up bridges and providing safe passage for other escapees.
Despite participating in these risky undertakings, raiding farms for food, and battling typhus, Rachel managed to survive the war. She returned to her native Vilna with her Red Army liberators.
Rachel remained in Soviet Lithuania for the next 50 years. When she retired in 1989, the same year that Lithuania achieved independence, she devoted all her energy to creation of the “Green House,” the Holocaust museum of Vilnius, now part of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum. She searched for materials in the archives and prepared exhibitions about the annihilation of Lithuania’s Jews.
Lithuania has what is, arguably, the worst Holocaust survival rate in Europe. About 200,000 people, representing 95% of the Jewish population, perished.
Now 86, Rachel spends 10 months a year with her daughter and granddaughter in Israel, and until 2008, returned to Vilnius every summer to work in her beloved museum.
A key diary disovered
Of all that she has accomplished in her life, Rachel is most proud of discovering and publishing an eyewitness account of the mass murders at the execution pits at Ponary, Lithuania. There, some 60,000 Jews and 10,000 Poles perished.
Shortly after the war, Rachel learned of this eyewitness account in the diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Polish journalist who lived in a villa located very close to the Ponary pits. He documented the daily mass murders on loose sheets of paper, then sealed and buried them in lemonade bottles. After the war, his neighbors dug them up and gave them to the Jewish museum. But in 1949 the Soviets closed the museum, and all of its documents were placed in the Central State Archives of Lithuania.
For decades, Rachel applied for permission to search for the Sakowicz diary, but the government refused to open the archives. Thus, for half a century, the Sakowicz testimony was unknown to the world. When Lithuania gained independence, the museum was reopened, and two years later (1991) Rachel was permitted access to Sakowicz’s diary for two brief days.
The diary included chilling statistics: the number of victims brought each day for execution, the number of trucks and automobiles that brought them, and descriptions of the clothing the victims wore. It was all scribbled on 66 scraps of paper, some less than three inches wide.
Rachel’s efforts led to publication of these documents in Ponary Diary: 1941-43: A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder (Yale University Press, 2004). It provides firsthand testimony of the mass murder of Vilna’s Jews, which the Nazis attempted to cover up.
If you want to help
To protest the treatment of Lithuania’s remaining Holocaust survivors, contact any of the following people:
1.Amb. H.E. Audrius Bruzga
Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania
2300 Clarendon Blvd., Suite 302
Arlington, Va. 22201
2. Chairman Rep. Howard Berman
House Committee on Foreign Affairs
2170 Rayburn House Office Bldg.
Washington, D.C. 20515
3. Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Robert Wexler
House Committee of Foreign Affairs
2170 Rayburn House Office Bldg.
Washington, D.C. 20515
With dissolution of the USSR in 1989, however, access to records became possible, and in 2004 we hired a Lithuanian researcher to explore the Margolis family records.
This researcher introduced us to her personal hero and our cousin, Dr. Rachel Margolis, a retired biology professor at the University of Vilna. A former partisan during WW II, Rachel was the only member of our European family who survived the Nazi onslaugh.
Rachel’s father thought he could save her from the Holocaust by paying a Christian Lithuanian family to take her in and hide her. But Rachel, then 18 or 19, had other ideas. She fled her hiding place to join the rest of her family in the Vilna Ghetto. Once settled there, Rachel joined the FPO, an organization with contacts in the resistance movement.
On Sept. 11, 1943, four days before the ghetto was liquidated, Rachel and a dozen other FPO members escaped and joined the partisans. The partisans fought the Nazi war machine by blowing up bridges and providing safe passage for other escapees.
Despite participating in these risky undertakings, raiding farms for food, and battling typhus, Rachel managed to survive the war. She returned to her native Vilna with her Red Army liberators.
Rachel remained in Soviet Lithuania for the next 50 years. When she retired in 1989, the same year that Lithuania achieved independence, she devoted all her energy to creation of the “Green House,” the Holocaust museum of Vilnius, now part of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum. She searched for materials in the archives and prepared exhibitions about the annihilation of Lithuania’s Jews.
Lithuania has what is, arguably, the worst Holocaust survival rate in Europe. About 200,000 people, representing 95% of the Jewish population, perished.
Now 86, Rachel spends 10 months a year with her daughter and granddaughter in Israel, and until 2008, returned to Vilnius every summer to work in her beloved museum.
A key diary disovered
Of all that she has accomplished in her life, Rachel is most proud of discovering and publishing an eyewitness account of the mass murders at the execution pits at Ponary, Lithuania. There, some 60,000 Jews and 10,000 Poles perished.
Shortly after the war, Rachel learned of this eyewitness account in the diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Polish journalist who lived in a villa located very close to the Ponary pits. He documented the daily mass murders on loose sheets of paper, then sealed and buried them in lemonade bottles. After the war, his neighbors dug them up and gave them to the Jewish museum. But in 1949 the Soviets closed the museum, and all of its documents were placed in the Central State Archives of Lithuania.
For decades, Rachel applied for permission to search for the Sakowicz diary, but the government refused to open the archives. Thus, for half a century, the Sakowicz testimony was unknown to the world. When Lithuania gained independence, the museum was reopened, and two years later (1991) Rachel was permitted access to Sakowicz’s diary for two brief days.
The diary included chilling statistics: the number of victims brought each day for execution, the number of trucks and automobiles that brought them, and descriptions of the clothing the victims wore. It was all scribbled on 66 scraps of paper, some less than three inches wide.
Rachel’s efforts led to publication of these documents in Ponary Diary: 1941-43: A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder (Yale University Press, 2004). It provides firsthand testimony of the mass murder of Vilna’s Jews, which the Nazis attempted to cover up.
If you want to help
To protest the treatment of Lithuania’s remaining Holocaust survivors, contact any of the following people:
1.Amb. H.E. Audrius Bruzga
Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania
2300 Clarendon Blvd., Suite 302
Arlington, Va. 22201
2. Chairman Rep. Howard Berman
House Committee on Foreign Affairs
2170 Rayburn House Office Bldg.
Washington, D.C. 20515
3. Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Robert Wexler
House Committee of Foreign Affairs
2170 Rayburn House Office Bldg.
Washington, D.C. 20515
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