The Fate of the Sedlis Family and the Tragedy of the Vilnius Jews

Let’s get back to the city of Vilnius.

There lived Dr. Ilya Sedlis, an uncle of Leah, Velvl, and Hirshl Mirkin. He owned a clinic before the establishment of the Soviet power in Lithuania. Ilya Sedlis was a well-known doctor in the city and its neighboring shtetls, who had earned patients’ respect and confidence. He was married to Anna Pruzhan and they had two sons Alexander and Gabriel.

At dawn on September 1, 1939, the German Wehrmacht (Armed Forces) invaded Poland without a declaration of war, and World War II began. The Germans routed the Polish Army very quickly and occupied the country. After that, the Baltic States fell into the sphere of interest of the USSR in an agreement between Stalin and Hitler in compliance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Then in October 1939, the Soviet Union returned the city of Vilno (in Lithuanian Vilnius) and the surrounding area to Lithuania. The fact is that the Polish Army under General Zheligovsky plundered that territory for Poland in 1920. Lithuania (including Vilno and surrounding area) was incorporated into the Soviet Union in July 1940. And Vilnius became the capital of Lithuanian SSR. Under the Soviet regime Ilya Sedlis lost ownership of his clinic.

After awhile, Germany attacked the USSR, and Vilnius was occupied by German forces on June 24, 1941, on the same day as Kaunas. The Hitlerites chose the beautiful forest of Ponary as the site for the mass extermination of the Jews. The site in a wooded area ten kilometers outside the Lithuanian capital was intended to be a fuel storage depot. For that purpose huge pits were dug next to the railroad station just before the beginning of World War II. The Nazis decided to use those pits for the massacre of the Jews.

The first shootings at Ponary occurred on July 13, 1941. Three hundred Jews were killed on that day. On September 2, 1941, during the first "great action" in Vilnius, 10,000 of our fellow countrymen were taken away to Ponary and then shot to death by the SS men who were assisted by Lithuanian collaborators. After that, the Germans killed people almost every day there. The doomed Jews were brought there from many cities and shtetls of Lithuania, and even from occupied European countries.

Before shooting the Jews, the Germans and their Lithuanian allies brutally beat them and ordered them to undress completely. Right before their eyes, the murderers divided their possessions, jewelry, clothes, underwear, footwear and other material for further shipping to Germany. Those doomed-to-death naked people stood for hours in the bitter cold waiting to be killed. The victims in small groups were led to the edge of the pit by whip lashes and rifle butt blows, and then they were shot with automatic rifles. After the pit was fully filled with bodies it was covered with soil, however not all shots were fatal. Some Jews were just wounded. Most of the injured were suffering from terrible pain, but the executioners did not finish them off. Terrible moans and groans mingled with cries of pain were heard from under the ground for a long time.

About 100,000 people were killed in the Ponary forest during the German occupation.

Exterminating the Jews, the Germans used the following propagandistic trick, which was typical of them. They ruled that Karaites would be considered as racially non-Jews. In fact, the religion of Karaites is the reformed version of Judaism. People of the Karaite confession speak a very ancient and archaic form of Turkish and may be the remnants of the Khazar Kaganat. The Karaites lived in Lithuania mostly in the city of Trakai (near Vilnius). The Nazis did not exterminate the Karaites although they practiced a religion of Moses. The Germans used that fact to show tolerance and respect for religious freedom, but not for race, stressing their cruel hatred just toward the Jews.

The Jews of the city of Vilnius, including the family of Ilya Sedlis, had been locked up behind a barbed wire fence in the Vilnius Ghetto as of September 6, 1941. The inhabitants of that ghetto were suffering from unbelievably hard work and unbearable life conditions. They were beaten on every occasion and without any cause – for bringing home after work a slice of bread into the ghetto, for giving aid to fellows who fell or fainted from hunger in column of workers, for coming too close to the ghetto’s gates, for loud talking or singing, for the way a Lithuanian policeman was greeted, and so on. Death became an everyday happening in the ghetto.

The majority of the Vilnius Ghetto inhabitants clung to their human dignity in that hell. They shared with one another their scanty food, gave a helping hand to the people who were sick, hid the old people and children during "selection" raids. The ghetto inhabitants gave one another moral support, trying to keep their presence of mind by building the "malines" to survive.

However, the Jews did not go to their death into pits of Ponary resignedly. Many of them stood up to the Nazis. The first armed underground groups of the Vilnius Ghetto were formed in December 1941. They then issued an appeal to all Jews, "Do not let yourselves be led as sheep to the slaughter. Fight to the last breath." Serious underground centers of resistance under the leadership of Yitzhak Wittenberg arose there later. In July 1943, the Gestapo arrested a Pole, who served as a liaison between Wittenberg and the city underground organization. Under the pain of torture he disclosed the name of the leader of the armed Jewish resistance in the Vilnius Ghetto Yitzhak Wittenberg, who was then arrested. On the way to the Gestapo at the ghetto’s gate he was freed and then hidden by underground organization members. The Nazis threatened to raze to the ground the Vilnius Ghetto with tanks and bombs unless Wittenberg was surrendered alive to them. Then Yitzhak walked along the empty street to the ghetto gate to hand himself over to the Gestapo understanding that unless he surrendered, the ghetto might be annihilated. He later perished in a prison cell. Wittenberg’s death was one of the greatest acts of self sacrifice and heroism of Jewish underground fighting in the ghetto. The underground resistance against the Nazis did not stop in the ghetto. Some inhabitants of the Vilnius Ghetto began an uprising against their Nazi captors on September 1, 1943. Most underground fighters were killed, although some escaped. They reached the forests and set up Jewish partisan units which fought against the Nazis and took part in liberating Vilnius together with the Red Army.

As the Soviet troops advanced in 1943, the German-led units tried to destroy all evidence of mass murders. About 80 Jewish prisoners were forced to dig up the corpses, pile them with wood and burn them in the flames of bonfires. Those prisoners were housed in one bunker to which the only access was a ladder drawn up each evening. Permanently chained at the ankles and waist, the Jews had no doubt about their eventual fate. Escape was nearly impossible because the round stone wall of the bunker was too high, and the guards constantly watched them from above. There were to be no witnesses left alive to describe the horrors of Ponary. Nevertheless group of doomed-to-death prisoners was determined to escape by digging with their hands, sticks and spoons 100 foot tunnel from the bottom of the bunker. The soil was sandy, so digging was easy. The excavated sand was secreted in their pockets and poured out when they worked in the pits. It took more than two months to complete the tunnel. On April 15, 1944, at 9:30 p.m., they made their heroic bid for freedom, and managed to get through the tunnel before the alarm was sounded. Most of them were shot in the ensuing chase, but 13 Jews successfully managed to survive, and 11 of them fled to the partisans in the Rudnitzky forest. They told the world the truth of the tragedy of the Vilnius Jews.

Liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto began in the fall of 1943. Some of the remaining able-bodied Jews were sent to work in slave labor concentration camps in Estonia, Latvia, Germany, and other places. And then the Vilnius Ghetto was renamed into a concentration camp and was transferred to the guard and administration of the armed SS forces. The shootings continued at Ponary until the summer of 1944 when the battlefront came closer to Vilnius. Before the Nazis deserted Vilnius they blew up and burned down the ghetto. Almost all of the Jews who were hidden in the "malines" died cruel deaths. Only a few ghetto prisoners survived there.

Let us go back to the time when the Jews were herded behind the barbed wire in the Vilnius Ghetto.

There was a hospital in the Vilnius Ghetto that worked under the directorship of Ilya Sedlis. He hired his nephew Velvl Mirkin, a student of Vilnius University, as a hospital attendant and it saved him from death in the pits of Ponary. Ilya Sedlis helped to save many other Jewish lives by hiding people in his hospital or outside of the ghetto in the homes of his friends, the honest Poles and Lithuanians who lived in the city. Those same friends helped the family of Ilya Sedlis and his own children.

Maria Godlevska, who before the war worked many years as a nurse for the clinic of Ilya Sedlis and as a housekeeper in his home, managed to hide the clothes and some of the belongings of the Sedlises. She sold it afterwards and from that money bought food and found a way to smuggle it into the ghetto. Maria Godlevska and Marla Abramovich also helped to deliver the outlawed correspondence between the Sedlises and Alexander’s parents-in-law, who were deported from the Vilnius Ghetto to the Nazi concentration camp in Latvia. Passing correspondence between families was strictly prohibited under the Nazi rules and people who were caught breaking those rules faced certain death.

Nine months before the liberation of Vilnius from the Nazi occupiers, Ilya Sedlis managed to escape from the ghetto and hide in the village of Grichunas. He changed his hideouts there very often, because the Polish bandits from the Armia Krajowa were active in that area. With furious zeal, these bandits ransacked fields, forests, shelters, houses in villages, and other places in search of their victims, the hidden Jews from the ghettos and soldiers of the Red Army. Those who were caught by the Polish murderers were hanged or executed by shooting on the spot.

Ilya Sedlis was hunted down by the bandits and captured. They were going to hang him. The information about his capture came to his friends in Vilnius. Maria Godlevska and other respectful people wrote a letter to the bandits listing the doctor’s accomplishments in medicine and patient care practices. The friends of Ilya Sedlis begged the bandits for mercy, and guaranteed all patients would receive his professional medical care regardless of nationality, politics, and religion. That letter helped Ilya Sedlis and he was released.

Some time later, Alexander and Milya, Ilya Sedlis’ son and daughter-in-law, ran away from the ghetto and hid in Vilnius at friends’ homes. Just like Ilya, they had to change their hideouts often. They miraculously survived. Unfortunately, most of the attempts of the Jews to hide in the city ended in tragedy.

Ilya Sedlis’ wife Anna Pruzhan did not survive as she was killed at Ponary.

The friends of Ilya Sedlis, the fearless and compassionate Poles and Lithuanians, saved several Jews from death, including the poet Shmerke Kacherginsky, who spoke with a strong Yiddish accent. To hide his Jewish origin, he had to play the role of a dumb man. After some time, Shmerke joined the partisans in the Rudnitzky forest and fought heroically against the Hitlerites avenging his beloved wife Barbara’s murder at Ponary.

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, recognized the selfless rescuers of Shmerke Kacherginsky, of the family of Ilya Sedlis and of other prisoners of the Vilnius Ghetto – the Poles Maria Fedetzka, Marla Abramovich, her husband Felix Volsky and other real heroes who risked their lives and the lives of their relatives to save others. They are named "The Righteous among the Nations of the World." Trees have been planted in the Yad Vashem complex in honor of those wonderful people of high moral character and clear conscience, in memory of their courageous and compassionate deeds.

Unfortunately, there were only a small number of such brave, humane people compared to the many villains and killers. In the city of Vilnius and the surrounding area, the Lithuanians and the Poles cruelly killed the Jews and stole their belongings. Those scoundrels often surpassed the Nazis in the number of cold-blooded murderous deeds they carried out against the Jews.

The younger son of Ilya Sedlis, Gabriel, could draw very well. And it helped him to become a comrade-in-arms of the leader of a youth organization of the resistance "The Young Guards" in the Vilnius Ghetto, the poet Abba Kovner. Gabriel made up forged stamps and falsified documents to save the lives of many Jews.

The group of young people, including Gabriel Sedlis, under the leadership of Abba Kovner, fled the Vilnius Ghetto through camouflaged secret hatches and an intricate maze of sewer tunnels a few days before it was liquidated. They got out of the ghetto and the city and reached the partisan detachments in the Rudnitzky forest. The First Lithuanian Partisan Brigade was organized there under the leadership of a commander named Yurgis (the real name Henrikas Zimanas). That brigade consisted of a few Jewish partisan detachments, and partisan units of various other nationalities, including the Lithuanians and the Russians. The First Lithuanian Partisan Brigade was stationed in the different partisan zones of Lithuania and Byelorussia. Gabriel Sedlis kept forging the stamps and various documents in the partisan brigade and took part in many combat operations.

His cousin Velvl Mirkin also fled the Vilnius Ghetto through sewer tunnels, but sometime later, and he joined a different partisan detachment of the First Lithuanian Partisan Brigade.

The partisans of the First Lithuanian Partisan Brigade had a hymn "Never say…" written in Yiddish in 1943 by a young prisoner of the Vilnius Ghetto, poet Hirshl Glik, to a popular tune by Dmitry Pokrass. That song, despite the horrible time when "a spurt of our blood fell on the Earth," ended with optimistic words:

Therefore never say the road now ends for you, Though leaden skies may cover days of blue. As the hour that we longed for is so near Our step beats out the message, "We are here!"

Although Hirshl Glik was killed during the summer of 1944 in one of the Nazi concentration camps in Estonia (at a time when the battlefront came close to its border), his words live on. The song of the young poet expresses the courage of the human spirit, which can preserve dignity and strength even in the face of overwhelming physical destruction. His song played a prominent role in the fight against the Nazis.

World War II finally came to an end in Europe with the crushing defeat of the German Army on May 9, 1945.

However, the local authorities and most of the people of the former Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe were not in a hurry to welcome the Jews returning from the concentration camps and partisan detachments demobilized from the armies of the anti-Hitler coalition.

When the Lithuanian Jews came back, they found that their families had been killed; their homes had been burned or pillaged, or otherwise taken over. For the most part, the Lithuanians and the Poles were very hostile to their former Jewish neighbors.

Ilya Sedlis and his family left Vilnius for Poland as its former citizens in February 1945. Then they managed to move to Italy, and later, emigrated from Italy to the United States in 1949.

When Alexander Sedlis and his wife Milya came to Italy they learned Italian very quickly, and continued their medical education (which they had begun in Vilnius) at the University of Rome. They both received their medical diplomas in 4.5 years.

After successful completion of the examination for a license to practice medicine in the United States, the Sedlises started working as doctors in New York (Alexander as gynecologist, and Milya as pediatrician). Later they taught and did research at several universities in the United States. Despite their age and retiree status, they are both still working, doing research and teaching at the universities of the city of New York. Alexander and Milya published many scientific works and both achieved the academic status of professor.

They have children who live in USA and are very successful as well as wonderful grandchildren.

Gabriel Sedlis, Alexander’s younger brother, received an excellent education in the United States and became an architect. He worked and then passed away in New York.

The Sedlises have gone through hardship, suffering, and the death of their relatives and friends. However, they have never been broken or consumed by despair and always fought for their lives.

Dreams that were born in the Vilnius Ghetto, such as surviving and being useful to people, came true with wonderful results. The research work they do now gives Alexander and Milya a tremendous supply of energy and strength.