In the Nazi Concentration Camps in Estonia and Germany

On October 26, 1943, before the SS men took over managing the Jews in the Kaunas Ghetto, 2,709 Jewish people were sent to the concentration camps located in Estonia, including Klooga, Vaivara, Ereda, and other places, to work to increase oil-shale production and to do other slave work. Rachel Shlimovich, her parents Benzion and Hannah, and her aunt Dvoira Levitan were among those people.

At first, Rachel and her aunt Dvoira were in the Vaivara concentration camp. Later, they were deported to the Ereda concentration camp where they had to work cutting down trees in a forest preparing firewood, shoveling snow-banked roads in winter, packing up various equipment, parts and other materials into boxes, lifting and moving those heavy boxes by hand.

During the summer of 1944, the Red Army was getting close to Estonia. The Hitlerites started the liquidation of the concentration camps there and the mass exterminations of the Jews. About 6,000 Jewish prisoners of those camps out of 10,000 were killed during those days. Rachel’s parents were among them.

During the fall of 1944, the physically exhausted prisoners of the concentration camps were herded like cattle into a ship and sent to the Shtutgof concentration camp. Conditions on the ship were unbearable and overcrowded. The prisoners had no food, no water, and no toilet facilities for four days.

The crematorium of the Shtutgof concentration camp was working night and day. Thick black smoke belched from its chimney. An enormous pile of human ashes next to crematorium was by the Nazis to fertilize the soil. Only once a day prisoners were given "soup" out of nettle and other grass. Soon, however, the gas chambers probably went out of service. Then the children and some women were taken from Shtutgof to Auschwitz where they were suffocated in the gas chambers and their bodies were burned in crematorium.

Those camp prisoners who could still stand on their feet were taken from Shtutgof and deported to other parts of Germany to do forced labor. Rachel and her aunt Dvoira were sent to a small concentration camp to repair the railroad. (Rachel does not remember name of the camp.) Female prisoners had to carry heavy steel rails, wooden ties, and boxes with rail fastenings. They also had to manually align rails, firm the ballast by hand and do other work. When the battlefront came close to them, the Hitlerites forced the people go on foot deep into Germany. The Jews spent their nights in the woods and village barns. The slave labor, hardships, miseries, and travel by foot were exhausting and physically weakened the prisoners. Day by day their physical conditions grew worse. The day before liberation the camp prisoners were driven into a huge barn. The German guards deserted that night, and the Soviet soldiers arrived the next morning and freed the Jewish people. Rachel always remembers that day, March 10, 1945, as one of everlasting happiness and liberation. However, not all camp prisoners could even get up from the ground. The sick Jews were immediately taken to military hospitals.

Shortly thereafter, all former camp prisoners were put into camps for displaced persons while their citizenship was determined and the necessary documents were prepared so that they could return home.

After that, the freed people were sent home, and Rachel came back to Kaunas in the spring of 1945. Her aunt Dvoira joined her a little later since she had become ill in Germany and had to spend some time in a hospital there.

They did not find any relatives in Kaunas. Everyone had been murdered. The former Lithuanian neighbors met them with apprehension, because they did not want to return the stolen Jewish property.

Let us get back to period when the Nazis were liquidating the Kaunas Ghetto.

The battlefront swiftly came close to Kaunas in June 1944. And the Hitlerites rapidly deported about 8,000 Jews from Lithuania to concentration camps in Germany. Shmuel Tsveigorn and some of his relatives were among those who were deported to the German concentration camps of Dachau.

The Nazis finished their program of genocide against the Jews in Kaunas after deporting the Jews to Germany. The whole ghetto was blown up and then burned down. More than 2,000 Jews, who were hiding inside the "malines," died a cruel death. Some of the "malines" had been built so skillfully that during the liquidation of the ghetto the Hitlerites did not find them even with the help of trained dogs.

Only a handful of people survived in those "malines."

Those Jews who were deported to the German concentration camps kept dying too. Mass executions of children took place in many concentration camps of Dachau on August 7, 1944. Also, the death rate had increased throughout the Dachau concentration camps during last six months before the liberation of the prisoners. The emaciated Jews could not endure such suffering under the atrocious living conditions. Typhus, typhoid fever and dysentery epidemics raged in the camps. The Nazis kept making the lives of the Jews more and more miserable. The prisoners were starved for food and water. Then to increase their thirst they were forced to eat an over-salted, turbid, tasteless ersatz soup and were denied drinking water.

The battlefront was coming closer and closer to Dachau. After April 24, 1945, the Nazi guards of the Dachau concentration camps started to flee, and many prisoners then managed to escape to the woods and hide out. Shmuel Tsveigorn was one of them. He hid in a hole and waited for the arrival of the American soldiers who found him on April 27, 1945.

Shmuel came back to Kaunas in August 1945.

Close to 80 percent of the Kaunas Jews confined to concentration camps in Germany died terrible, agonizing death. Only a handful of the prisoners managed to survive until their liberation.