Chasia Spanerflig
“I stayed here (in Vilnius)… because this is where my children died, my parents died.”
Chasia was interned in the Vilnius ghetto with her husband, Boris Fridman, their baby son and family. Boris escaped to join the partisans in the forests but was ambushed and killed. Boris’ men came for Chasia and gave her 20 minutes to make a decision – to leave with them or stay with her family. She did not get to say goodbye. After the war, Chasia returned to Vilnius where she remarried, bore two children, one of whom contracted meningitis and suffered permanent disability. She is a widow and volunteers at the Jewish Community Centre, in the very same building she studied as a young girl.
“I live for my work at the community centre, to help the war veterans and the former prisoners of the ghettos and concentration camps, so that they wouldn’t be so lonely, and they have a kind of home to go to. Where the centre is now used to be my old school, my youth, and at present it’s my old age, where I am living my last years. Well, now I have not got long left, time is running…”
“I stayed here (in Vilnius)… because this is where my children died, my parents died.”
Chasia was interned in the Vilnius ghetto with her husband, Boris Fridman, their baby son and family. Boris escaped to join the partisans in the forests but was ambushed and killed. Boris’ men came for Chasia and gave her 20 minutes to make a decision – to leave with them or stay with her family. She did not get to say goodbye. After the war, Chasia returned to Vilnius where she remarried, bore two children, one of whom contracted meningitis and suffered permanent disability. She is a widow and volunteers at the Jewish Community Centre, in the very same building she studied as a young girl.
“I live for my work at the community centre, to help the war veterans and the former prisoners of the ghettos and concentration camps, so that they wouldn’t be so lonely, and they have a kind of home to go to. Where the centre is now used to be my old school, my youth, and at present it’s my old age, where I am living my last years. Well, now I have not got long left, time is running…”
