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Abramas Leščius. the son of Chaimas, always stresses he’s from Raseiniai, Lithuania.

“I am a resident of Raseiniai. My mother travelled to doctor Levitanas in Kaunas to give birth to me. All Jewish women went to him to give birth. That’s what mother said. The roots of our family were in Seda and Mažeikiai. My great-grandparents, grandfathers and grandmothers lived there since ancient times, one may count it in centuries. I lived in Raseiniai with my parents until June 14, 1941. That day the Soviet Russians deported us. Why did they deport us? My father operated as a so-called middleman, he used to visit farmers and buy up linen and all sorts of grain. Then he brought it by car to a rich fellow in Klaipėda who bought everything from him. Father fed the whole family.

There were three of us children: my two sisters and I. Mother didn’t work. We were not rich, we lived moderately. I remember where we lived there was a synagogue in the yard to which my father and I went. Father was a good Jew, meaning, in his heart he was a Jew, and always helped with money if anyone asked, he prayed at synagogue and kept the Sabbath. Mother’s father was a rabbi in Seda, so she was more religious. I remember when we used to go to synagogue father and I would stop at an inn and when father took a drink mother would get very angry. Dad said there was a person in Raseiniai who used to say the Jews are bad, and perhaps he turned us in and that’s why we were deported. Many Jews lived in Raseiniai before the war.

“They transported us to the Inta gulags next to the Arctic Circle in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. They transported Jews and Lithuanians. Even today I remember their names [sighs]. There my childhood passed in cold and toil. I tried to escape from there in 1945. One Jew from Vilnius visited us and he was supposed to take two girls back from exile, so my mother asked him to take me, too, but she didn’t have anything to pay him for that. He agreed to take me. I traveled to Syktyvkar, the capital of Komi. I went to spend the night at one Jew’s, and in the morning I discovered the man with the two girls had already left. I needed to get home by myself, and I didn’t have a ticket or any money either. So there was nowhere to which to disappear, I knew I had to travel 68 kilometers back to where my family lived. I was 13. I was walking and I saw a horse foraging. I went up to him, he was a sweetheart and looked at me, so I mounted him and we rode off. A few kilometers away from our place of exile I dismounted and left him in a meadow, and went back by myself on foot. We lived the life of deportees. I remember how my father broke his arm moving logs and there was no doctor, just a midwife named Frosia. She viewed us as ‘enemies of the people’ and told him just to put iodine on it. An infection started and we took father to a hospital. He died, and I, a child, became the eldest man in the family.

“We lived in a barracks, we had an oven, and when it was fired up it was warm, and when not, it was cold. Winters are cold there, down to minus fifty degrees. Non-laborers got 400 grams of bread per day, working people 800 grams. I began to work in my father’s place to get more bread. The years passed and 1946 came. In the winter I moved logs with a horse, in the summer I cut meadows with a scythe. I remember it was very difficult. Adult men went first, and cut their portion of hay, while I was lagging behind. They come back, stand behind me and say: ‘Abramuk, go to the end.’

“Later I worked with a plough. I worked the fields in winter. Our shoes were moccasins woven from reeds. I tried to run away again and succeeded. I reached Vilnius where my mother’s cousins lived who had escaped the Holocaust by being evacuated to Russia. My relatives took me in and first of all undressed me, because my lice-filled clothes had to be burned, and then washed and fed me. On Trakų street there was a fuel store, and next to it a luggage store, where I was put to work. Three Jews worked there who took me on as a student. We sewed purses, I earned very little and gave it all to my aunt and uncle with whom I lived. I went to night school. In 1951 I had to leave to serve in the Soviet army. I did my service in the Black Sea Fleet. When I returned I worked at the Galanterija factory next to the Halė market and worked my way up the ranks from worker to brigade leader to master, to workshop head, to director of production.”

Abramas says life led him into the synagogue. Now he leads a minyan, the group of at least ten Jewish men required to hold a service.