Text and photo by Daumantė Baranauskaitė manoteises.lt

More than seven decades ago the livestock cars began to leave Kaunas. Four-year-old Iser Shlomovich watched his father growing distant in one of those train cars. Iser, a Jew, his twin brother, sister and mother would all be deported to Siberia, too. When Lithuania was still an independent country, father and mother Shlomovich spoke Yiddish at home but spoke Russian to the children, so they would learn flawless Russian. As later events showed, they bestowed a great gift upon their children. Although most people don’t realize it, Lithuanian Jews were deported along with ethnic Lithuanians in 1941.

Full story in Lithuanian here.