This year marks the 75th anniversary of the mass deportations of Lithuanian citizens which began on June 14, 1941. The Russian regime then began by rounding up intellectuals, members of the educated elite, wealthy businessmen and well-to-do farmers, sending them deep into the interior of Russia. In total about 132,000 people were deported, and 28,000 people died in exile.

Jakovas Mendelevskij lived as a child in Ukmergė in an affluent and happy family. He was 9 that early morning of June 14, 1941, when the knock came at the door and the family was ordered to get ready to be deported. Many Jews were deported in Ukmergė that morning. They were taken by truck to Jonava, summarily separated from his father, and he, his mother and brother were loaded onto train cars like livestock and carried off. His father was arrested and tried, and received a sentence of 10 years in one of Stalin’s camps under article 58 of Soviet law. He was taken to a camp in the Krasnoyarsk region.

Tell me about your family, your parents and what you remember about your childhood.

I was born in 1932. My family lived in Ukmergė where many Jews lived. I started school at a Jewish school in Yiddish, when I was five, and I remember the name of the school principal, Morgenshtern. I taught myself, too, because we had a large library at home. Our house wasn’t large, but it was well furnished, beautiful furniture, orderly, clean rooms. A maid helped keep things in order. When I was eight I spoke Yiddish, Russian and Lithuanian. A man came from the synagogue to our home to teach me Judaism: Tanakh, the Chumash in Yiddish [printed Torah in Yiddish translation]. I had a brother, mother didn’t work. I went to two synagogues in childhood. Since father was away almost the entire week, my grandfather, a doctor, took me to a small wooden Hassidic synagogue in Ukmergė, and when my father came back, we went together to the large stone mitnagid synagogue.

Father worked as a salesman at the Trinyčiai factory in Klaipėda, he drew up sales contracts for textile products, travelled around presenting the factory’s products, represented the factory everywhere it needed representation and drove around in a Chevrolet. Father told about how once the Inkaras factory, which bought soft flannel material from Trinyčiai to line the rubber boots they produced, decided to change suppliers and bought flannel somewhere else. Trinyčiai’s owners sent father to tell them they would set up a factory next to Inkaras which would also produce rubber boots. That was enough to make Inkaras apologize and keep buying flannel from Trinyčiai. We lived in a small house we owned in Ukmergė. Father’s monthly salary was 2,000 litai, and for comparison I’ll say that a cow cost 50 litai then. The two brothers Fainberg, the owners of Trinyčiai, used to remind him his salary could be larger if he sold more. Father was away from home all week, he came back Fridays. When the Germans occupied Klaipėda, the factory owners gave father a loan and he opened a textiles shop in Ukmergė. I remember I used to go with mother to the Ukmergė market to buy food products brought in by wagon by villagers wearing home-spun canvas clothing, who threw their wooden clogs over their shoulders to protect them from wearing out when they walked on the sidewalk, and they covered their heads with straw hats. They used to conserve matches by splitting them in half.

Do you remember being deported? Where did you end up?

Early in the morning of June 14, when I was nine and didn’t really understand what was going on, a Russian soldier came to deport us. We were ordered to get ready within an hour, a truck took us to Jonava, father was immediately separated from us, and they herded me, mother and my brother onto a train car like livestock, along with everyone else. Father was arrested and tried, and sentenced to ten years in one of Stalin’s camps under article 58. They took him away to a camp, and we only found out much later where he was. He was a prisoner in the Krasnoyarsk region, while we were taken to the Altai region. The train car was full of Jews from Ukmergė. I remember there were Lithuanians in other cars, but there were more Jews. We were taken to the city of Biysk, and from there we were put on wagons and taken into the mountains. We stopped at the village of Medvedevka and there we were installed in barns to live with local villagers. I remember they didn’t really understand what Jews are and they treated us alright. After some time the deportees were settled in a separate building. A large room was assigned in which every family was given a single corner. We were called “spetz-deportees.” I can’t say how many of us there were, maybe 25, and I only remember a few surnames: a mother with three sons from Ukmergė called the Janoviskis, the Levins were a mother and her son and daughter, the three people of the Jofė family. We didn’t freeze, but there wasn’t enough food.

What did your family do in exile in an unfamiliar land, how did you communicate with the locals? How did you get by?

Since it was summer and the local people lived by farming, we were sent into the fields to work. This “madam” Ankudinova, who always wore a red scarf on her head because she was the representative of the regional committee of the Bolshevik party, was in charge of the work by deportees. Even though 75 years have passed I still remember her surname. There was a stable in the village and they quickly taught me to ride a horse there. I think very few people in Lithuania have seen these sorts of horses, they were different, their trot or gallop was different. I was placed atop a horse dragging a sled on the ground where they threw cut hay. I drove it to the place I was told. As the day ended, the horse and I lay down. We worked from early morning until evening. The horse got tired. Then madam Ankudinova would say, “Enough.” Ten years passed, I was hungry, and it was a good thing we found vitamins in the summer to maintain our energy. We used to go into the mountains where all sorts of berries grew, a field full of strawberries and other berries. There were enough of them for all of us. Once I was ordered to take a letter to the central farm, in the mountains. I rode for a long time, and it was getting dark on the way back home and I didn’t know the way. It was scary and I thought I should dismount from the horse, but he knew the way and took me home.

One spring a local resident of Medvedevka called me over and said: “Here’s a piece of land, work it, and here’s a bag of potatoes, plant them.” I dug it up and planted them in the way he told me. In the fall I dug up very many large potatoes. The only thing was that there was no place to keep them. The cellar was bad. The cold in winter reached -40 degrees, the potatoes froze, but I made food from the frozen ones. I learned to make soup and even how to cook potato-skin cutlets.

I’ll never forget how our landlady’s older son was already in the army, we’d seen him when he was younger, when they brought us there, and then they sent him to the front. Soon the mother of two sons received letters at the same time announcing their deaths. I will never forget how that woman screamed. I can say it has always been difficult for the people of Russia and they are still living a hard life, but the people there were moral. What were we to them when they took us in and gave us shelter? Nothing, deportees, but they, the Tikhnov family, treated us as human beings.

How long were you in exile? Did you try to escape?

In 1943 my mother’s sister who lived in Marijampolė before the war and had evacuated to Central Asia, got permission to bring my brother and me out of exile to live with her. She came to get us and take us there. After some time my mother also got permission, because she came down with arthritis in exile. Our family ended up in Central Asia in the small city of Djizak, between Samarkand and Tashkent, right in the hottest place. It was impossible to walk barefoot the sand got so hot. Many evacuees lived there. I began to attend the railroad school. In 1945 we returned to Lithuania. Father came back from the Potma camp in 1951 and said almost nothing at all about the camp. I used to ask him about it, but I sensed it was unpleasant for him to talk about it.

He ended up at the camp together with former Lithuanian president Aleksandras Stulginskis. He told me they took them there, lined them up, and said: “The Germans are attacking, but we’ll still have time to shoot you.” Father came back to Lithuania 10 years later.

How did the rest of your life go? When did you come back to Lithuania?

My mother, brother and I returned to Lithuania in 1945. We lived in Vilnius. I continued my education. I finished school and went to study at an engineering institute in Russia. After I graduated I was assigned work as a constructor at the Žalgiris factory, then I ended up in the senior constructors department, in the constructors unit. Then I transferred to the Komunaras factory as senior constructor. The years flew by. A minister of the Soviet Union appointed me constructor general of four factories, the Irkutsk, Yerevan, Vilnius and Odessa industrial equipment factories. My technocratic head was perhaps worthy of that. We made equipment. I, not a member of the Party and a Jew, became director then. Everything I had experienced in life remained firmly in memory, I understood and realized very much, and therefore was not a Party member. I participated at working meetings with famous scientists and ministers of the Soviet Union and I knew them personally and well. We manufactured equipment for export and that was complicated. I remember I designed and constructed equipment and sent it to the German city of Aachen [Aix-la-Chapelle] where there was a West German scientific equipment institute. They accepted the equipment as fit for export to Europe. After that we worked together for many years with the famous Maho firm [Deckel Maho Gildemeister] whose tools were automatic, robotic, and worked without a human operator. I worked at Komunaras until 2001. The Vilnius Komunaras factory was also of very high quality standards. Once the European representative of an association of US equipment makers arrived. We walked with him around the Komunaras factory. He said everything he saw was achieved over decades and destroyed in a single month.

Why did such strong factories have to be closed down? Didn’t you try to save them?

Don’t ask me. They killed the goose that laid the golden egg. Now there are no more people inventing things who think and count in microns [a human hair is about 1.4 microns in diameter], while we made equipment to a 0.6-micron precision. We exported 15% of production to Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Israel. Then the industry was destroyed. It created value for the Lithuanian state which could be exported and which allowed import of other needed valuables. We have an historic example of how not to do things. I used to meet with other factory heads and they used to tell me it was better I not ask who and why.

I was at the factory of Swiss equipment manufacturer CIP who had orders for five years in advance. They didn’t advertise themselves. I asked why they didn’t expand production, and they said they would certainly expand but there was a lack of qualified personnel. Now it takes 10 years to train a good constructor. There used to be high-quality equipment manufacturers in many different Lithuanian cities. How did they all vanish? At that time there were 3,700 different engineering factories in Germany. In Lithuania there were perhaps 200, why were they shut down?

What happened to your relatives who stayed in Lithuania during World War II?

They were murdered in the Holocaust. Once I went to the place where they shot my grandfather, an extraordinarily beautiful location in Ukmergė, a meadow, the Pivonija forest surrounding it, and I thought, it must have been even more horrific for them because of the beauty around. I never drove back there, I can’t see it, I remember everything, I can’t talk about it. I counted all my relatives murdered during the Holocaust in Kavarskas, Širvintos, Kaunas, Ukmergė–49 in total, I don’t count anymore. Neither mother nor father wanted to talk about it. My librarian said no doctor could cure her niece of phlegmon until she went to a Jewish doctor in Ukmergė who cured her. Once the girl was walking in Pivonija forest when the war was on, and all of a sudden she saw a crowd of people, and in the front was the doctor who saved her. She saw him being shot. She became mute, she lost the power to speak after that. She was silent for three years until the end of the war. When there was fighting in Ukmergė, a Russian soldier asked the girl to bring him some water, and she began to speak again.

You said your grandfather and father took you to synagogue in childhood. Do you go now?

Once when I was walking through the Gates of Dawn [in Vilnius] where a great many people pray, I thought: do they really see more than I do? They are following the traditions of their people. What about me? I do deeply respect my parents and ancestors. These sorts of thoughts brought me to the Choral Synagogue. In childhood I attended two synagogues. Father was gone almost the whole week, so my grandfather took me to the little wooden Hassidic synagogue in Ukmergė, and when my father came back on Fridays, he and I went to the large stone mitnagid synagogue. I still remember the prayers from childhood.

interviewed by Ilona Rūkienė