On June 22, 1941, the German invasion of the Soviet Union began. In a matter of days, the war reached the suburbs of Kaunas, Lithuania, where a young Jewish violinist, Yochanan Fein, led a happy childhood. On June 22, 1941, that childhood ended.
In Boy with a Violin, Fein recounts his early life under Nazi occupation-his survival in the Kaunas Ghetto, the separation from his parents, his narrow escapes from death at the hands of Nazi officers, the harrowing stories of those he knew who did not survive, and the abhorrent conditions he endured while in hiding. He tells the tale of his rescuer, Jonas Paulavicius, the Lithuanian carpenter who sought to save the Jewish spirit. Paulavicius rescued those he believed could rebuild in the wake of the Holocaust, hiding engineers and doctors in his underground Noah's Ark. Among the sixteen he saved stood one fourteen-year-old violinist.
Following liberation, Fein describes the aftermath of the war as survivors returned to what was left of their homes and attempted to piece together the fragmented remains of their lives. He recounts the difficulties of returning to some semblance of normal life in the midst of a complex political climate, culminating in his daring escape from Soviet Lithuania.
In one of the darkest eras of human history, there were those who proved that the goodness of the human spirit survives against all odds. Boy with a Violin pays tribute to those who risked everything to save a life, and whose altruism crossed the boundaries of race and religion. In this first English translation of Boy with a Violin, Fein continues to offer his testimony to the strength of the human spirit.
Autorentext
Yochanan Fein. Translated by Osher Fein
Inhalt
Acknowledgments
Part I
Prologue
1. Who Was This Man?
2. A Jewish Boy and His Parents
3. The Goal-Saving the Intellectuals
4. The Violin of My Life
5. The Story-Back to the Beginning
6. The Great Action and the Looting of Those Who Remained
7. The Separation from My Parents
8. At My Relatives' House
9. General Winte
10. Activities
11. The "Malina"
12. The Girl, Ghetta'leh
13. The Murder of Children
14. My Escape from the Ghetto
15. In the Attic and the "Tomato Patch"
16. In the Depths of the Pit
17. Farewell from a Distance
18. The Russian Captive and Rubin, the Jew
19. About Anna, Oscar and Otto
20. The Sixteen Survivors
21. About Hideouts and People
22. The Paulavicius'
Part II
23. There Is No Law and There Is No Judge
24. Grazina
25. The Return Home
26. The Joy of Youth
27. Moscow
28. A Brief Return Home
Part III
29. Goodbye Lithuania
30. Strangers in Poland
31. At the Children's Home
32. My Students-My Friends
33. The Court
34. Solitude
35. Goodbye Poland
36. Me and My Past
Epilogue
Notes