Voices from Vilna

By Helaine Shoag Greenberg

To my great joy, I found poignant letters in my family home describing my father's and his family's life and current events from 1930 to 1940 in Vilnius, Lithuania. On a "roots trip" there in 2000, the letters were shown to the Director of the Vilna Gaon Museum who thought them valuable. Voices is a creative, non-fiction memoir told from the perspective of a first generation 'child'. The letters are arranged chronologically, interspersed with letters to my father telling him what I found. Sadly, new photographs show evidence of ongoing anti-Semitism. I wrote this story as a memorial to the letter writers.

Chapter One contains love letters to my mother from my father. It also describes his desperate attempts to leave the country. Chapter Two shows how hard my father tried to get some of his family out, especially his sister married to a rabbi. Rabbis were targets of oppression. Chapter Three illustrates how difficult life became in Vilna even before the Holocaust. It was a cry for help. They knew what was coming, yet kept hope alive. I'm glad my father could not go back with me because the experience would have been too painful for him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 18, 2006
• ISBN: 9780595841431

Helaine Shoag Greenberg

The author is a Doctor of Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania. She has published articles in social work, medical and veterinary journals. Her last research project involved post-traumatic stress in children and adolescents who survived home fires. She is married and has two children and three delightful grandchildren.

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Copyright © 2006 by Helaine Shoag Greenberg

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Sometimes a forest burns down, but once in a while you find a seedling. An old man from Vilna made this remark when we recently met

Contents

Photographs

Acknowledgements

Introduction of the Letter Writers

THE EARLY 1930s

THE MID 1930s

THE LATE 1930s

References

Photographs

Fagel and Moses Shoag

Ida Levin and Wolf Shoag

51-52 Wilkomieska Street

Monument at Fort Nine Prison, Kaunas, Lithuania

Sonia and Roza Shoag

Poster Hitler Savior in Vilnius

Graffiti Jew Out

Acknowledgements

I thank the Jewish Gen ShtetlSchleppers Project in Houston, Texas for enabling me to visit the sites where these letters took place. I owe a special thanks to Galina Baranova, archivist at the Lithuanian National Museum, and to our guide extraordinaire Regina Kopilevich who gave us a past by handing us a family tree. Now I too, along with my Yankee friends, can be related to the ages. The birth and death records suggest that the legend about the family name Shoag is true. I also thank Rachel Kastanian at the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum of Lithuania for suggesting this project.

The author thanks Nancy Nicholas for her editorial assistance.

Introduction of

the Letter Writers

After my parents died in 1984, in the basement of their house in Jeannette, Pennsylvania, I found a treasure of family letters sent between 1929 and 1940 from what is now Vilnius, Lithuania. After World War I, the period of the early letters, the city became Wilno, Poland, until it was returned to Lithuania immediately before the Second World War. To the Jewish citizens of this illustrious and beloved city, however, it was always the Yiddish Vilna, the Jerusalem of the North, home of the learned and famous rabbi, Vilna Gaon.

The early letters (1929–1934) were from Wolf Shoag in Vilna to his love Ida Levin (Chayela in the letters) in the United States. When Frank and Mary Levin, Ida’s parents, brought their daughter back to Vilna in 1929 to visit relatives, Ida and Wolf met and fell in love. Wolf learned English to write to Ida. Wolf and Ida, my parents, got married in the United States in 1934. The next letters, dated 1938, were sent to the American Consul General in Warsaw, Poland from a United States congressman as part of an effort to help Wolf get some of his family out of Europe. The final letters, translated from Yiddish, are from Moses Mattathias Shoag, Wolf’s father and my grandfather, and from Wolf’s sister, my aunt, Roza Shoag Koslovska.

I feel privileged to have been able to become intimate with these relatives through their letters. I decided to write my family’s story after a visit I made to Vilna in May 2000 to present one important letter to Rachel Kastanian, the Director of the Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum. The museum did not have primary documents from the 1930s, and she urged me to write about the ones I had found. The letters describe the prelude to the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust from a personal perspective. Moses and Roza seemed to know what would happen, but they kept some hope alive. I wrote this so their voices might be heard.

A brief family history: Moses Mattathias Shoag, his wife, Fagel Rochel, and his brother Benjamin and his family lived in Snipiskes, a suburb of Vilnius, across the Green Bridge. Moses and Fagel Rochel made their living from a store that carried dry goods, bolts of cloth, and shoes, located in the front of their home, at 51/52 Wilkomienska Street. They had six children, three boys and three girls,