Author: Fredy Rotman

On a summer day, June 23, 1945, a strange scene unfolded in one of the old courtyards of Vilnius. Right on the street, a group of people were hastily packing their belongings. They were all Jews who, judging by their suitcases, were preparing to leave the Lithuanian capital forever. They settled in the back of a truck along with their luggage. As the vehicle departed, it let a car pass ahead—driven by a man in a Soviet pilot’s uniform.

In the car, aviation captain Nikolai Borodulin was at the wheel, accompanied by several passengers who hadn’t fit in the truck bed. Seated next to the driver was a woman well known in Vilnius: Tzvia (or, in Polish form, Civya) Wildstein. She was one of the founders of the Vilnius orphanage for Jewish children who had survived the Holocaust.

At the airport, a plane was waiting to take the Jews out of the Soviet Union to Bucharest, from where the Vilnius group planned to continue on to Palestine. But before the passengers could take off, Captain Borodulin reported over the radio an unexpected malfunction and requested an emergency landing. Time seemed to freeze for Tzvia Wildstein: the landing, the sudden intrusion of secret service agents into the cabin, her arrest, and the cell of the NKGB’s internal prison. Instead of reaching Eretz Yisrael, Tzvia Wildstein—who had survived the occupation—found herself behind bars once again, only this time in the clutches of her “own” Soviet regime.

Yet Tzvia Wildstein could never call the Lithuanian SSR her homeland. She was born on July 26, 1906, still under the Russian Empire, into the family of Bila and Yosef Nabozhny in the small town of Berezhnitsa in the Volhynian province. The Nabozhny family lived in nearby Sarny, where Tzvia’s father worked as a teacher in a Jewish folk school. In addition to Tzvia, the family had another daughter, Pesil, and a son named Itzhak.

From early childhood, Tzvia Nabozhna would sneak into her father’s lessons and thus learned the Torah quite well. At age seven, she began attending the folk school where her father taught. That same year, in 1913, her paternal grandparents emigrated to Palestine.

Like her relatives, who were Zionists, Tzvia had longed from childhood to make aliyah to Eretz Yisrael. She became fully convinced of this life goal after transferring in 1917 to a Polish gymnasium. After the Polish-Soviet War, Sarny became part of the Second Polish Republic. But just like with the Soviet regime later on, it was difficult for a Jewish girl to embrace the red-and-white patriotism of the Poles. The reason was the rampant antisemitism that flourished under Polish rule. On one occasion, an antisemitic outburst by several classmates outraged her so much that she publicly scolded them in class. In retaliation, the bullies grabbed Tzvia by the arms and legs and threw her off a balcony. The fall wasn’t high enough to cause serious injury, but the lesson stayed with Tzvia for the rest of her life.

Tzvia’s studies at the Polish gymnasium also troubled her father. Classes were held on Shabbat, and students could easily be expelled for skipping them. After much deliberation and family discussion, she was allowed to move to Vilno. In 1924, she entered the 6th grade of the Vilnius Jewish Gymnasium. Although the institution was Jewish, it granted a state-recognized diploma, which was necessary for university admission.

In Vilno, Tzvia rented a corner of a room from a woman who also housed three other tenants. She had to sleep on a broken couch, but the young student remained undaunted. She earned a living by giving private lessons and couldn’t afford expensive textbooks, so she often borrowed books overnight from friends. Several times she had to leave the gymnasium when she couldn’t afford to pay the tuition, but she still listened to the lectures—from outside the classroom door.

In 1926, she finally received her secondary school diploma. That autumn, she was accepted to Stefan Batory University in Vilnius, where she began studying history, pedagogy, and psychology. Upon entering university, Tzvia once again had to find work. At first, she taught in a small private school run by a man named Zaslański, and later in a regular Polish school. In her free time, the young teacher participated in events organized by the Jewish National Fund, never forgetting that sooner or later, she was destined to emigrate to Eretz Yisrael.

In 1936, Tzvia married Asher Wildstein and took his surname. Her husband was a merchant in Vilno and shared her dream of leaving Poland. But the newlyweds had little time to enjoy family life before the outbreak of World War II. Part of the former Vilnius Voivodeship became part of the Belarusian SSR, while the region’s capital, Vilno, was transferred to the Republic of Lithuania in October 1939. However, before Lithuanian officials had even settled into the city, Lithuania lost its independence and was absorbed into the Soviet Union.

On the very day Germany invaded the Soviet Union—June 22, 1941—Tzvia, along with her husband and brother Itzhak (who also lived in Vilno), decided to flee eastward. But they didn’t get far—the German army advanced with lightning speed. Upon returning to the city, the escapees found themselves facing a new and horrifying reality brought by the invading “brown” forces.

The occupiers immediately imposed various restrictions and prohibitions on the Jews. One of them was a ban on leaving the city. But Tzvia, who did not look like a stereotypical Jewish woman, took the risk of traveling to nearby villages in search of food. One day, she failed to return before curfew and was caught by a Lithuanian patrol. She managed to convince the policemen that she was Polish. Eventually, they released her—but she had to take such risks again and again.

On Saturday, September 6, 1941, Tzvia and her husband were forced into the Vilnius Ghetto, created by the Germans. The crowding was overwhelming. But what truly made Tzvia’s heart stop was the sight of countless suffering children. She began going door to door, gathering aid for the little ones.

In addition to hunger, the ghetto was plagued by horrifying unsanitary conditions. Mountains of garbage piled up in every corner, and people relieved themselves right in the streets. Tzvia organized a team to clean the toilets and cesspools. After some time, she was appointed secretary to Dr. Lazar Epstein—a well-known physician and political figure from Kaunas—who headed the ghetto’s sanitary and epidemiological department.

Asher and Tzvia had no children of their own. When a woman approached Tzvia, saying she could no longer care for her two children, Tzvia took them in without hesitation.

After the first mass execution of Jews carried out by the Germans on August 31, 1941, many children were left orphaned in the ghetto, having managed to hide from the Nazi executioners. The heads of the ghetto’s medical and humanitarian departments decided to open two shelters for them: one for girls, the other for boys. Tzvia Wildstein was appointed director of the girls’ shelter, which was located in a synagogue on Jewish Street. Every morning, the girls would go with her to do gymnastics in a field near the prison. People in the ghetto looked askance at such “luxuries,” but Tzvia was convinced that physical exercise strengthened the girls and gave them the resilience to endure hardship. After training, the children would eat a piece of bread, sometimes bean soup, and hot water tinted with black breadcrumbs. Then the younger girls would attend school, while the older ones, aged 12 to 14, were assigned by the Judenrat to darn socks, pants, and gloves.

Tzvia Wildstein placed great importance on keeping the girls occupied and distracted from the horrors of daily life. She organized the shelter into four working groups: one was responsible for clothing and bedding, another for keeping the premises clean, a third oversaw haircuts, bathing, and caring for the sick. The fourth group helped the younger children with their homework. In addition, the shelter had a cultural committee that prepared a newspaper, organized Shabbat, decorated the walls, and more. Alongside these permanent work groups, the shelter also offered various hobby clubs: sewing, painting, drama, and choir.

To prepare for unforeseen circumstances, a hidden shelter—known as a malina—was set up in the orphanage, along with a small stockpile of food. Sometimes, when Tzvia’s husband returned from work, he would bring a bit of food he had managed to smuggle into the ghetto. If, in the middle of the night, one of the girls began to cry from hunger, Tzvia would come over and place a small piece of sugar into her mouth.

In September 1943, the Nazis began deporting people from the ghetto to Estonia. Tzvia’s husband ended up in the Klooga concentration camp, where he was murdered by Nazi executioners. Unaware of Asher’s fate, Tzvia hid in a secret refuge along with the children in her care and her husband’s parents. When the food supplies in the malina ran out, she decided to go out in search of food in the Polish district. Entering the balcony of a building that faced an “Aryan street,” she climbed down a drainpipe. Almost immediately after she left, a firefight broke out in the ghetto between the Germans and partisans. She was unable to return. That evening, she found temporary refuge with a Polish acquaintance who lived in the city center on Wielka Street.

Many years later, recalling those terrible events, Tzvia remembered how, approaching the ghetto a few days later, she saw the Germans leading a group of “her” orphans somewhere. She joined them—and ended up in Ponary, near a mass execution pit. As the first shots rang out, Tzvia fell into the trench. Hours later, she managed to climb out and escape into the forest.

Wildstein eventually reached the home of a peasant who hid her, and later contacted Professor Tadeusz Czezowski, who had once been Tzvia’s lecturer at the university. The professor turned to his assistant, Mrs. Zykowska, who found Tzvia work as a farmhand in the village of Czerwony Dwór near Kaunas. Fearing that word might spread about the rescued Jewish woman, Czezowski and Zykowska moved Tzvia to a safer location called the “Skala Estate.” There, she worked at a sawmill and gave lessons to the estate owner’s children. To the Polish villagers, she introduced herself as a Polish woman named Jadwiga Pogorzelska.

In July 1944, the Red Army entered Vilnius, and Tzvia Wildstein was able to return to the city. The situation there was catastrophic: she encountered Jewish children wandering the streets, abandoned and homeless. Some had been sheltered by Lithuanians; others had survived for months hiding from the Nazis in forests, dumps, and even in sewer pipes. Sick, emaciated, and fearful of people, many were nearly mute. Tzvia made a firm decision: a Jewish orphanage must be established in Vilnius to save these children and give them back their childhood.

Tzvia’s initiative, along with that of several other educators, was initially rejected by the Ministry of Education of the Lithuanian SSR. Instead, they were offered the option of placing the children in standard orphanages. The logic was strictly Soviet: there could be no orphanages for specific nationalities in the country.

Help came from Professor Yosef Rebelsky, a Soviet lieutenant colonel in the medical service, whose older brother David was one of the leaders of the Zionist movement in the United States. When Tzvia met with Rebelsky at the hospital, they spoke for several hours. Rebelsky agreed to help with securing a building and obtaining permission from the republican government, while Wildstein promised to locate the children and recruit teachers. As they parted, the professor said: “We will open this orphanage, no matter what it takes. You will be the children’s mother, and I will be their father.”