RUTA'S CLOSET

In this memoir, Morgan and Sigal recount the harrowing tale of Sigal’s family’s journey from German-occupied Lithuania to postwar Canada.

On June 23, 1941, the Kron Family—Meyer and Gita and their two daughters, Ruta (co-author Sigal) and Tamara—were on a rural road in northern Lithuania, on their way to Latvia and then Russia, hoping to outrun the German invaders who were intent upon murdering every Jewish person they encountered. The family’s only transportation was a horse and cart, which carried the two children and Shana, Meyer’s widowed mother. The Krons were not alone: Hundreds of others from their hometown of Siauliai, Lithuania—known in Yiddish as Shavl—and elsewhere were making the same journey. When German dive-bombers, known as Stukas, started strafing the road, the refugees first jumped into ditches to hide and then turned back to Shavl. Soon afterward, the Soviet Army, which still controlled Lithuania, rounded up some 700 ethnic Lithuanians and Jews in the dead of night, including Gita’s uncle Aharon “Ore” Shifman, a former mill owner, and his wife, Hoda.The Soviets labeled all those arrested as “potential troublemakers” and eventually sent them to Siberia—never to be seen again. When the Germans took control of Lithuania, they forced Jewish residents to switch houses with the poorest people in an area called Ezero-Traku. Armed men often entered the ghetto at night to terrorize the inhabitants, steal their goods, and march them to their deaths. Meyer, an engineer specializing in leather production, and Gita, who worked as his secretary, each had skills that the Soviet and German armies needed, which afforded them greater freedom of movement—and which ultimately saved their lives.

In riveting, novelistic prose, Morgan transports readers directly into the daily personal experiences of Lithuanian Jews during the German occupation. The remembrance effectively reports Sigal’s story, drawing on her recollections of the horrors of her childhood years. The authors punctuate the narrative with stunning moments that recount excruciating pain, sacrifice, and tenderness. One passage describes a mass killing of Jewish people, forced to march in eerie silence to their death in a killing field, where their captors ordered them to lie in a trench on top of the dead bodies of the people who came before them: “Some would stare down into people they had known all of their lives, while others were cheek-by-cheek with the grotesquely contorted faces of complete strangers.” In one of many short, poignant episodes, set in 1944, Ruta’s mother, who placed her young daughter with a Catholic family, came up to the girl’s new bedroom window, smiled warmly at her, and showed her rosary beads: “Ruta read it as a sign that she had her mother’s approval to go to church and become a Catholic. It meant survival for her.” Morgan, a veteran newspaper journalist for the Vancouver Sunand other publications, effectively grounds the emotional story in historical accuracy, presenting factual details—such as dates and locations—with precision.

A heartbreaking remembrance that’s historically compelling, vividly graphic, and tenderly evocative.