Sister Ona Mikaila

Saving Jewish Children

Sr. Ona Mikaila is a writer and editor of Bendradarbis, and a member of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a Lithuanian order in Putnam, Connecticut.

Before World War II, the Jews were the largest ethnic minority in Lithuania numbering about 240,000. After the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, the Soviet occupation of Lithuania was replaced by the army of Nazi Germany. Almost immediately the Einsatz kommandes (special detachments) of the Secret Police (SS) began rounding up Jews from all parts of Lithuania. They were either massacred or sent away to concentration camps.

When they realized what was going on, most Lithuanians were horrified. Many risked their lives and the safety of their families to hide Jewish people on the run. A number took in Jewish children given up by their parents as they were led away to be shot or deported.

One of these brave and generous souls was Mrs. Constance Braženas, a widow living in Kaunas. She had four children of her own, as well as aged and ailing relatives to take care of, but she gladly took in two Jewish children, Sarah and Alex. Food was scarce during wartime, but Mrs. Braženas gave whatever she could obtain to the children. She would also help “visitors” – Jews trying to get away from the SS – by giving them food and shelter.

Word spread that Mrs. Braženas was harboring Jews, and the SS made several raids on her house looking for fugitives. Once, she barely managed to wrap little Sarah in a shawl saying she was sick with diphtheria. Another time Alex hid in a cubbyhole under the stairs when the SS found him. Mrs. Braženas managed to persuade the German officers to leave the boy alone, and they did not realize that he was Jewish. The days and nights full of fear stretched into months and years.

Mrs. Braženas' son Mindaugas once rescued Alex from a line of Jews being marched away for deportation. At the end of the war, Alex was reunited with his father and Sarah with her mother. Mrs. Braženas also managed to send three of her own children out of the country as the Red army reentered Lithuania.

This good lady’s trials were far from over. In 1948, the Soviet police came to her house to arrest her son Mindaugas. When they found out that he had died, they took his mother instead. Constance Braženas was exiled to Siberia where she was forced to do heavy physical labour for eight years. Her health rapidly deteriorated and she was allowed to return home as an invalid in 1956.

Her children, living in the West, tried to get their mother out of Soviet Lithuania. One daughter, Dr. Nijolė Paronetto, was living in New York, while her twin sister was in Melbourne, Australia. Nijolė finally succeeded in obtaining an exit visa for her mother, although it took ten years. Finally in 1966, Mrs. Braženas joined her daughter and her family in New York. That same year Alex and Sarah came to New York for a moving reunion with their “Aunt Constance”. Prematurely aged and in poor health, Mrs. Braženas died in 1970.

Fifteen years after her death in 1985, Mrs. Constance Braženas was awarded the medal of “The Righteous of the Nations”, and a tree was planted in her honor in the Park of the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

To date some 409 Lithuanians have been awarded medals and the title of “The Righteous of the Nations” for rescuing Jewish people. Among them is Jonas Jackevičius, the godson of Blessed George Matulaitis, his sister Magdalena’s grandson. Mr. Jackevičius received official acknowledgement for saving five Jews in 1945, three of them children. The award was given in 1975 while Mr. Jackevičius was living in Toronto, Canada. He passed away in 1980.

In April of 1999, President Valdas Adamkus presented Father Jonas Žemaitis with an award for saving 47 Jewish children during the war years. The Lithuanian government sponsors this award, and some 200 Lithuanians have received it.

Father Žemaitis, now in his nineties though still active as a priest, is a Salesian (a religious community founded by St. John Bosco) who was head of the Laura Children’s Home located just outside Vilnius. During World War II, this home housed 300 orphans and was staffed by the Salesian sisters. Dr. Grišovičius worked at the home as attending physician. He encouraged Fr. Žemaitis to save Jewish children living in the Jewish ghetto of Vilnius.

Father Jonas would drive his horse-drawn wagon into the city, ostensibly taking three of four orphans for medical treatment. He would drive through the Jewish ghetto and pick up several Jewish children along the way taking them back with him to the Children’s Home. These children, aged four to twelve, would mix in with the others in the Home and would thus be protected from the SS police. It was a risky undertaking and eventually someone informed the German authorities.

Several German nurses were sent to the Home to examine the children: they were supposed to check which ones had been circumcised. Fortunately, Father Žemaitis found out in time, and the sisters shepherded the Jewish children out into the nearby woods while other children were sent in to the nurses to be examined. After Father Žemaitis left the Home, the sisters followed his example and managed to save forty more Jewish children from the clutches of the Nazis.

Even after fifty years, not one of these Jewish children, now adults, has ever acknowledged that they were rescued by a Lithuanian priest, Father Jonas Žemaitis. And so he has not been honored as one of “The Righteous of the Nations”, although he richly deserves the title.

Michail Ehrenburg, Curator of the National Jewish Museum in Vilnius, says that the museum has documentation on 2,300 Lithuanians who rescued Jews during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania. He admits that this number could easily be tripled and quadrupled.