Tales of a Holocaust Survivor
April 27, 2009 • By Erik Landers, The Breeze
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HARRISONBURG, Va. — Imagine surviving on 934 calories a week.
That was the total amount of calories Jay Ipson and each member of his family received each week while living in the Kaunas ghetto in Lithuania during the Holocaust.
A Big Mac and medium fries from McDonald’s alone contains 920 calories.
“I can’t imagine living like that,” freshman Aaron Robinson said. “I can’t even put myself in those shoes; it’s unbelievable.”
Ipson, 73, the director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, spoke Thursday night about his experience living through the Holocaust, as part of JMU Hillel’s Holocaust Remembrance Week. Hillel is a Jewish student organization on campus.
“It is so important for our generation to be educated about the Holocaust because future generations will only be able to learn about it through text books,” said junior Rachel Rosenberg, Hillel president.
Ipson’s experience in the Holocaust came from living in a ghetto in Lithuania. He said the only difference between a ghetto and a concentration camp was the ghetto was for a local population, while people had to be transported to a concentration camp.
“They’re both the same,” Ipson said. “They starve you in both; they kill you in both.”
Ipson said the killing of Jews in Lithuania began before the Nazis even invaded. After the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania, Germany invaded and Lithuanians hoped they would grant the country autonomy.
To appeal to the Germans, according to Ipson, non-Jewish Lithuanians killed 92 percent of the Jews in Lithuania and the Nazis killed only 6 percent.
In January of 1941, the Jewish population of Lithuania was reportedly 208,000 people. Ipson was one of 5,000 that survived the Holocaust.
“It’s the first time I heard about Lithuania killing the Jews before the Germans even went in,” Robinson said. “I’d never heard about it before ever. I never read it in a textbook and none of my teachers ever told me about it. It adds onto the atrocity.”
Ipson recounted how he, his mother and many members of her family were taken from their home when the Nazis rounded up 5,000 Jews from the ghetto and put them in line to board a train to be taken to a concentration camp.
“The excuse was to make more room in the ghetto so everybody could live fine,” Ipson said. “Well, they had already killed half of us off.”
Ipson was spotted in line by a local police officer who pulled him out of line and told him to go home. Ipson went home only after convincing his mother to leave with him, even though she wanted to stay in line with the rest of her family. The rest of the family all ended up being killed in a concentration camp in Kluger, Estonia.
Ipson, along with his mother and father, spent two and a half years living in a ghetto before they were able to escape with the help of local farmers. He spent nine months hiding from the Nazis, three months in a barn and six months in an underground room his father dug in the farmer’s potato field.
During the six months he lived underground, Ipson never changed clothes and never had a bath.
“I was the proud owner of hundreds of lice,” Ipson joked. “They were all over me. What I used to do was go to the hole when there was enough light, lift up my shirt and pop the lice with my thumbs. They were big suckers too, and that’s how I learned how to count.”
Ipson and his family were finally liberated by soldiers of the Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States in 1947 when he was 12 years old.
Contact Erik Landers at landerea@jmu.edu
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What kind of “education” is this? You are a University publication - how could you accept and proclaim such misinformation as the truth before doing a fact- check on the history of Jewish genocide in Lithuania? Where did you get these numbers? In 1941, Jay Ipson was 6 years old, yet you quote him as an authority.
Claiming it was not Nazis but Lithuanians who carried out 92 % of the genocide there… what an absurd assertion! Kaunas had 35,000- 40,000 Jews, of which german-organized anti-communist insurgents murdered perhaps 10%. Here’s a Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kovno. Check it out.
Yes, there was the shame of Nazi collaboration among a small minority of Lithuanians, but your story depicts the tail wagging the tiger, and portrays the Soviet Union as somehow benevolent. Stalin, a rescuer ?
There is never any recognition from the Jewish community of the horrific genocide that was simultaneously being carried out by Stalin on the Lithuanian population, as well as the rest of central and eastern Europe. It’s like those millions of people weren’t human; those numbers don’t count.
How can we ever stop the cycle of racial hatred and revenge, when the flames are stoked with this kind of fuel?