Portrait of Jewish Lithuanian sisters, Basia and Genia Kopelanski, 1932

Genia Kopelanski was born in 1911 in a village near Kovno, Lithuania. She had a sister named Basia and two brothers, Yaakov and Leib. Genia left her small village in 1927 and made her way to Kovno. She managed to live on her own for several years. This was a pretty brave thing for a single woman to do, it was almost unheard of.

In 1938, Genia married Efrayim Riebman, and their son Nachum (Noni) was born in April 1940. It was a marriage of love, and not arranged. Her sister Basia married, and they had a daughter. Their brother Leib was a soldier in the Lithuanian army, in the "Yiddische Soldaten".

After the start of WWII, Lithuania became under the Soviet sphere of influence, and by the summer of 1940 was occupied by the Soviet forces. In June 1941, Germany invaded Lithuania, and Soviet forces fled.

The invasion was quickly followed by a pogrom that took the lives of several thousand Jewish people in the Kovno area. The ones doing the killing were the Lithuanian gentiles, and it was shocking to many. These had been their neighbors!

In early July German Einsatzgruppen units began systematic mass shootings. Those who survived the initial pogroms and massacres were forced into a ghetto, including Genia and her family. In March 1944, the Germans conducted an action which targeted children and the elderly in the ghetto. Genia’s son young son Nachum was killed. She was spared seeing his murder, but would always be affected by it.

In July 1944, the ghetto was liquidated, and the women were sent to Stutthof labor camp. Yaakov Michles, another resident of the ghetto whose wife had been deported, left his daughter Chasia with Genia. Yaakov himself was deported to Dachau, and he hoped that Chasia would be safer with Genia in Stutthof. Caring for Chasia gave Genia a small will to live.

Genia was, in fact, able to protect Chasia throughout their time in the camp, and through a death march at the end of the war as well. After liberation, Genia located Yaakov and he was reunited with his daughter. Genia’s family all perished in the Holocaust. Yaakov began courting Genia, and truly grew to love the woman that protected his daughter.

Genia and Yaakov later married and had a son Moshe, born on May 31, 1947. They moved to Vilna, where Yaakov worked as an electrician in a printing plant. The family remained in Vilna until their immigration to Israel in 1958.

USHMM

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