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. ...