at the airport. He was one of the
lucky ones, capable of hard
physical labor and thus was not
sent to certain death.
My mother worked as a
housekeeper for the notorious
Obersturmenfuhrer Goeke, the
commander of the ghetto who
ordered the deaths of tens of
thousands of Jews. From a win-
dow in his house, my mother
was forced to watch the
"Children's Action," when the
young children of the ghetto
were thrown into trucks by the
Nazis to be slaughtered.
In July 1944, my mother met a
guard who said the Russians
were on the brink of entering
Kovno. He said the Nazis
planned to liquidate the ghetto
by burning it to the ground, with
Jews inside the burning build-
ings.
He would allow her to escape
if she would meet him on a date
at the Café Conrad. My mother
agreed, as long as she could take
her "family" with her. Her family
had been killed at Ponar, but she
identified 15 individuals, includ-
ing my father, as her so-called
family.
Passing through barbed wire
in the middle of the night, this
group escaped and my mother
never returned to the cafe.
Liberation brought freedom
but uncertainty. I was born dur-
ing this uncertain period. My
parents moved across newly
erected borders with me in tow.
Secretly and often illegally, they
crossed from Lithuania to
Poland to Germany, evading
Poles and Lithuanians still intent
on killing Jews.
Their difficult journey took
them to Munich, where the
American government, in con-
junction with the American
Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee, had established a
facility to house displaced per-
sons and refugees.
After almost a year in the
camp, my father's four Perlman
uncles in Detroit sponsored our
family to come to the U.S. We
arrived in New York July 17,
1947, and came to Detroit.
The war destroyed my parents'
families, their friends and
dreams of the future. Perhaps it
was a lack of tangible evidence
— all photographs, of course,
were destroyed — which also
motivated me to return to
Europe.
Armed with a few addresses,
we attempted to find the homes
where our mothers had lived in
Vilna, where our families worked
and the schools they attended.
We identified some houses, but

Evil, Hope on page 54

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September 29 2005

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53