TE15 Lithuanian Honey Cake

Irena: Life Should Be Clear

I did not write any of it down . . . I felt very good staying with Pranelis. Once he gave me some money to get a permanent for my hair, so that, in his words, I would look “like all the other young girls.” But it was a mistake, because with curly hair I looked even more Jewish. While livingwith Pranas, I used the documents of Feliksas Treigys’s daughter, Irena; Juozas and Ona Strimaitis had procured them for me. Treigys was a mathematician, a teacher, and director of the Marijampolė high school, and his daughter spent the war years in that town. I never knew Treigys, but my friends must have simply asked him to help me. Thanks to him, my life in Vilnius could appear legitimate. A wonderful woman named Marcelė Kubiliūtė helped me to find a job as a cleaner in the nursery of Dr. Izidorius Rudaitis’s clinic at 16 Subačiaus Street. 6 Marcelė was a great Lithuanian patriot and, as I later learned, a Lithuanian intelligence agent. In the nursery I fed the children, washed floors and cleaned the wards, changed bedding, and did laundry. A week after I started there, head nurse Gabriūnienė rushed into the ward in which I was working and began to ask me questions: “Who are you? Where are you from? What is your last name?” I had the impression that she was asking all of these things quite angrily and that she suspected I was a Jew. Of course, I answered all of her questions and immediately told Pranas and 6 Marcelė Kubiliūtė (1898–1963)—social activist, intelligence agent (worked with Lithuanian military intelligence), public servant.

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