A Close-Up Look At People Who Matter : Helping Hand for Old Heroes of Holocaust

When Benjamin Lesin travels to Lithuania each summer, it is with mixed feelings.

On one hand he is returning to his family’s roots, especially in the western town of Naumiestis, where he takes color snapshots of houses, the former synagogue and other buildings to match old family black-and-white pictures from the 1920s and 1930s.

But he is also visiting a country that exterminated a greater portion of its Jews (94%) than any other during the Holocaust. Lithuanian citizens and police killed Jews “with such gusto” in mid-1941, Lesin said, he is convinced that Hitler “saw how easy it was” to exploit the anti-Semitism of local populations, and formalized his plans for the Final Solution.

But Lesin, an Encino hand surgeon whose own parents were able to escape through Switzerland before he was born, returns primarily to look in on the well-being of 95 Lithuanian “righteous Gentiles.” These are people, he said, who, in spite of what turned out to be double jeopardy, protected Jews from slaughter.

Certain death at the hands of the Germans awaited entire families of individuals caught harboring Jews, said Lesin. Then after World War II, although the USSR reoccupied the country, bands of Lithuanian nationalists, convinced that anyone who had saved Jews must be a Communist, roamed the countryside killing such rescuers.

In 1988, as one of the first Westerners to visit Naumiestis since the war, Lesin asked his host, “Didn’t anybody help?”

Dozens had and Lesin began to meet some of them: a couple to whom a baby girl was passed through a ghetto fence; a carpenter who saved 12 Jews; a farmer, part of a network with two other farmers, who saved 26. Virtually all were now elderly pensioners.

“I was overwhelmed by their modesty,” Lesin recalled. “I asked the couple who had saved the baby (now living in Wilkes Barre, Pa.) why they put themselves in so much danger. Their response was, ‘We did the only thing a decent person would do, . . . what a good Christian would do.’ ”

In 1989, he founded the Institute for Righteous Gentiles of Lithuania, first taking medicine and used clothing back on his trips, then sending each person $200 a year. Again he was surprised at their selflessness.

“The daughter of one man told me, ‘My father doesn’t need any help. He has a pension. Why don’t you put the money into what’s left of the Jewish cemetery,’ ” Lesin said.

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought independence to Lithuania, but near poverty to its elderly. Lesin said a monthly pension is about $30, with half of that going for heating fuel alone.

“Inflation has hurt their buying power,” he said. “There are now more food choices, but food has become more expensive.”

While several of the group die each year, Lesin periodically hears of more who are still alive. Two of the three farmers who had networked to save Jews are dead, but he recently learned that one of the sons had also helped. The boy, 11 at the time, had carried food to and waste matter away from the barn where his father had hidden a family.

“I can’t possibly refuse to help someone like that,” Lesin said.

“A day does not go by when my thoughts do not turn to the Holocaust. The courageous few who saved Jews must be recognized and supported in their waning days.”

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