Colonistics

Never celebrated Christmas - just not my holiday. But a year ago I drank this day for the first time. We spent all that day in Kaunas - in the notorious Ninth Fort, which became a grave for 80,000 Jews. And it was there that I first heard incredible, seemingly fantastic details of the famous escape from this fort. It was the most daring and brilliant in its design and execution escape from imprisonment.

By December 1943, there were only 64 prisoners in the Ninth Fort. The Nazis left this group alive to try and hide the traces of their terrible crimes. These Jews were forced to dig out corpses from places of mass graves, burn them on bonfires, and then rub the charred bones into dust and mix it with the ground. It's hard to imagine what these Jews felt in their souls, but they knew for sure that no one of them himself would be released from the Ninth Fort. Once they finish cleaning after the Germans, they will immediately be killed. There was only one way out: to escape.

The first plan of escape Alex Faitelson, Berka Hempel, Shimka Adelson and Moshe Levin developed in early December 1943. In effect, this was the plan for the insurrection - it was necessary to interrupt the internal guard, then with the help of captured weapons to destroy the security along the perimeter of the Ninth Fort, and then - to flee. But this plan was rejected by most of the prisoners: there were too many German guards, all of them not to be killed, and from the fort to the nearest houses it would have to run hundreds of meters along open and well-shot terrain.

A new plan, approved by all prisoners, was supposed to escape through a tunnel in which firewood and an old German uniform were stored. However, a passage to this tunnel was closed by a heavy iron door, and it was impossible to make a tunnel under it. Then the prisoners made homemade drills with a lot of holes in the door, at the appointed time, just to break a rectangle out of it. During the day, only a few holes could be drilled, which were then clogged with clay or breadcrumb - so that the Germans would not notice. In total, such holes had to be drilled 350 - and then enough was a blow to the door appeared "window".

I remember how I stood at this "window" a year ago and could not believe that 64 people were released through it. In my opinion, at best, only a cat could crawl through it. About myself with my figure of a hippopotamus, I do not say. And I also looked at the boots that these prisoners carried-they weighed about five kilograms, or even more. And how they can run at all is incomprehensible. Simultaneously with the holes in the wall, Jewish craftsmen made duplicate keys of the chambers and stairways, along which they had to descend from the fort wall.

The escape itself was assigned to the outcome of the Sabbath, on the night of Christmas - in the expectation that the whole fort guard this day will get drunk and not notice what is happening under her nose. And this calculation worked! Towards evening the Germans gave the prisoners six liters of vodka and each a pack of cigarettes, but Alex Faitelson forbade drinking vodka - the fugitives needed to maintain sobriety. The decision of the Germans to close the chambers in honor of the holiday was not closed at seven, but at nine in the evening the prisoners were not at all pleased - this meant two additional hours of waiting.

Finally after nine in the evening, when the Germans had left, Shimka Adelson pushed the door of his cell, which had been weakened in advance, to the prison corridor and, following Fitelson's instructions, began to open the cameras with the keys. People left silently, organizedly, stele on the floor of the blanket, so that the guard did not hear the sound of footsteps. Then the blankets were spread along the corridor and on the stairs leading to the tunnel. At the entrance to the tunnel all the fugitives in accordance with the arrangement lined up in two columns - each knew exactly its place.

When the door to the tunnel was broken, the prisoners also fled from prison in an organized manner, and then in camouflage dressing-sheets with the help of self-made stitched rag stairs descended from the walls of the Ninth Fort. The Germans remembered in four hours.In search of 64 fugitives the Nazis threw the police of Kaunas, Gestapo fighters, SS units and even army units, but nobody was found.

The fate of those who fled that night from the Ninth Fort formed differently. Some of them did not live to the end of the war, having perished in the Kovno ghetto. Others survived, many decades later they repatriated to Israel. Sam Alex Faitelson wrote a wonderful book of memories of those events and died in the Israeli city of Givatayme in 2010.

Last Christmas in Kaunas a piercing wind blew. It was cold, but without snow. On the night when they fled, it was, according to Faytelson's recollections, much colder. When we returned to the hotel in the evening, I splashed a whiskey into my glass and raised my glass in a symbolic gesture. I drank for the first time in my life for Christmas, albeit perhaps on a different occasion, than the rest of the inhabitants of Vilnius stretching out the window. But I drank for Christmas. Because, if it were not for Christmas, all this brilliantly planned operation would have been impossible. That night, these Jews were born anew - for each of them it was his personal Christmas.