From Lithuania to Jerusalem, a Holocaust survivor shares his story with diplomats

Foreign diplomats gathered in Jerusalem on Monday to hear the story of a Holocaust survivor as part of Holocaust Remembrance Day programming, with survivor Arnold Clevs sharing his experiences of enduring several work and concentration camps during World War II. At the event organized by Zikaron Basalon and the Anti-Defamation League at the latter’s Jerusalem office, Clevs brought the diplomats back in time to when he was eight years old. He had been living in Kovno, Lithuania, when the Nazis entered the country.

“On Sunday morning, I was still a child. On Monday, I became a man,” he said. Clevs’s father decided that their best chance at survival would be to flee the city for rural towns. With his parents and older sister, they tried to escape the march of German invasion forces. “The road was hell on earth,” said Clevs.

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On Sunday morning, I was still a child. On Monday, I became a man.

The road was full of war refugees fleeing the Nazi advance, and German warplanes strafed and bombed any target that made itself available. The road became littered with human and animal carcasses, and it was the first time he had seen a dead body. However, it would be far from the last. Clevs’s father was separated from the family, and when the rest of them reached a town, the Jewish refugees discovered that the German forces had already arrived. When he watched the invading soldiers march through the street, one Lithuanian person pointed to him, saying, “Hey, look at the little Jew boy.”

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The road was hell on earth.

Clevs and his family realized that they would not be welcome there and decided that the best course of action would be to return to Kovno by river rowboat. They hired a boatman, but as they rowed on, they noticed that the river was filled with the bodies of slain soldiers. The boatman refused to continue, and so the Clevs family continued on foot. The Clevs family was stopped by a German patrol and detained at a former Soviet military barracks, where Lithuanian collaborators with the Nazi regime inflicted cruelties upon Jewish captives. They would take pleasure in sliding their rifles through the windows and discharging into the ceiling, delighting in the Jews’ fright. They would come and take the pretty girls, who would never be seen again. Clevs said that his mother covered his sister so that she wouldn’t be seen by their captors.

Later on, the family was taken to a prison facility, where they implored a Lithuanian officer to see to their release as patriotic Lithuanians, as Clevs’s father had volunteered in the Lithuanian military. The officer released them, and they reunited with Clevs’s father at their home in Kovno. However, this was just the beginning of the tribulations that Clevs related. New laws and regulations were implemented under the Nazi occupation. Valuables were stripped from the possession of Jews, and t

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Hey, look at the little Jew boy.