My name is Mina Dimont, maiden name Kvartovsky.[1] I was born on August 5, 1916, in Sirwint, Lithuania. The closest large city to Sirwint was Kovno, which took about five hours to get to by horse.[2] Sirwint was a small town with about 1,000 people, all of them Jewish. The gentiles had farms on the outskirts of town, but life in Sirwint was a beautiful Jewish life. We had good Jewish schools, good homes with all the Jewish traditions and synagogues. We had our families: our parents, sisters, and brothers, and we were all young, healthy, and very happy.

My father, Meyer Kvartovsky, was a Hebrew teacher who taught in different towns. He would come home for holidays, but he didn’t live at home during the week. My mother, Reizel, maiden name Levush, was a housewife. My older siblings are Yosel (Jack), Frieda, and Sara. After me, there were Avrom (Abrasha) and Liza. We lived in an apartment that had one big room and two smaller rooms. Yiddish was our language; the whole town spoke it. We also spoke Hebrew in our house because my father was a Hebrew teacher. The languages used in the schools were Yiddish and Hebrew as well.

There was a big factory that made stockings and sweaters in Kovno that I went to for work. While in Kovno I met my husband, Israel Dimont. We dated for two years and then wed at my parents’ house in Kovno in 1940.

On June 22, 1941, the Germans bombed Kovno and the Russians began to leave in big trucks. We were very frightened, knowing that the Germans were coming, and we stayed in basements. We were chased out of the basement after two days by a gentile. We were very scared when we went to our house. My sister Liza ran a different way and we lost her. She was picked up by the Russians and taken by truck to Moscow.

Right away, the Germans began arresting people. My sister and her husband lived with my parents, and my husband and I lived separately. Our home was near a monument. One day, from my kitchen window, I saw three Jewish men being put up against the monument, and right away I saw them fall to the ground. About 15 minutes later there was a knock on my door. I said I’d open it because I knew it was more dangerous for the men. When I did, three or four gentiles with guns came in and searched the house. They were looking for guns and ammunition, but they left and didn’t arrest us.

We stayed in Kovno for about a week before they gave us the order to go into the ghetto at Slobodka. Slobodka was a little Jewish suburb across the bridge in Kovno. All the Jews went there. There were a lot of streets in Slobodka. Later on they surrounded Slobodka with gates and walls. We were told what house to go to; my brother with his wife and her family, my sister, my husband and I lived together in a two-room apartment. My mother was with us, but my father wasn’t home when everyone was taken to the ghetto. I heard that he died of starvation.

There were 10 of us in the apartment, so it was very crowded. A couple of times we snuck out to find food, but we had very little to eat. Food was not important because we were so scared. A Jewish committee was created in the ghetto that included Dr. Elkes, who died during the war.[3] His home hospital in Lithuania is now a museum. He was a wonderful man. The committee created a Jewish police force and assigned the older men to drive us to work.

We had to go past German soldiers to get in and out of the ghetto. Every morning, hundreds left to go to work, including my brother. He would hide food in his clothes and bring it back in for us to eat. One day they caught him with the food and beat him badly. When he came home his face was very swollen.

People would take clothing out of the ghetto and trade it for food. You could get a loaf of bread for a good suit, but mostly people on the outside gave us their rotten potatoes.

Everybody wanted to work, because we thought that if we worked perhaps they’d keep us alive. I mostly worked in the house, taking care of my family. A couple times they took me to the airport to pick up stones and that sort of thing. There were a lot of captured Russian soldiers there, and they were at the airport once when I went to work there. They looked worse than us. We had our homes, with water and light, but the Russians slept outside in the snow. One of them came to me and asked for bread, so I threw him a piece. The Germans saw this, and beat him. The Russian begged them to kill him. I saw him fall to the ground, which broke my heart; all because I gave him a piece of bread. There were 6,000 captured Russians; all of them died within three months.

Right after we entered the ghetto, in 1941, the “actions” began.[4] The first time it happened, the Germans said they needed professionals, doctors and lawyers, that sort of thing. We thought it might be good, that they’d put them to work. Five hundred people volunteered to go that day. They never came back.

There was a small action every day, and life became worse with every passing day. Every day we waited for something to happen. If not today, then tomorrow. Pregnant women were killed right away. In another action, they took away children. Some women put on big coats to try to hide their children, but they took them all. One of my friends decided to go with her children. They let her go and then killed her and her children. Another woman wanted to go, but wasn’t allowed.

The big action occurred later, maybe in late 1941 or 1942.[5] That day they came to our homes and told us to leave. They said we were being taken to work. We went out with whatever we were wearing, and they kept us overnight. We slept on the ground, not knowing what was going to happen. Then they made two rows: the old and the children on one side, and the younger ones on the other. My mother was on the opposite side of me because she was “old.” At that time a woman was considered old at age 40. The Germans stood at the front and ordered the right line to go back to the ghetto; people in the left line (the old and the children) were taken to the Ninth Fort. The Germans killed them up against the ditches in which they fell. Those of us in the right line, who had returned to the ghetto, could hear the shooting. This was the last time I saw my mother. Everyone’s mothers had been taken away, so we cried together.

I was in the ghetto for about three years until they liquidated it in the summer of 1944. That day they told us to leave our homes and put us on trains with no windows, cattle cars. I was there with my husband. There was no food or water. We were on the train for about three days. They told us they were taking us to work. The ride was terrible and many people jumped to their deaths.

The Germans took us into the woods, we saw the “SS” on their black uniforms as they lead us. They separated the men from the women, then took us away. They stripped us naked and inspected us for gold. They put the women in chairs and checked our bodies for gold. They made fun of us when we were naked. They checked our hair and then made us shower in ice-cold water. After that we were given the striped clothes, the pajamas. This was the concentration camp at Stutthof near Danzig (Gdansk), Poland.[6] We had a Polish overseer in the camp named Max. He was a murderer. Max beat us and yelled at us, and we were afraid of him every time we saw him.

There were a lot of barracks at Stutthof. The barracks were big buildings and had wooden beds. I was with my sister, Sara, and several friends. Our area was all women; there were also Poles and Russians at the camp. We had little contact with them. We did nothing and got weak from not having any purpose. They provided us with little food.

We were at Stutthof for about three weeks and then we were taken to Malken, another camp also near Danzig (Gdansk).[7] Life was very hard at Malken. They’d wake us at four or five in the morning, count us, and then take us to work. We walked to work, maybe five or six miles, where we were told to dig with shovels. The ditches were so deep that you couldn’t see our heads when we were in them. In the morning we got a cup of black coffee, and after dark, when we returned, they gave us a bowl of soup and a slice of bread. We had a special dish (a bowl) that they provided us with, no spoons or anything. My sister and I would share one so she’d drink half and I’d drink the other half. We slept together on straw, and cuddled together to keep warm. Everyone at Malken had lice.

The guards at Malken were German SS troops. I risked sneaking out of the camp at night a couple of times. I covered up my star and walked in the snow until I reached a village, where I knocked on a door. If you knocked on German doors they’d lock them and not talk to you, so I knocked on the doors of Polish houses. They’d let me in and give me bread, and if they had hot soup they’d give me some. They knew I was from the labor camp and that I was Jewish, but they didn’t care. They saw the conditions and felt sorry for us.

One night I snuck out of camp for bread, and when I tried to come back in a German caught me. He called me over and took everything away from me. He said I’d have to make my appeal in the morning when everybody went to work. My sister was crying and went to him, saying, “She’s my sister, don’t hurt her and don’t kill her.” In the morning I faced the facts and was able to explain myself, and the Germans let me go. My sister and I kissed each other, and from then on I never snuck out again.

You had to go to work, even if you were sick. But a lot of women got very sick and had to go to a special room where they kept the sick people. When they got sick they went to that room and wouldn’t survive. In 1945, when they began to liquidate the camp, the Germans went into that room and shot everyone there.

That last winter we had the deepest snows, and when they liquidated the camp they told us to get out. I had a coat that I’d picked from the clothing the Germans had collected. I had wooden shoes, but they didn’t last long. I wore rags on my feet when we walked in the deep snow. We walked for two or three days; people around me were dropping and dying while we marched. They were left behind. We then noticed that the Germans were taking off their uniforms and disappearing while they were leading us.

We walked for a while and knocked on the door at a Polish house. An old Polish woman came to the door and let us in. We stayed with her for three weeks. There were a lot of abandoned German homes so we got food and clothes out of them. One night, as we were sleeping on the floor, a terrible shooting began. We saw a big fire from the shooting and we knew it was the Germans and the Russians fighting. At four o’clock it started to get quiet. It was winter, so when daylight started to come we could see the Russian soldiers coming down from the hills. After a little while we heard a knock on the door, and the Russians came in. We were kissing each other, saying, “We are free, we are free, we are free!”

After liberation, my sister and I decided to go to Warsaw, Poland, and traveled there on a Russian truck. There was a Jewish committee in Warsaw already, helping people. They told us where to stay. There were many people returning after surviving the camps. We lived there for almost a year. My sister and I got a room with a family and had to work to survive. My sister did the bookkeeping for a barbershop and I was a cleaning lady.

The situation in Poland was better, but we knew we didn’t want to stay. The committees started to help people to immigrate to Israel and the United States. I had a brother in New York and wanted to go there. My sister and I went together. My brother found out I was alive and sent papers for me, which went through the committee. We stayed six or seven months in Warsaw and then went to Munich because you had to go to Germany to get to the United States.

There was a Jewish group in Munich that helped us get a room from a German lady. We met a lot of people from Kovno in Germany. We stayed there for about a year. We knew what happened to my father, but I still didn’t know about my husband. We knew that our brother Avraham was killed in the ghetto. He’d given his baby daughter to a gentile and hoped to survive to be with his daughter.

One night in Germany, on the first Seder of Passover, a man knocked on my door. When I came downstairs, I saw my husband standing on the other side of the room. It turned out that my husband had been in the concentration camp at Dachau, and then went to Italy after the liberation. They had no money in Italy, or passports, so they had to use blackmail to get to Germany. He was so sick with a rash that we had to put him in a hospital for a week. My daughter Tobie was born while we were in Germany.

After about a year in Munich, my husband, daughter and I sailed on a ship to the United States, while my sister Sara went to Israel to be with her husband. We settled in Yonkers, New York, where one of my husband’s relatives lived. I worked in a shop making lingerie. My husband came out of Dachau a very sick man. He died in 1969. He lost his whole family.

I have one daughter and one granddaughter, Tamara. Tamara has two sons. I want people to always remember what happened to the Jewish people because when we are gone, they will be the witnesses to our stories.

[1] From an interview conducted by USC’s Shoah Foundation.

[2] Kovno is the city’s Slavicized name. Its Lithuanian name is Kaunas.

[3] Doctor Elhanan Elkes was a respected Jewish physician elected as chairman of the Kovno (Kaunas) ghetto committee. He was a man of unquestioned integrity who conducted committee affairs with equity and fairness.

[4] The “actions” were a series of massacres of Kovno ghetto Jews carried out by the Germans and their Lithuanian auxiliaries. Jews were removed from the ghetto and taken to various forts in the area where they were shot. These “actions” occurred in numerous other established European ghettos.

[5] Ms. Dimont describes here the “big action,” known by historians as the “Great Action.” It occurred on October 29, 1941, when 9,200 Jews in the Kovno Ghetto were shot to death at the Ninth Fort.

[6] Stutthoff Concentration Camp was used for forced labor. Conditions at the camp were brutal. Typhus epidemics struck twice, and SS guards gassed prisoners judged too weak or sick to work. Camp doctors also used lethal injections to kill prisoners. More than 60,000 people died at Stutthoff.

[7] Malken Mierzynek – one of the many Stutthof sub-camps.