Photogalleries and/ or stories from descendants
My father, Charles
(Chalilis)(Betzalel) Trey , was born in Pakruojis in 1930 and
left for South Africa with his parents and sister in 1939. (He died in 1999). He
would often talk about Pakruojis as the place where he grew up, but I never knew
many details about the town.
Before the Crimean war, my family's name was Joelson, and they were from Latvia.
(Al Joelson was one of the descendants of the Latvian Joelsons). During the
Crimean war, all Jewish boys who were not first born sons were subject to
conscription in the Russian army for 20 years at 12 or 13. My father said that
his ancestor gave each of his sons who wasn't a first born a different last name
and claimed to the authorities that the non-Joelson children were first-born
orphans that he had adopted. My ancestor, the third son, was given the last-name
of Trey (similar to three in Yiddish).
My father didn't tell many stories about Pakruojis. He had a deep hurt because
he felt that the people there were at least as responsible for killing all of
his relatives and the people he grew up with as the Germans. His father,
Chlaune,
and uncle Jacob (or Yacob), were from Latvia and fought in the White Russian army with
their other brother, Samuel, who was killed by the Bolsheviks. They escaped and settled
in Pakruojis.
There my grandfather met Hadassah Katz, his wife. My grandfather was a businessman. My dad said he had owned a sewing machine factory, but I don't know if that was in Pakruojis or in Latvia. According to my dad, Hadassah came from a family descended from a prominent rabbi. Perhaps that was the Haim Katz listed on your site.
Jacob had a wife and children. Hadassah's family emigrated to
South Africa a while before my family. They were the father and mother,
Arieh
and Tuviah, I think, and the two brothers,
Baruch and Meyer. As
the Nazis came to power in Europe, they continually wrote to my grandfather and
grandmother asking them to come down. Then, I think as a result of the invasion
of Poland in 1939, my grandfather did emigrate to Port Elizabeth, South Africa
with his family (which included my dad and his sister Sonia), another brother
named Yitzhak died at about 1. They took a train through Germany to get there.
They stayed in a hotel overnight in Nuremburg or Munich on the night of a Nazi
rally.
Regarding my father's life in Lithuania, I never got many details. He said his
best friend he used to play with all the time was named Hennie who he described
as always smiling. Jacob and his wife and children were killed. My father's
Hebrew name was Betzalel, and his given name before South Africa was Chalilis.
He said that the synagogue services in Pakruojis were just like the present day
services in South Africa - the synagogue had a cantor and choir.
My dad said he once visited a person in Israel who was the sole survivor of the
massacre. That person said that one day a single German officer came to the town
and the Lithuanians rounded up the Jews (I guess based on the info on your site,
this must have been the men only first, though my dad never mentioned this). The
Jews were shot and left for dead in a pit. The survivor said that he was not
dead and lay in the pile of dead people until everyone left when he crawled away
and joined the partisans. Unfortunately, I do not know who he was.
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Copyright © 2008Dora Boom