Eight days before the German attack on the USSR, two Jewish families who owned businesses, Kolitzman and Kaplan, were arrested and deported from Pakroy to Siberia as enemies of the Soviet Union. This was a blessing in disguise. They all survived the deportation, and the younger  generation immigrated to Israel in 1990. One of them – already about eighty years old – Rochel Kolitzman – lives in Rechovot and I occasionally visit her. In Siberia they were sent to a kolkhoz, then they moved to Prokopievsk in the Kuzbaz coal-mining area where her father first had work underground as a miner but later managed to find a job as a technician. After the war they went to Lithuania, to Vilna, but as they were there without permits they were scared of being arrested so they left Vilna and moved to the south, to Kirgizstan.

I seem to remember that Chana Nurok, a Pakroyer living in Tel Aviv, (Rochel Kolitzman’s aunt) told Mum that David Maisel was indeed on the Siberia deportation list but, as he was scared of being sent there, with two young children, he bribed the Soviet authorities and had his name removed from the list. He was the richest Jew in Pakroy and logically should have been amongst the first to be deported. Rochel Kolitzman thinks that he was on the list for the next shipment but the Russians did not manage, the Germans invaded Lithuania a week later. Rochel clearly remembers the arrest: it was early on a Shabbat morning and she cried as she was being parted from Taibe Maisel who not only was her best friend but also her cousin (their mothers were sisters). She was already outside the house when she decided to go back and take the photograph albums. She still has all these old photographs with her, in Rechovot.