We learned of the dreadful fate that had befallen Svenciany Jews during the Civil War.  The district had been devasted by marauding armies and armed bands.  Each time another of them arrived it looted everything in sight, horses and carriages, food and clothes.  When a band of Greens arrived (or was it Reds or some other colour?), their leaders called together the elders of the Jewish community, made them surrender anything of value they still possessed and then took them, with their wives and children, in cattle trucks a few miles out of town.  There they dragged the men out and shot them, in front of their families.  Then they galloped away.  Among those shot were relatives of Father's.  Luckily, young cousin Joseph had a few days earlier gone to Vilna and was staying with our grandparents.  But his even younger sister Dora witnessed it all.  It was the first horrific chapter in a life that was later to take her into Soviet and Nazi camps.
 

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