Leizer Bart and his wife Zenia Lewinson-Bart
Jewish freedom fighters against the Nazis
By Anne-Gerard Flynn | Special to The Republican
on October 18, 2009
Courtesy Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center
Former Springfield resident Leizer Bart, the sixth man from the left, and his wife Zenia Lewinson-Bart, standing with rifle in front of him, were part of the “Freedom Fighters of Nekamah” under the legendary partisan leader Abba Kovner who help liberate Vilna. This photo was taken on July 14, 1944, the day after the city was liberated from the Nazis.
By ANNE-GERARD FLYNN
aflynn@repub.com
Former Springfield resident Michael D. Bart, 56, was unaware that his parents during World War II had been part of a band of Jewish partisans who helped to liberate what is now the Lithuanian city of Vilnius from the Nazis. His journey into his parents’ heroic past did not begin until his father’s death in 1996 at the age of 81.
“At my dad’s funeral, one of the mourners came up to me and said I needed to inscribe ‘Freedom Fighters of Nekamah’ on my parents headstone to honor their involvement in the Jewish resistance movement in Vilna,” said Bart, using the city’s name when it was his mother’s birthplace in 1922 and part of Poland.
Bart shares his parents’ story in the new panels added to the exhibit, “A Living Memorial,” at the Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center in Springfield as well as in his book, “Until Our Last Breath,” which won the prestigious Christopher Award when it was published in 2008.
Both his parents escaped death a number of times before finding their way to a new life first in Springfield, where their two sons were born, and later in San Diego.
His mother, Zenia Lewinson-Bart, was 19 when the Nazis invaded Vilna. They forced her successful middle class family into one of two ghettos there where they lived for nearly two years in one apartment with 100 other people. It was in the ghetto that she met and married 28-year-old Leizer Bart.
At one point, Zenia was rounded up and taken to a prison that served as collection center for Jews to be shot. She begged a German soldier to spare her as someone who could work. The soldier responded with a blow to her head. She awoke to find those around her had been shot dead.
Shortly before the last deportation from the ghetto to extermination camps, Zenia and Leizer managed to escape with members of the underground to Rudnicki forest about 25 miles from the city, where they joined the legendary resistance fighter Abba Kovner and his “Avenger” partisan battalion. Leizer, who was seriously wounded on a mission to obtain food, helped mine and destroy enemy train and rail lines. Zenia cooked and carried supplies to other partisan camps.
At war’s end, the couple tried to return to Leizer’s home town in Poland but a local priest warned that it was not safe for them. Zenia’s hopes of being reunited with her mother and brother, who had been seen alive at a labor camp, cruelly ended when she arrived at the camp in Vilna to find the Nazis had shot all the prisoners, including her family members whose bodies she found in a court yard.
It was then that Zenia, who spoke several languages, sent a postcard to “America, Springfield,” telling an uncle that she was the last one in her immediate family to survive.
Former Springfield resident Zenia Lewinson-Bart, far right, who died in San Diego in 2003 at the age of 80, was the only Holocaust survivor in her immediate family that included, her brother, Michael Lewinson, far left, her mother Rose Balcwinik-Lewinson-Botwinik, and step-father, Hillel Botwinik.