The foreign minister of Lithuania on Thursday honored the memory of his great-grandmother, who had been recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations for risking her life to save a Jewish girl during the Holocaust.
On an official state visit to Jerusalem, Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis took the routine VIP tour of Yad Vashem—the Holocaust History Museum and the Hall of Names, a memorial ceremony in the Hall of Remembrance—before a personal highlight of the trip, visiting the Garden of the Righteous to pay respect to the memory of his grandmother’s mother, Ona Jablonskytė-Landsbergienė (1894-1957), who received Yad Vashem’s highest honor more than two decades ago.
“However, this place is also a hopeful testimony that even in the darkest times, there will always be people who will choose the light, regardless of any circumstances.”
In the fall of 1943, Jablonskytė-Landsbergienė brought a seven-year-old Jewish girl, Avivit Kissin, who was the daughter of friends, to her sister Julija Petkeviciene’s house and asked her and her husband, Tadas Petkevicius, to take the girl in after the girl’s parents learned that the children in the Kaunas Ghetto were to be murdered, according to Yad Vashem records. Jablonskytė-Landsbergienė even managed to obtain a false birth certificate for the girl, who did not look Lithuanian. While kept from having any contact with strangers who entered the house, Avivit was not forced to hide and lived there as part of the household.
More than 95% of Lithuania’s approximately 210,000 Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, a higher proportion than in any other country.
A total of 28,217 people from 51 countries—including 924 from Lithuania—have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.