Suly Chenkin, survived the Holocaust in a sack of potatoes and took refuge in Cuba

Suly Chenkin was born 81 years ago in the city of Kovno, in Lithuania. When he was eight months old, his life and that of his family took a different turn. The Nazis invaded the country and they, like many others, became prisoners in the concentration camps, the one they would be in from then on would be known as the Kovno ghetto.

“I left my house when the Nazis invaded Lithuania and together with the other Jews in my city they put us in a ghetto until I was 3 years old,” the woman recounts during an interview with the voice of america in Miami.

For three years she lived hidden in that ghetto, something that, despite her young age, she will never be able to forget.

Desperation to save his daughter

His parents were desperate. They didn’t know what to do to save her daughter’s life because, as the weeks passed, the chances of survival diminished. Finally “they had to make the terrible decision” to hand her over to a family, “from a very orthodox Jewish sector.” They did not know who her daughter would be with from that moment on, they only knew that this family had also been able to save the lives of other children.

They didn’t think much of it. They gave her something to sleep on and hid her in a potato sack.

Without knowing it, that sack of potatoes would be the one that would save his life. Her grandmother already made a prophecy when she was born: “This girl was born on the first day of the Jewish New Year, she will be lucky all her life.”

And it seems that his prediction was fulfilled. It was May 11, 1944. The vehicle that was carrying her made a stop and gently threw the sack over the barbed wire that separated both territories. There, two women opened it and took the little girl away in a carriage.

When her parents handed her over to that family, they feared that this would be the last time they would see each other. They were convinced that getting out of the Nazi concentration camps alive was almost impossible due to Hitler’s dominance in that area.

“My parents were sent to two different concentration camps, she to Poland and he to Germany,” the woman said.

Later, his parents would also be released and after a long journey, “jumping from one train to another”, the family was able to meet again.

Cuba, your refuge

Now yes, his life would start again. But far, far away from the land they called “home.” With a completely different culture and with a language they were completely unaware of.

“My dad had all his siblings in Cuba and they found out that my parents were alive after years of silence, so they did all the paperwork to bring us there,” Chenkin continues.

At that time, that girl from Kovno was already 6 years old and was fully aware of the nightmare that she, her parents, and the thousands of Jews who suffered the actions of the Nazis had experienced.

“It was February 1947 and Cuba ended up being a true refuge, the greatest paradise of my life,” he explains. There he was able to graduate from the University of Havana, settle on the Caribbean island and speak perfect Spanish.

Years later, however, he would have to flee again. This time from the land that she welcomed her and that she already felt as her own. History repeated itself. Fearing that Fidel Castro’s Revolution would wreak even more havoc on her family made her father buy a plane ticket so that she could head to Miami first. It was July 1960.

“My father told me that I was not going to go back to university, that that week I would leave the country on a flight to Florida. I remember that my parents were behind glass at the airport, I looked at them and thought that they were going through the same situation again, sending me out again to save my life, ”he says.

And in America, he started a new life again. For the third time.

“I tell my story so it doesn’t happen again”

But he had practically not told anything about what he had experienced in Kovno. For a long time her life story was a real taboo in his family. “I never talked about this and all my friends in Cuba knew that I had come from Europe, that the war had passed, but they didn’t know the details,” she says.

But it wasn’t until her father died suddenly, when she was already living in Charlotte, North Carolina, and someone close to her made a request. “One of the bankers who worked with my father came to offer his condolences and he told me that he had promised his seventh-grade son that he would go to her school to tell his story. He told me that since he was no longer there, I would have to come. And so I did ”, she comments on the first time that she publicly recounted what she experienced in Lithuania.

For several years, she leads The Butterfly Project (Butterfly Project), formed by a team of Holocaust survivors in the United States who give talks in schools across the country to publicize their experience. He is committed to telling his story “as many times as necessary” because he believes that society cannot be ignorant or indifferent to what is happening in the world.

Convinced that “many of the things that happen in the world” are due to the fact that there is often great ignorance on the part of society, she wants to do her bit to remember the victims of the Holocaust and that something like this is not To happen again.

“I always say that in the world there are people who are very bad, but there is also a larger group of people who are indifferent and that is what causes the things that happen to happen,” he says.

January 27 marks the International Day of Remembrance in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. On that same day in 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration and extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.

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