George Shershnevsky (M / Lithuania, 1941), Holocaust survivor

George Shershnevsky (M / Lithuania, 1941), Holocaust survivor

• KEYWORDS : <Hidden Children, Lithuania>

Biography

Gregory "George" Shershnevsky was born in April 1941 in Vilna, Poland. He was smuggled out of the Vilna Ghetto to live with a Christian woman. After the war he was reunited with his father.

USHMM Oral History Collection

Gregory Shershnevsky, born in April 1941 in Vilna, Poland (Vilnius, Lithuania), discusses the German Army entering Vilna on June 22, 1941 and all Jews immediately being moved to a ghetto in downtown Vilna; his parents’ attempts to escape the Germans but being captured in White Russia (eastern Belarus) and forced to return to Vilna; his family being moved to a second ghetto; his parents receiving work permits, which allowed them to earn some money outside the ghetto under German supervision; his parents going into hiding and finding a Christian, Polish woman who was willing to take him in November 1941; his parents hiding him in a garbage can to smuggle him out of the ghetto; the Polish woman taking him to city hall, claiming to have found him, and adopting him; his Polish name, Stanislao, by which he is still called by some of his friends; his fake birth certificate; his adopted mother, who took in 14 other Jewish and non-Jewish children and was a nurse; his memories of living in the basement of a building that was used as a German hospital; his adopted mother rescuing a wounded Russian general and later receiving a small pension from the Russian Government; his caretaker moving to live with some distant relatives in Poland and seeing her for the last time in 1967; his parents joining the resistance movement during the war and his mother’s death; the liberation of Vilna and his father picking him up from the woman who had saved him; his father remarrying a few years later and the birth of his half-brother in 1949; his uncle writing a book about his experiences; and the importance of not forgetting the atrocities of the Holocaust.