Satchel carried by partisans in Lithuania

Sara Ginaite was born on March 17, 1924, to Yosef Ginas and Rebecca Virovitch Giniene in Kovno (Kaunas) Lithuania. Her father was a representative for a foreign manufacturer. Sara had an older sister, Alice, who was married before the war began in September 1939. Sara attended a Jewish, Lithuanian-speaking high school and was about to graduate when Germany occupied Lithuania in June 1941. During the early weeks of the invasion, Lithuanian partisans launched a violent pogrom in Kaunas. Three of Sara's uncles, Isaac, Salomon and Abrasha Viravicius, were murdered by their janitor. Their mother, Sara's grandmother, Malke Viraviciene, died upon hearing the news. Later that summer, Sara and her family were forced into the newly established ghetto. She met Misha Rubinsonas, who had attended the Yiddish-speaking Shalom Aleichem school in Kovno. The two were married in a civil ceremony in the ghetto on November 7, 1943. Misha was an active member of the ghetto underground. He headed the youth branch of the Anti-Fascist Organization (AFO) and was secretary of the Young Communist League. He and his sister Sonia were instrumental in securing a cache of arms for the underground from a storage shed near a German field hospital. Sonia secretly copied the key that had been left in the door of the shed, and the ghetto underground staged a raid and brought the arms to a nearby cemetery. From there, they were transferred by truck to a safe-house in the city. Misha and Sara were among the first group of seventeen underground members who escaped the ghetto on December 14-15, 1943, for the Rudniki Forest and became partisans. On January 7, 1944, Sara was sent back to the ghetto with four others to escort a new group of resistance fighters to the forest. She reentered the ghetto by pretending to be a nurse and claiming that she needed to escort four sick workers to the ghetto hospital. She got the group out, and on February 8, Sara returned to escort another group to the forest. The partisan unit they established, called Death to the Occupiers, operated in the vicinity of Vilna and assisted in the liberation of the city in July 1944. Sara and Misha settled in Vilna after the liberation. Sara's father Yosef died of natural causes in the ghetto. Her mother was deported to Stutthof concentration camp, where she became ill and died. Sara's sister Alice was liberated from Stutthof and her husband, from Dachau.

The satchel was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1996 by Sara Ginaite-Rubinson.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Sara Ginaitė-Rubinsonienė