Last voices of the Holocaust: ‘I felt heard’

Melbourne Holocaust Museum’s Untold Stories project aims to capture the testimonials of Australia’s remaining survivors. Survivor ROZA RIAIKKENEN explains why she was finally able to tell her story.

With the number of Holocaust survivors declining every year, Melbourne’s Holocaust Museum (MHM) is calling on the public for assistance in its effort to reach Australian survivors who have not yet recorded their testimony.

Born in Kaunas in 1938, Roza Riaikkenen (nee Lamdanskaya) was a toddler when World War II broke out. Her father, having been seconded to Russia for work, became stranded, so it was her well-educated mother, Sara Lamdanskaya, who bravely took whatever steps were needed to ensure her daughter survived.

When German soldiers took the Jewish families with elderly and children from the Kaunas ghetto to be shot, Sara, who could speak German, said something she could not later recall to an SS officer. This allowed her to slip away unharmed with her mother-in-law and Roza.

Later, confined to the poverty-stricken ghetto, Sara was forced to do shift-work in the town. Food was scarce, but in return for the kindness Roza’s grandparents once showed her, a Lithuanian former nanny risked her life to secretly travel the significant distance on foot to bring Sara whatever food she had spare. When the Germans tried again to round up and kill all the remaining children and elderly in the ghetto, a horror dubbed the Children’s Action, the men were prepared and hid them. Roza remembers the petrifying fear of being found by the soldiers.  

Eventually, the danger became too great for Sara to bear, so she smuggled Roza out of the ghetto to live with a Lithuanian couple a friend had found for them. Roza remembers her shawl getting tangled in the barbed wire in the cold dead of night as they escaped the ghetto. But she was eventually hidden in the haven of her foster parents’ home. Just a month later, Roza’s mother was placed on a train bound for Stutthof, a concentration camp on the border of Poland and Germany.