Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Jay Ipson: The Original Survivor

ACT 1

0:25

(from Track 20, Jay Ipson Tracks 2; 0:25-0:50)

(of Hitler telling the German people about the final solution)

NARRATIVE 1

1:00

That was Adolph Hitler. He was talking about a final solution. He mentioned an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers. Crazy talk. Insane. Yet, the German people went along with him. They followed him, executed his orders, systematically rounding up millions of European Jews and exterminating them.
One of the youngest survivors of the Holocaust living in Virginia is Jay Ipson. He wears a large Stetson hat, cowboy boots, a suit coat and tie. His pace is brisk as we walk back to his office.
When the dark tide of Nazism began seeping across Europe, Jay was just a boy. He lived with his parents and infant sister in Kuvna, Lithuania. His father, an attorney, followed world affairs closely and could always predict what would happen next. He kept his ears open to every tidbit of information. Jay’s father was also an inventive man and a quick study. And he knew what he had to do to keep his family safe.

ACT 2

1:59

(from Track 2; 02:07-04:06)

so in 1941 the Germans invaded Lithuania so my parents and I, my father was a brilliant individual always listened to the news, he could see tomorrow before tomorrow came and he realized that being under the Germans was not going to be a good thing for us. I had a little sister at the time so we escaped on a horse and wagon with the Russian soldiers trying to make our way to Russia or deeper in Russia hoping to survive because my father was afraid what was going to happen under the Germans. We had already heard from Polish Jews escaping Poland that the Jews were being severely oppressed. Paratroopers, German paratroopers were dropped in front of us and they cut off our escape. I could see Russian solders going through the corn which was way above their heads it grew very high and when I’m talking about corn, actually it’s wheat, we called it corn, but it’s wheat, not the kind of corn we’re talking about, kernel kind of corn that we eat but it’s wheat and they made their way to the woods and eventually some of those became guerilla units those that weren’t captured and they were called partisans. We in turn turned around because we were told to go back to our community. On the way back for lack of food, I had a little sister she was six months old, we got some spoiled milk, not knowing it was spoiled, gave it to her and consequently she became sick and died.

NARRATIVE 2

When the Ips, as they were then called, made their way back into Kuvna, everything had changed, almost overnight.

ACT 3

1:26

(from Track 2; 4:07-5:00)

Once we got back to our town our neighbors massacred the Jews in our community, They grabbed them off of the street, dragged them out of houses and took them to a spot that was known as LaTookas garage. It was a huge service station there with clubs they beat them to the ground while some of our neighbors who didn’t participate were applauding and chanting the Lithuanian national anthem. There was one guy that was standing on the body of a Jew he had just killed playing the accordion.
Shortly thereafter the Germans came in and said they were going to establish peace between us

(from Track 3; 0:00-0:33)

And our Lithuanian neighbors. And in order to do that all the Jews had to be in one area and they were going to be put in a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire and guards. The Germans said that was for our protection, actually it made it easier for them to get at us.

NARRATIVE 3

0:35

In some ways the Ip family was lucky. Jay’s grandmother owned a three-room house in the area of Kuvna that became the ghetto. Sixteen members of the family ended up living in this modest home built for no more than five. The quarters were cramped, but at least they were together with a roof over their head. There was a wood stove that provided heat, a well and an outhouse in the back yard, a carbide lamp to read by. But they were living in what amounted to an industrial chicken coop. There was no escape. They could not wander into the world at large. And everything was carefully meted out to them.

ACT 4

0:59

(from Track 3, 2:12-3:11)

Our rations inside the ghetto were 948 calories a week. Now that’s a week. The average American consumes 2000 calories a day so you can imagine what we had to do with 948 calories amounts to three ounces of beef that could have come from an animal, four ounces of flour, four ounces of beans, three ounces of salt and 22 slices of bread. If you were a working individual that worked at hard labor you got an additional 22 slices of bread. Now that’s what you had for the week. Also if you were a hard working individual on hard labor you got three quarters of one ounce of lard.

NARRATIVE 4

0:15

Nazis understood that intellectuals were enemies of the Third Reich. They knew that the educated could organize resistance. So one of the first things the Nazis did in the ghetto was separate the chaff from the grain.

ACT 5

1:08

(from Track 3; 3:13-4:21)

Then came an order that everybody that was inside of the ghetto should report to a field known as Democratic field, Democratic square. It didn’t matter if you were young or old, sick or well, by six a.m. in the morning some 27,000 of us came to that feel and we stood in front of a sergeant and he selected who was going to live and who was going to die. What he did is ask what your profession was. If you were a white collar worker no matter what you were, whether you were a rabbi, an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor you and your whole family were sent to his left. All those that are sent to his left, which ended up about 10,500, were executed. Out of that 4,226 children were executed in one night.

NARRATIVE 5

0:10

Jay’s father, who sensed what was happening during this selection process, concocted a story that would save him and his family. It would be the first in a long succession of survival tactics that Jay’s father would use to outsmart the enemy.

ACT 6

1:13

(from Track 3; 4:22-4:57)

When my father stepped in front of Rocka that was the sareant’s name and my father was an attorney and he asked what his profession was, my father lied and said he was a car mechanic he told us to go home. My father represented the whole clan of the Ipp and Boutremouvich family so everybody that was associated with him was allowed to go home. We survived that particular selection.

(from Track 4; 0:36-1:14)

The very next morning after the selection a German came with a rifle knocked on our door and he said he was looking for the car mechanic. You can imagine what ran through our minds. We knew there was not car mechanic there. And either all of us would be killed for lying or my father would. My father spoke seven languages, German fluently. He stepped forward and he said in German, I am the car mechanic. The German told him come with me.

NARRATIVE 6

0:10

Jay’s father was taken to an airfield outside of Kuvna. The Quonset huts there had been converted into automotive repair shops. An officer told Jay’s father to repair his car.

ACT 7

2:50

(from Track 4; 1:48-4:38)

So the German asked him how long would it take. My father said Oh a few days figuring that if he be returned to the ghetto he could ask his friends that were mechanics how to fix it. The German said I don’t have a few days. Fix it now. So he asked the German, in German, tell me what seems to be the problem. The German says, you’re the mechanic, you tell me. When I drive it there’s a banging underneath my seat, I don’t know what the problem is. My father said I’ll tell you what I’m going to lay down on the ground and you drive over top of me, figuring if the German drove over him and squashed him that’s a chance he had to take, otherwise he would shoot him for having lied no questions asked. My father laid down between the wheels and the German drove over him so that he could see underneath the vehicle what the problem was. When he did that my father noticed that a universal joint was hung and that every time it made a revolution it hit under the seat He told the German he saw what the problem was and that he would now fix it for him. The German went away to talk to somebody else and my father didn’t know what kind of tools to ask for so he went to the tool room and told the guys in the shop that he needed an adjustable wrench and a screw driver, figuring that with an adjustable wrench and a screwdriver he could take care of any size bolt that there would be. He then told the parts department what he needed and they gave him an adjustable wrench. He managed with the wrench and his bare hands to take the universal joint apart he took the biggest piece and took it into the parts department. The boys in the parts department saw which joint he needed they gave him the joint but along with that they gave him the proper tools to bolt everything back. After he put everything back he went over to the German and told him I’ve got your vehicle fixed would you like to try it. The German got in the vehicle drove it a couple of blocks came back said it’s perfect you’re the finest mechanic I’ve ever seen you will now be the shop foreman.

NARRATIVE 7

0:10

Back in the ghetto, the Germans performed yet another selection. This time some members of Jay’s family would be taken away and never heard from again.

ACT 8

1:40

(from Track 5; 1:44-3:24)

It was a deportation to Riga, Latvia from Lithuania. My mother was home from work because she was beaten over her head for not working fast enough with a rifle butt, which split open her head and she required stitches so she was home recovering from that. My grandparents were home from shift change when the Germans came to drive us out of our house. It was my mother and I, my grandparents, her parents, her two brothers and a sister. We were all in line to be deported amongst with 5000 other Jews. A Jewish policeman that was a friend of my father’s spotted me, pulled me out of line, told me and my mother to go home and wait for father to come home from his job at the airport. My mother didn’t want to leave her family but I started crying and told her that I wanted to go to my father. I pulled on her and we both left the line and went home. Mother and I are the only two that survived that ordeal. Everybody that was deported that day was executed along with my grandparents, two uncles and an aunt.

NARRATIVE 8

0:30

Jay’s father realized it was essential to get his wife and son out of the ghetto with all deliberate speed. The Nazis were tightening the noose. The Kuvna ghetto had become a concentration camp. At the garage where he continued honing his skills as a mechanic, Jay’s father met a farmer he had done legal work for years before. The farmer told him that he would help the Ips to escape from Kuvna. It was in November of 1943 and Jay’s father, using a pair of wire cutters, went to work on the wall of barbed wire.

ACT 9

1:56

(from Track 6; 1:06-3:02)

My father cut the wires, in the middle of the night while the guard was walking his beat I was told to run across the street and hide and not to utter a word no matter what I saw or what I heard so that later on my parents would find me. I ran across the street and I remember thinking to myself what was I going to say if the person that lived in the house in whose yard I was now hiding came out and spotted me. It seemed like almost forever when my mother came to find me. She couldn’t utter a word and in total darkness had to find me. And the way she found me was running her hands across the ground just like when you drop something you don’t see it you keep feeling for it, till she touched me. We didn’t say a word. And again what seemed like forever before my father found us likewise. My father’s cousin who lived near the spot where we cut the wires, hooked the wires back so that the Germans did not know that we escaped. We walked a few blocks where the farmer was waiting with the wagon full of straw. I was buried under the straw, my mother sat next to the farmer his name was Marchuke, with a scarf over her face so that her city features could not be recognized. My father walked the team. We went that way all the way for forty some kilometers from Kuvna to Tracki.

NARRATIVE 9

0:05

Out in the country the Ips were taken to a farm.

ACT 10

0:43

(from Track 6; 3:07-3:50)

Where a Polish Catholic farmer offered us refuge. We had nothing to give him and he asked for nothing. And he risked his, his wife’s and sixteen year old son’s lives in order to try to save us. In the very beginning we hid in a barn up where the hay was on the second level. During the night my father would go out and try to dig a hiding place in a field in the woods where potatoes were stored.

NARRATIVE 10

0:25

These storage areas were called potato holes and were like inverted silos. Down in the earth potatoes were stored from harvest to planting. Each night, working only with his hands and a piece of wood, Jay’s father descended into a potato hole and began excavating a room that would eventually be nine by twelve by four feet high. It took two months to complete, and one night Jay’s father was almost buried alive in his work.

ACT 11

2:36

(from Track 7; 1:06-3:42)

So he was not a mechanic. He wasn’t an architect or engineer either. He didn’t realize that when you take and excavate under the ground that what’s above you can cave in because you didn’t have any beams or had anything to shore it up with. And sure enough one night as he was digging the whole thing cave in on him. The farmer had a German shepherd by the name of Rexie. Rexie befriended us, not only was he a warning device. When he started barking we had to be extremely careful because it meant some stranger was in the neighborhood, else he wouldn’t bark. He also kept people at a distance. He was a huge German shepherd. Well when daddy used to go out at night Rexie used to accompany him. Rexie was on top as my father was digging underneath and when it caved in he started running in circles and barking. He tried with his paws to dig my father out but it was not something a dog could do. The farmer’s sixteen year old son Stashuke heard Rexie barking, he was coming back from a hoedown, he used to play fiddle at hoedowns and everybody had a good time after working in the fields all day they’d get together have a couple of shots of white lightning which was home made brew and having a good time. He was coming home when he heard Rexie. He came running and when he came running to the spot he saw a hand sticking out of the cave in. He quickly opened up my father’s face so he could breathe. Ran and got his parents and his father and him dug my father out, saving his life. After that whenever Mr Pachoska used to cut down or chop down, you didn’t cut down, chop down wood for the fireplace and for the smokehouse he used to leave pieces for daddy to find so he could take them into the hole and shore up the hiding place.

NARRATIVE 11

0:15

Once the hiding place was finished, Jay’s father dug another tunnel to another potato hole so the family would have an alternate escape route if they were discovered. And then the Ipps moved into their subterranean home where other members of their clan joined them.

ACT 12

1:39

(from Track 8; 0:16-0:46)

We stayed in the hiding place for six months. I came out maybe once or twice. The farmer’s wife liked me so in the middle of the night she came and got me and took me to the house to warm up for a little while and give me an extra treat. Thirteen of us lived there, five women, four men and four boys of which I was the oldest by one day.

(from Track 8; 0:59-1:14)

We survived on potatoes, black bread, which is bread that farmers bake themselves out of local wheat and sauerkraut almost every farmer. That was staples.

(from Track 8; 2:30-3:26)

As far as lights, we had absolutely no lights in the hiding place. The air supply was a two inch pipe that was driven up beside a plant so that it would cover it, and there was not enough oxygen. If you lit a match which was necessary in order to keep a candle or something going, it would go out for lack of oxygen so we had absolutely no lights in there whatsoever. The bathroom was a bucket that we used to use at the bottom of the potato hole and when my father and my mother’s uncle used to go out to try to beg for food they would take the bucket along with them far into the woods so the human waste could not be traced back to us.

NARRATIVE 12

Six months is a long time to live in such close quarters. His family would hearken back to better times, and Jay taught himself, in an unconventional manner, how to count.

ACT 13

1:24

(from Track 8; 3:48-5:00)

Everybody’s nerves were raw there were arguments but everybody knew that if you argued too loud it would mean your death. The boys we used to go from one tunnel to another just continuously crawled back and forth, back and forth, but as far as entertainment or to talk everybody talked about food and the good times that they had prior to us being put in the concentration camp or ghetto. You talked about old times and what was the first thing you going to do if you ever survived. And of course that was what kind of meal you would get, or what you would eat that you hadn’t seen or eaten for so long. In my particular case, I used to crawl into the potato hole and pull off my outer shirt and kill lice. I was covered with them and boy they itch. Every time they take a bite out of you it just itches

(from Track 9; 0:00-0:19)

Like all get out. And of course you have bloody spots and they used to get right fat on my blood. So I used to pull them off my shirt and with my thumbs and my nails I would pop them. And that’s how I learned how to count. The idea was everyday to get more than the day before.

NARRATIVE 13

(0:07)

And then on a warm summer day, like the larva of cicadas, the Ipps emerged from the ground ready to start living again in a sunlit world.

ACT 14
0:15
(from Track 9; 0:20-0:35)
For six months I didn’t have a change of clothes or a bath. We were liberated in August of ’44. And on liberation the first thing we did is was have a sauna.

NARRATIVE 14
0:18
They washed away six months of grime. Things looked bright. At least at first. But the liberators were Russians, and they imposed their own brand of totalitarianism on Lithuania. Soon enough the Ips were on the run again. This time it was Joe Stalin snapping at their heels.

OUTRO
0:55
This is your host and producer Charles McGuigan and I want to thank you for listening. And a special thanks to song writer and guitarist Charles Arthur who provided the music. And my sound engineer Brad Kutner. A Grain Of Sand is produced in the studios of WRIR, Richmond’s independent radio.
I hope y’all’ll join me next time for the second part of Jay Ipson story, Tale of a Survivor. Until then, remember, you can always find the universe in a grain of sand, heaven in a wildflower. All you need to do is listen. Smell, taste, touch and see. It’s all there for us. Every waking moment of every waking day. Even in our dreams. Take care.

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