RESCUED
friday, june 24, 2022
Holocaust survivor, Suly Chenkin was born in Kovno, Lithuania. Her story began and ended with a prophecy uttered by her grandmother when she was a child, “born on the first day of the Jewish New Year, will be lucky her entire life.”
Six months later the Nazis invaded Lithuania, and the word “luck” disappeared for all Jewish people living in the country and all others throughout Europe. As a ten month old, Suly’s family, together with about 40,000 other Jews were interned in the Kovno Ghetto. Miraculously, she survived famine, disease and the Kinder Aktzie, when the Nazis went house by house and took any child under the age of 12 and the elderly, sick and the handicapped. Suly can remember hiding in the bunker, her mother’s hand pressed against Suly’s mouth as they came into their house. The Nazis and their dogs did not find our hiding place.
On May 11, 1944, at the age of 3-1/2, Suly was given a sleeping potion, put into a potato sack, and as prearranged, was thrown over a barbed wire fence to a woman, Miriam Shulman and a young Christian girl waiting on the other side. A few weeks later the Kovno Ghetto was burned to the ground and fewer than 6000 inmates were put into boxcars headed to the concentration camps: the men to Dachau in Germany and the women to Shuthoff in Prussia.
Following the war, Suly remembers the terrible trek thru Europe with no food, documents or money. They finally arrived in Romania and on her fifth birthday, as they boarded a ship for Israel. She then understood why she was an orphan and began calling Miriam “Ima”. Six months later, she was told that her parents had survived and on her sixth birthday, she was reunited with her mother in Israel, and six months later, they travelled to Cuba, and she was reunited with her Dad. After three long years, they were together. But 27 of our family had perished and out of Kovno’s 40,000 Jews, only 2000 survived.
Suly grew up in Havana, but shortly after graduating High School, Fidel Castro took over the country and they left for Miami. In 1961, her parents moved to Charlotte, NC. Suly went on to New York City. Now living in Charlotte, N.C. Chenkin speaks widely to school and community groups about the Holocaust and her experience.