Helen Verblunsky Yermus

Born: Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, 1932
Wartime experience: Ghettos and camps
Writing Partner: Bev Birkan
Helen Verblunsky Yermus was born in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, in 1932. She survived the Kovno ghetto, the Stutthof concentration camp and forced labour in the subcamps of Bromberg-Ost and Elbing.
Helen and her mother were liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945. They lived in Poland and in displaced persons camps in Austria before immigrating to Canada in 1948, where they settled in Montreal. Helen studied at Montreal’s United Jewish Teachers Seminary of Canada and then worked in a factory. She married Aaron Yermus in 1952 and together they raised a family in Toronto. Helen has been a Holocaust educator since 1985, speaking to students through the Toronto Holocaust Museum. In 2019, her story was featured in the documentary Cheating Hitler: Surviving the Holocaust.
We were not allowed to have any books. The Germans had ordered all books to be turned in, and then they burned them. But I was never without a book. I resisted by reading.
The Kovno Ghetto
Each time people were taken away, the ghetto shrank. Families were relocated. People who survived the Big Action took over the houses where those who had been killed had lived, and I eventually met new friends.
My father was still working for the Gestapo. My mother was taken to the military airport in the Aleksotas suburb, where the Germans were enlarging the airport by using Jewish slave labour. My mother was a gutsy woman. She would wear a fatsheyle, a very large kerchief, with a tartan plaid design that covered the yellow stars on the front and back of her clothes. She would take out something of value to hide in it so that she could exchange the item with a non-Jew for food. We were supposed to have turned over all our valuables to the Nazis, and they often searched people to try to find anything that was hidden or smuggled in. But people took chances. After making a trade, my mother had to smuggle the item of food back into the ghetto. Every day, as the labourers returned to the ghetto, the guards did sporadic searches. My mother risked her life on a regular basis. She was lucky. She returned with necessary items. My father would never have done that kind of thing; they were very different that way.

Helen with her father, Yitzhak, and her mother, Toba Leah. Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, 1933.

Helen in the Kovno ghetto. Date unknown.
Stutthof
We had been taken to the concentration camp known as Stutthof. We were kept overnight in the perimeter of the camp. It was huge. It was surrounded by thick electrified barbed wire. There were watchtowers spaced at different points with armed guards looking down on us. Perhaps the electrified fence was not enough to confine us. They needed the guards to watch us to make sure we wouldn’t escape.
There were thousands of people there. Kovno Jews were not the only deportees at this camp. Hungarian Jews had also been deported and “resettled,” and many were with us.
We were taken group by group into a very large hall. The guards were dressed in black SS uniforms. There were tables around the room and we were ordered to undress completely. Then we were examined by guards. Some women were given internal examinations. Group by group, we left our belongings on the floor or wherever we were told to put them. We were then told we were going to the showers.
Losing Hope
In the middle to end of November, our job was finished, and we were taken to a different place called Elbing. We were again assigned to tents, and then informed that they wanted five hundred volunteers to go back to Stutthof. We weren’t forced; it was simply requested that we line up.
I was still without shoes. The ropes on my mother’s shoes were frayed and there was not much left of them. My whole body had broken out into sores, except for my face. Lice constantly crawled all over us. Up until this time, we always felt there was a shred of hope that liberation was near, that we would be able to survive someway, somehow. My mother and I always stayed together.
I couldn’t remember ever feeling the desperation that we were feeling then. In the three years in the ghetto, even during the worst times, there was a glimmer of hope. Even the ghetto archives had been hidden with the hope that they would tell the history of what had happened. And even after my brother was taken from my arms, I still had some hope.