UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH
Laurel Corona, Author

-Laurel Corona

--Publishers Weekly

Zenia Lewinson was born in Vilna in 1922, when the city was still part of Poland (it is now Vilnius, Lithuania).

Her father died when she was a young girl, and her mother, Rose, married again, this time to Hillel Botwinik, whom Zenia always referred to as her father. Zenia had one younger brother, Michael, and many cousins all over Vilna.

The family lived in a building owned by Rose’s mother, Bluma Balcwinik. Bluma operated a hay and grain business on the ground floor and lived in an apartment on one of the upper floors.

Rose’s family and her sister Lizzie Skolnicki’s family lived in their own separate quarters in the same building. Another sister, Sonia Bulkin, lived elsewhere in Vilna.

Hillel Botwinik was a successful merchant as well. He owned a lumber business but also helped run an office supply store owned and operated by Rose on the ground floor of another building owned by her family. He also owned a dacha, “The Boulders” outside Vilna, where the family spent summers.

Business successes over generations provided the Lewinson-Botwinik family with the affluence and social standing to send Zenia to the prestigious Epstein-Szpeizer Gymnasium for high school, from which she was due to graduate shortly after the Nazi invasion.

The German occupation changed everything for the Lewinson-Botwinik family, as it did for all the Jews of Vilna. They lived in their home for a few more months, but they were forced to close their businesses. Like Jews everywhere under the Nazis, they had to follow onerous restrictions on their daily behavior.

Hillel Botwinik was soon dead, murdered by the Nazis even before the ghetto was created, while working as part of a forced labor detail.

In July 1941, the Lewinson-Botwinik family was marched to the ghetto, along with every remaining Jew in Vilna. Their homes and other properties as well as their businesses were lost forever. Few would escape with their lives.

After the war, like many other survivors, Zenia found herself, as she put it in a postcard to an uncle in the United States, “left one from the whole family.”

Leizer Bart was born in Hrubieshov, Poland in 1915, to Israel David Bart and Ida Bayla Gal-Bart. They had two other children, a son Michael, and a daughter Munia, who was nicknamed Mindy.

Leizer was the only one of his family to survive the war.

He was involved as a teenager in the Zionist youth movement, and spent time at a hakhsharah, or training camp, in Czestochowa, Poland, readying himself for the rigors of immigrating to Palestine.

In 1939 he fled to Vilna, ahead of the Nazi invasion. His plan was to secure visas to get his family safely out of Poland, but when he was able to get only one visa, he would not use it to save himself alone.

Leizer was a member of Ha-Shomer ha-Tzair, a leftist Zionist youth group, so when he arrived in Vilna he quickly became acquainted with the group’s local leader, Abba Kovner. In the ghetto, this friendship became deeper, and Leizer became part of the underground movement Kovner started. When the ghetto was liquidated, Leizer and Zenia, who had by now married, escaped to be part of Kovner’s partisan group in the forests outside Vilna.

When the war ended, Leizer and Zenia found themselves in a Displaced Persons Camp in Rome, on the site where the film studio Cinecitta, established by Federico Fellini now stands.

They came to the United States in 1948, settling first in Springfield, Massachusetts, and eventually in San Diego California.