Rebbetzin Wolpe’s parents had first lived in Memel, a prosperous port city in Lithuania, after their marriage. Reb Leib established a successful leather goods business there. He was a cousin of the Alter of Kelm who had studied in Slabodka alongside Rav Aharon Kotler ztz”l, and he was known as a talmid chacham in his own right, as well as a prominent, well-connected baal chesed and baal tzedakah. The Friedmans hosted many gedolim of the era who were on fundraising trips for their yeshivos, including Rav Elchonon, as well as numerous people who came to seek medical treatment in nearby Koenigsberg. Sarah Yehudis was very involved in girls’ chinuch and in strengthening the mitzvah of taharas hamishpachah at a time when secularization and even assimilation among Lithuanian Jewry was rife.

In 1939, Lithuania handed the Memel region over to Germany. An astute Reb Leib realized that they were in grave danger in Memel. The family escaped in the middle of the night to the city of Kovno, where they rented an apartment above Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinsky ztz”l. There, they continued to run their emporium of chesed, again hosting Rav Elchonon Wasserman (who became stuck there, sleeping and learning in the vestibule, after his home and yeshivah in Baranovich came under Soviet rule and he was in danger of arrest if he returned) and assisting the many Jewish refugees who flooded Kovno from German-occupied areas of Lithuania. Many a meeting of the gedolei Yisrael of Kovno took place around their dining room table as the rabbanim debated the complex inyanei d’yoma of such a terrible time.

In the early summer of 1941, Sarah Yehudis took four-year-old Shulamis along with her to the city of Telz in an attempt to assist a bochur who’d been conscripted to the Soviet army. While she was there, the Soviets invaded Lithuania but gave the Lithuanians jurisdiction over the Jewish population. Immediately, they took orders from Germany and began ghettoizing and massacring the Jews of Lithuania.

During the months they spent in the Telz ghetto, Sarah Yehudis and Shulamis endured terrible experiences. The men of Telz were rounded up and herded into a horses’ stable, which the Lithuanian peasants lit on fire. Afterward, when all was quiet, Rebbetzin Wolpe remembers her mother, Sarah Yehudis, reciting Kaddish for those who had perished inside.

The next aktion rounded up the mothers and children. There, the mothers, their children in their arms, were made to stand over ditches and then shot. Somehow, the bullets missed Sarah Yehudis, and in the dead of the night, she and Shulamis crawled out of the ditch and made it back to the ghetto.

Along the way, they watched from the top of a slope as a military vehicle stopped next to a Jewish man walking along. A soldier stepped out and beat him before shooting him dead. When the soldier left, Sarah Yehudis picked up Shulamis and ran toward the body. “Look at him,” she commanded her daughter. Shulamis was terrified to do so, but her mother was firm. “Whatever happens,” she told her daughter, “Make sure you end up like this Yid, beaten, and not like that goy, someone who beats others.” Then she buried him on the spot, digging a grave with her bare hands.

“Now, more than eighty years later, I still see that man’s dead body in my dreams,” says Rebbetzin Wolpe, adjusting the blanket spread across her lap. “It’s something I can’t forget.”

Somehow, Sarah Yehudis and Shulamis managed to get from Telz back to Kovno. Their home was empty, save for young Rochel — Reb Leib and Rav Elchonon had already been killed al kiddush Hashem. Only a handful of Jewish women remained in the Kovno ghetto.

Life in the ghetto was a fight for survival. It was a harsh winter and there was little food and no way to keep warm. They hid in their old apartment along with a few other women. One morning, they awoke to find two of the women with them had frozen to death. Frightened for little Shulamis, who was blue with cold, Sarah Yehudis cut a slit in her forearm and told her daughter to suck on her blood to give her warmth and nourishment.

Sarah Yehudis knew that her children’s only hope was to go into hiding with non-Jews. There was a priest she knew of, Father Pranas Venckus, who agreed to find a place for the girls. Sarah Yehudis gathered little Shulamis in her arms, told her that she’d no longer be called Shulamis, but Maria, and that she should never forget that she was a Jew. “I know that whatever happens, you’ll have a good life,” she promised her. “Remember, there is always hope. If the door closes, there’s always a window. If there’s no window, maybe there’s a hole in the wall.” Then she sent her off with her sister Rochel to the priest’s parish.

“My mother was a very strong woman,” Rebbetzin Wolpe explains. “I got my strength to survive from her.” Sarah Yehudis was so impressively strong that the Chofetz Chaim had advised Rav Leib not to send his daughter Rishel away to high school in Telz, but to keep her home, as there was so much to learn from Sarah Yehudis.

The priest separated the two sisters, sending Rochel to hide elsewhere, and placed little Shulamis in a room on the upper floors of the church. He instructed her to remain on the floor in case her silhouette would be seen from the windows or along the walls. Father Venckus would put food and drink into her room once a day. Otherwise, she was alone. “I would talk to Hashem night and day, and make up imaginary conversations with my mother, and my sister, so that I wouldn’t feel alone,” Rebbetzin Wolpe says.

But there were some suspicions that Father Venckus was hiding a Jewish child inside his church, and he was forced to find her another place. He brought her to a peasant who lived nearby and hid her in his barn, alongside a goat. But he neglected to bring her food, and so to keep herself from starvation, Shulamis drank milk from the goat and ate its dung. “I used to tell myself I was eating chocolate milk,” recalls Rebbetzin Wolpe.

When she could no longer bring herself to eat dung, she escaped the barn and went back to Father Venckus’s church. “I told him I was starving, that I wouldn’t survive much longer. I cried, I screamed. After all, I was a little girl, all alone in the world and so frightened,” she says. “And he found me another place, with another goy. This man was a rasha. He looked at me with such hatred and told me it was the Jews who killed Yeshu. Whenever he was in a bad mood, he’d beat me. I had black-and-blue marks all over my body.”

Shulamis escaped his clutches and ran into the forest, where she came across a Yid. When he realized she was a Jewish child, he showed her which shrubs and plants in the forest were safe to eat and which were poisonous. She survived on this as she made her way through the forest back to the priest.

He wasn’t pleased to see her. “Look!” She showed him the bruises all over her back. “Look what he did to me!”

Sighing, he took her to a local hospital, where a number of the doctors and nurses were Jews disguised as Christians, and they looked after her until word came that the Nazis were going to raid the hospital, looking for Jews. The priest sneaked her out and tied her to a tree in the forest nearby to keep her from running anywhere, and from there, Shulamis watched as Nazi soldiers marched a line of Jewish medical personnel out. She heard them scream a final “Shema Yisrael.”

From there, the priest took her to a convent. Ever the teacher, Rebbetzin Wolpe asks me, “You know what a minzar, a convent is, right?” and I nod.

The nuns there became infuriated when she refused to attend a church service and declared she was making a mockery of the savior. They threatened to hand her over to the Gestapo the next morning, locking her in a room in the upper floors of the convent.

“I talked to Hashem constantly throughout the war,” says Rebbetzin Wolpe softly. “I begged Him, ‘If You love me, please save me. Please, show me that You love me, and save me.’ That night, I said that over and over again. Then I remembered my mother’s words, that there’s always a way out. I tried the door, but it was locked. I tapped the walls to see if there were any holes, just like she’d said. And when the sun rose, I saw there was a small window high up on the wall. I pulled myself up toward it and saw a pipe along the wall. I slid down the pipe and ran back to the priest.

“This time, he put me in an orphanage. There was another Jewish girl there, Adina Sher, who later married Rav Dov Landa shlita, rosh yeshivah of the Slabodka yeshivah. I remembered her from Kovno. We didn’t talk to one another — we were both terrified little girls who didn’t really understand what was happening — and we stayed there until the end of the war.

“Adina’s uncle in Eretz Yisrael, Rav Yitzchak Eizek Sher ztz”l, who rebuilt Slabodka in Bnei Brak, had heard Adina was alive and hiding in this orphanage and sent representatives to get her. When they came to take her, they saw me watching her with big eyes and understood I was Jewish, and they took me out, too.

“They didn’t yet have papers to bring Adina to Eretz Yisrael, so they put the two of us in an apartment in Kovno. It was full of clothes that had been sent from Jews in America for refugees. We sold these clothes to provide us with money for food, and that’s how we were able to survive, two little girls basically on their own, while the representatives tried to organize papers for us. We were filthy, full of lice, and every time we pulled a louse out of our hair, we told ourselves it was a German soldier as we’d kill it.

“It was very hard to get into Eretz Yisrael at the time. The British had put strict limits on the number of Jews allowed in, and most Jews came illegally. Eventually, they were able to get papers for Adina because she had family in Eretz Yisrael who would sponsor her. Rav Sher’s representatives took us to France, to the pier from where we’d take a boat to Palestine, but they weren’t able to sneak me onto the boat, so they had to leave me there, screaming and crying in panic as I watched the boat pull away.

“A woman who worked there took pity on me, a little refugee girl all alone. She allowed me to sleep in the offices there as long as I was gone by morning, and gave me ration cards for the kosher restaurant there. And that’s how I’d spend my time, walking up and down the pier in the hopes that someone would be able to help me and get me onto a boat to Eretz Yisrael, eating in the restaurant and sleeping in the offices at night. I was all alone and would often cry and weep like the little girl I was.

“One day, I noticed a couple with a daughter about my age. They looked wealthy — the woman had lots of rings on her fingers and necklaces around her neck. I approached them, told them my story, and begged them to help me. The father promised me he’d do whatever he could to get me papers to come to Eretz Yisrael with them. But the day of their departure arrived and the father told me he hadn’t been able to get me a permit. As they walked away from me toward the boat, I started weeping hysterically. Their little daughter turned around and came back, taking my hand and schlepping me along with them. Her parents weren’t happy. When we got to their cabin on the ship, the father said, ‘Now what? How are we going to stay undetected when they inspect the boat before departure?’

“I was all of seven or eight years old, but I shouted at him, ‘Liar. You’re a liar. You promised you’d help me and you didn’t keep your promise. What’s more important to you? Your things or a Jewish child? If it’s a Jewish child, then hide me in your suitcase.’ The mother emptied one of her suitcases, throwing her silk dresses and scarves into the sea, and they put me inside the suitcase, and that’s how I traveled for the two-week journey — inside a suitcase they poked air holes into. It was terrible.”

When they arrived in Haifa, the British searched the ship for stowaways and illegals and were horrified when they found Shulamis. “I was terrified they’d send me back to Europe, and I cried and cried, but I wouldn’t tell them who’d smuggled me in,” says Rebbetzin Wolpe. The British decided not to send her back, but incarcerated her in Atlit.

“You know what Atlit is, right?” Rebbetzin Wolpe asks me, and again I nod and respond, “A transit camp for illegal immigrants.”

The authorities contacted Hatzalah representatives in Yerushalayim to find someone who would take responsibility for Shulamis. There was even an article about her in a local newspaper, the eight-year-old girl who arrived alone and whose cries distressed everyone who heard them. The Rav of Pardes Chana heard about her and said he’d sponsor her, so the British released her from Atlit.

Eventually, the daughter of Rav Yitzchak Eizek Sher and wife of Slabodka Rosh Yeshivah Rav Mordechai Shulman, Rebbetzin Rochel Shulman, who’d been friends with Rebbetzin Wolpe’s mother back in Kovno, took her in. “I went to school in Eretz Yisrael, but I didn’t learn much,” says Rebbetzin Wolpe. “Life had already taught me what I needed to know.”

But her lack of learning didn’t stop Rebbetzin Wolpe from becoming a beloved teacher and then principal. “I used to sit next to the girls on the bench in the yard and talk to them as if I was their friend,” says Rebbetzin Wolpe. “That’s how I built them. I wanted them to be proud of who they are. To walk around like this”—she lifts her kerchiefed head upward—“and not like this”—she hunches her small frame. “I just had some former students visit me on Shabbos, and they told me they remembered how I used to sit with them.” Her face is somber, eyebrows penciled into an elegant arch and a rosy-brown lipstick on her lips, but now she breaks into a gentle smile. She radiates a warmth and serenity that suffuses her whole apartment. It feels as if there’s a touch of the Shechinah here.

Rebbetzin Wolpe’s husband, Rav Yaakov Yehoshua Wolpe ztz”l, was from a choshuve Yerushalmi family and was a close talmid of the Chazon Ish who went on to become the rosh yeshivah and rosh kollel of Yeshivas Ashkelon. Rav Wolpe passed away last year b’seivah tovah, at 98 years old, after several years of being in a coma.

“I wouldn’t go as far as to say I had a happy life,” Rebbetzin Wolpe says. “I’m still haunted by everything I saw and experienced at such a young age, but I definitely had a good life, like my mother promised I would. My daughters are all mechanchos and I have much nachas from my five children and numerous grandchildren, bli ayin hara.

“My early life was very, very hard. But I had no choice but to push through, learn to rely on myself, and continue on. It still isn’t easy. But I talk to Hashem all the time. That’s the way to find strength to continue on no matter what happens to you. I did it during the war, and I still do it today. I talk to Him, thanking Him for every little thing He does for me. In the morning, I thank Him that I woke up, for a new day. I ask to feel His love, like I asked Him when I was a little girl, terrified and alone in hiding.”

“The wars here in Israel haven’t been easy for me, especially the past two years. I see how the world hates us now, remember how much the goyim in Europe hated us. I saw it in their eyes, in their faces, in the way that goy beat me black and blue, and I know it makes no sense — it’s entirely from Hashem. And He looks after us through it all.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 974)