Ella Lidsky

In Her Own Words

I grew up in Vilna, the “Jerusalem of Lithuania”. My family lived in Radoszkowice, a little shtetl on the border of Poland and the Soviet Union. Now it is part of Belarus. My two brothers and five sisters were born there. My parents bought real estate in Vilno and moved there. We spoke Yiddish at home. My father was an ordained rabbi, my mother was a businesswoman. In the summer we would go to Volokumpia on the Vilija river or Pospieszki. I went to gymnasium “Os’wiata”. My husband Alex graduated from gymnasium Epszteina in 1938. In 1939 I went to Grodno where I finished high school. On  June 21st 1941, when the Germans started the war with the Soviet Union I was in Lviv – Lvov, Ukraina, where I studied at the Pedagogical Institute. I tried to get home to Vilna but the Germans already were there. The last time I saw my family in Vilna was during my winter vacation end of December 1940, beginning of January 1941. I ended up in the Soviet Union. In 1945 I graduated from Odessa Pedagogical Institute in Bajram-Ali, Turkmenistan, to where the Institute was evacuated.

In 1946 I came back to Poland. I was teaching Russian language and literature in high school in Wroclav. Then it was discovered that I had tuberculosis. I stayed one year in a Sanatorium in Zakopane near the mountains and there I recuperated. But I was not allowed to teach young children any more because of my health history. I worked in an office in Warsaw. In 1957 I immigrated to Israel. I had a brother there who emigrated to Palestine when I was a little girl. I went to teachers’ seminary in Beer-sheva for a year and I was teaching second grade Israeli born children.

1n 1962 my cousin Philip Hochstein a famous journalist who lived in New York City was invited by Ben-Gurion to Israel and he found me there. He invited me to his daughter’s wedding in New York. Somebody told me that Dr. Lidsky lives in New York. I remember the name Lidsky. They were two doctors renting an apartment in my parents’ house in Vilna. I called Dr Betsy Lidsky. She invited me for dinner and there I met her son, Alexander Lidsky. He and his mother survived, but his father Dr Abraham David Lidsky and his identical twin brother Tolka were killed by the Nazis. Alex remembered my parents, my sisters and brother. We got married in seven weeks after we met.

In New York City I learned English. I got my first master degree from Columbia University School of Library Science in 1965 and my second one in education at the Teachers College at Columbia University in 1973. My son was born in 1964 when I was a student. My son was 7 months old when I started to work as a librarian for Columbia University.

I left Columbia University when we bought our house in Teaneck, New Jersey. I worked two years for Ramapo College in Mahwah, NJ. In 1973 we moved to Madison, NJ where  I started to work for Fairleigh Dickinson University as an assistant director for technical services in the library.

My son David graduated from high school in Madison. In 1985 I started to work for US Court of International Trade in NYC as a law librarian. I retired in 2000.

My husband Alexander worked for AT&T for 30 years in Newark, NJ. He was an electrical engineer. From 1985 he worked for IRS in Manhattan, NYC until he died 1996.

My son David Lidsky has a PhD in physics. He did his post doctoral in Tokyo, Japan. He was there for 2 years and I visited him in Tokyo. He lives now in Virginia and works for the Navy.

I visited Vilna many times. I was invited to Vilna in August 2009 for the Litvak Conference. I stayed there for 4 weeks. It was a festival of Jewish culture. I went to Ponary, the suburbs of Vilna, where 60,000 Jews were killed, among them my mother, my 5 sisters, my sisters 2 children and my husband’s brother. My father and my brother were killed in Radoszkowice in March 11, 1942.

From Vilna I went for 8 days to Warsaw where there was another festival of Jewish culture.

When I was 12 years old I already knew 5 languages: Yiddish, Polish, Latin, German and Esperanto. Since then I learned 5 more: White Russian, Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew and English.