One of 1.5 million Painting in memorial

Portrait of Rivka Rachmiel, aged five, wearing a large white bow on her head in the style of the 1940s. Just over a year later, Rivka was deported to Auschwitz on 5 November 1943; one of the 1.5 million children murdered in the Holocaust. Born on 3 May 1937 in Lithuania, Rivka was beloved by her mother Bertha and father Hirsh Rachmiel, and all of their large extended family.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, many Lithuanians collaborated with the Germans in the hope of renewed independence. Local Lithuanian partisans turned on their Jewish neighbours and began a campaign of terror and murder. Boys and young men were seized by a band of local Lithuanians and SS, taken to a forest nearby and executed. Among those murdered was Hirsh Rachmiel. The women and children were loaded onto carts and taken to the ghetto in Žageré. Bertha procured papers that enabled her and her daughter to leave the ghetto for Siauliai, in northern Lithuania, escaping the liquidation of the Žageré ghetto. Bertha worked long hours for meagre rations. She recalled “The little time I had left over to be with my Rivkele was spent hugging each other in silence, as there was nothing cheerful to talk about.”

On 5 November 1943, Bertha returned from work to find that her daughter had been amongst the children seized by the SS, rounded up and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. "At first my whole body was as though paralysed. So was my mind; it did not want to face up to reality. Then… not caring about anything that might happen to me, I started running - faster than ever before in my life - till I found the commanding officer. I shouted defiantly: 'You took away my daughter! Now take me to her, wherever she is!' Unperturbed, he looked at me with disdain. 'No! You are young and strong - we need you to work.' With this sentence, I was condemned to life. It was a cruel sentence, having to be the sole survivor of a once large and flourishing family.”

Painting of Rivka Rachmiel from a photograph, comissioned by her mother Bertha in memorial.