“On Grandmother’s Trail – From the Ghetto to the White House” reads the headline from Lrytas, one of Lithuania’s largest news organizations. It is referring to Ada Gens-Ustjanauskas’ odyssey from Lithuania’s Vilna Ghetto to President George H. W. Bush’s Oval Office nearly fifty years later, and her grandson’s journey to retrace and document Ada’s remarkable path. Ada Gens was born in Smalininkai, Lithuania in 1926 to her parents Jacob and Elvyra Gens. The family spent the next thirteen years living in the city of Kaunas until the Soviets invaded their homeland in 1940, forcing them to move to Vilnius to avoid deportation to Siberia. Shortly after the Gens family arrived in Vilnius, the Nazis took control of Lithuania and immediately began their destruction of the Jewish people. Ada’s Jewish father Jacob was confined to the Vilna Ghetto with his side of the family, where he was appointed leader of the ghetto. Ada and her Roman Catholic mother Elvyra lived just outside of the ghetto under Elvyra’s maiden name, hoping that the Nazis would not find out their true identities since Ada was half Jewish, and would have been sent to the ghetto. Due to Jacob’s administrative position, Ada and her mother were allowed to spend time in the ghetto with their Jewish family and friends, a privilege only given to a select few. Although it was dangerous for them to travel in and out of the Vilna Ghetto, the pair were not dissuaded by the fear of Nazi reprisal. In fact, Ada and her mother acted boldly in taking further risks to protect Lithuania’s Jews, in some cases even hiding them in their own apartment in the gentile section of town. After two years of living under these conditions, Jacob Gens was executed by the Gestapo, which had then learned of Ada and Elvyra’s whereabouts and were now searching for them. This forced sixteen year old Ada and her mother into hiding until the end of the war.

To access Ada’s interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum please click here.

As Ada’s grandson I have had the pleasure of living with her for half of my life. I have spent countless hours listening to the stories of her childhood, surviving the Holocaust, escaping Soviet deportations throughout multiple invasions, as well as her time in the United States working with the U.S. Government to bring freedom back to her homeland of Lithuania. It was not until recently that I decided to document Ada’s journey, with the hope of adding my grandmother’s experiences to Lithuania’s Holocaust history, and to inspire newer generations to appreciate and protect democracy as much as those who survived the Holocaust. Between this past October and April I spent nearly four months in Lithuania conducting research for our Gens Family Project, traveling the entire country and visiting every archive in search of documents and clues. In each city I met with historians, researchers, reporters, as well as acquaintances of my grandmother from her decades of government work, where we exchanged our findings and stories regarding the Gens family. Other than a handful of interviews my grandmother gave over the years her experiences have remained largely untold, and although these events took place many decades ago, their historical significance still rings true today. For these reasons along with several fortunate coincidences, five articles were published on the Gens family during my recent trip to Lithuania, with at least one being published from each city that holds historical significance to us. Links to the articles can be found in the map below in the city each was published in, as well as the link to a recent article from Connecticut (located in the northwestern section of the map.)