Open Writing

I was brought up in Kaunas, Lithuania, having spent seven days at the Riga hospital where I saw the light of day on the 12th July, 1924. Lithuania was my fatherland, literally, as my mother was born and raised in St Petersburg. She had fled from the Bolsheviks during the Russian revolution and my father imported her into Lithuania from Berlin after a whirlwind romance.

Both my parents were non-observing Jews, though unlike my mother, my father was born into a traditional Jewish family. At the age of 14 he managed to escape a Yeshiva education to study economics in Belgium and fought in the French army during World War I.

When Lithuania got her independence my father gave up a prestigious job in France, opting to return home. In Kaunas he earned a law degree in addition to the Belgian economics one and was sent to serve as a commercial counselor in the Berlin Embassy. My father's career in the Lithuanian Foreign Office was cut short, though, by his refusal to convert to Catholicism. He then ran the main agency of Lithuania's State Lottery, whilst remaining very much involved with his country's socio-political life. My mother, on the other hand, felt distinctly uncomfortable in this 'backwater', resented Lithuania's stifling provincialism and lack of cultural development. She dreamt of moving to Paris.

As for me, I was sent to a Lithuanian state girls' High School with Jewish girls few and far between. I was fully aware that I was Jewish, but without much knowledge of language, tradition or ritual, Jewishness held little emotional content. My parents encouraged me to go to school on Jewish holidays, none of us ever set foot in a synagogue and having to stay behind after lessons for Jewish religious instruction did not add much to my flimsy Jewish base; nor did occasional visits to my paternal grandparents' traditional Jewish home influence my attitudes.

But whenever I lapsed into thinking of myself as Lithuanian, as being no different from everybody else, the majority, something would happen to make me think again. It was much easier to feel Lithuanian out of the country. Thus, while in France, at the age of thirteen, I expressed my juvenile patriotism in an ardent defence of Lithuania against some French, who saw it as a wasteland inhabited by savages.

Back home, I relapsed into my ethnic ambivalence. Out of it eventually grew my cherished belief that I was an important particle of the world community, which transcended national bigotry and boundaries. It gave me comfort, helped to infuse stability into my background and saved me from total confusion. I saw my father as a liberal democrat - enlightened, compassionate and fair-minded - sympathetic toward the underdog, which in the thirties included the communists languishing in Lithuanian jails without trials. To my mother I was totally devoted, but found it more difficult to empathise with what seemed to me (at the time) her excessively emotional attitudes, some of which, like her hatred of communism, were in direct contrast with my father's calmer, more reasoned, views.

On June 15th, 1940, I saw Soviet tanks rolling through the streets of my hometown, Kaunas, the temporary capital of the independent Lithuanian republic, very soon to be incorporated into the Soviet Union. Throughout the following year, my father would try to reassure my panic-stricken mother, often pointing out that occupation by the Soviets was far more benign than by the Nazis.

On Sunday night, June the 22nd of 1941, when Germany declared war on the Soviet Union, my world started crumbling. I had heard quite a lot about the Nazi attitude to Jews but was totally unprepared for anti-Jewish Lithuanian 'excesses.' My little brother was at the time in a children's summer camp near the German border. My parents decided not to retreat with the Soviet front. We all stood and watched the Soviet troops flee in disarray. I well remember my father's face go ashen when a Lithuanian neighbour yelled at him to take his hand out of his pocket and hand over his gun, when all he had in his pocket was small change.

Sheltering from an air raid I could sense the animosity against us Jews mounting by the hour as the Germans were advancing. The next day my father went to town, saying he would hand over the keys of the food-producing co-op that he directed. He never came back. We did not find out till after the war that my father had been arrested and subsequently killed during an infamous massacre at the Lietukis garage in Kaunas. My mother too got arrested in the street, but was released the next day - a nervous wreck.

A non Jewish school friend - I was the only Jewish girl in our class - reported that a couple of the boys we had been studying with for our exams were debating whether it would be awkward for them to raid our house to confiscate our belongings, and eventually decided to delegate this particular job to one of their fellow 'partisans'. (Interestingly enough, the two boys concerned were the only two in our class to have joined the young communists and seemed to be the first to join the anti-Soviet, anti-Jewish partisans.)

And when a raid did come, it was Lithuanians, not Germans who surrounded our house and had us hands up against a wall, while neighbours watched through their windows and could be heard whispering, They are going to shoot them..." In fact they did not - just confiscated anything which took their fancy and left. The German Wehrmacht officer who got billeted in our neighbour's flat (they had fled) got very friendly with us and hoped he would not be moved out to the front until we were 'safe and sound' within the ghetto walls. Wishful thinking, maybe, but we shared his hopes.

By August 1941, every Jew in Kaunas had to be behind barbed wire in Vilijampole, the predominantly former Jewish suburb of our town. It did not take long to realise that the Vilijampole ghetto was anything but a safe haven. No sooner had the ghetto gates closed, decrees of varying degrees of severity followed one another. They were appropriately called 'actions'. Because most decrees were accompanied by brutal, arbitrary enforcement., executed by Nazi stormtroopers and ghetto guards.

The preceding Kaunas events were traumatic, large scale, totally out of control; like a global hurricane wreaking havoc, pitting friend and foe against each other. Surrounded by barbed wire and ghetto guards, life assumed quite a different character. I became very much more conscious of events being directed from Germany by an evil Nazi regime and that the murderous Lithuanian gangs as well as the ghetto guards were but willing tools.

To my own surprise our physical confinement created a sense of community, a sense of belonging which in turn produced a feeling of responsibility. This implied options, a need for decision making and defining one's attitudes, on however limited a scale. For example the Germans demanded five hundred young, educated inmates to sort through some archives; should one volunteer?

How much of one's valuables was one to surrender? Should one join the Jewish establishment? What attitude should one adopt toward the Jewish police? Was it right or wrong to fight for a coveted 'Jordan pass', maybe at the expense of someone's life? Was one to trade, to smuggle, to take risks or starve? Any one such small decision could mean life or death; equally, one could meet death by the purest of chance, such as not tipping one's hat to a passing German one hadn't noticed. To what extent one's chances of survival, really depended on any one individual's thought, action or decision became the 64,000 dollar question.

My mother, as it turned out, was more enlightened than most. She realised early that we were irrevocably destined for destruction and that the best we could achieve would be to accelerate or delay it. Thus, when Chana Bravo, a wonderful lady alongside whom I was working in the ghetto and who had known and admired my father, offered to try and place my then 12-year-old brother with her non-Jewish friends outside the ghetto, we jumped at the chance. So one day in October 1943 Chana took little Alik by the hand to brave the barbed wire.

With trepidation we waited for news. At last, very late that evening we heard that Chana was back, safe and sound and without her charge, meaning that the Macenaviciuses had agreed to harbour Alik. This news gave my mother and me a unique moment of intense relief, as well as a rare sense of gratitude to fate and some hope for the future.

By that time I had formed an intimate friendship with an extraordinary inmate of the ghetto - Joseph Kagan. He shared my mother's belief in our certain destruction and got to work on persuading me to join him and his mother in a hiding place he was building. Whilst I did not want to leave my mother and grandmother behind in the ghetto I could offer them little more than emotional support. My mother argued forcefully that I would be of much more comfort and potential concrete help outside, rather than inside the ghetto, and it made sense.

Eventually I succumbed to the combined onslaught of Joseph and my mother, decided to marry Joseph and go into hiding. I had been spending as much time with Joseph as was possible in ghetto circumstances, listening enthralled to his dramatic tales of adventures past and present, while being regaled by food and music, something most of us wouldn't have believed existed in the ghetto.

I had heard a lot about the set up at the workplace to which Joseph's slave labour brigade was assigned - a foundry in Vilijampole run by a pre-war acquaintance of Joseph, the German Treuhaender, director trustee - Johannes Bruess. Johannes Bruess had given tacit approval to JK's project to build a secret hide-out in the loft of the factory. The bookkeeper, Vytautas Garkauskas, was in the know and approved. But the heart and soul of the scheme, without whom it would have been a non-starter, was the modest factory foreman, Vytautas Rinkevicius.

I took JK's unbounded enthusiasm for this wonderful man with a pinch of salt; thus when JK wangled for me to get assigned to his work brigade on a day pass, I went with some trepidation. It boded well that the place itself, the atmosphere and the workload, lived up to JK's description. Joseph, personally, was allowed to show me to the junkroom cum office and kitchen combined, which I was to tidy and clean up. It was not far from his own workplace, where in front of a red hot furnace, stripped to the waist, he and his mate Boris worked. No child's play - but amazingly, no one tormented, harassed or hardly even supervised us.

It was not until our lunchtime break that I was to get my first glimpse of Vytautas. Joseph pointed to a distant figure in a far corner of the foundry yard. We were to go over and Joseph was to hand him the bundle of personal belongings we had smuggled out of the ghetto, while I stood on guard. The man we were approaching was tall and lean, wore blue coveralls and a beret, looked alert, yet reassuringly relaxed. He wore heavy rimmed spectacles and their thick lenses seemed to set him apart from our ugly world. From behind these lenses his eyes exuded calm, hope and confidence.

When I got back to my mother in the ghetto that evening, I found it difficult to explain just why this man had made such a monumental impression on me; but I did manage to convey my deep-felt confidence in Vytautas' integrity and goodwill. I sensed my mother breathe a sigh of relief. Once more I was to join JK in his workplace for a day and this time Joseph managed to take me up to the box in the loft which was to be our home. On a prearranged signal from Vytautas, that the coast was clear, we tiptoed upstairs.

A wood plank wall sectioned off the loft from its gable end to which there was access through a small, secretly hinged door. Within that gable end there stood a newly completed crate-like wooden structure, approximately six by five feet, topped by a wood roof slanting at the same angle as the loft. Inside it two wood plank shelf-beds - the one along the six-foot wall to be Joseph's and mine, the other, a few feet above it and across - Joseph's mother's. It all looked both comforting and frightening. How long would the three of us have to be cooped up here, afraid to breathe or move? What were our chances of survival? Was the ghetto a safer place to stay in, after all?

At last came the day in November 1943 when I had run out of excuses for procrastination and all was set for departure. My little brother Alik was already outside the ghetto walls with his saviours and rumours about another 'action' were unusually strong. There was no time to be lost and having to find a suitable hiding place for my mother prompted additional urgency. Would I have started out from our cramped home in Varniu Street through the ghetto gates, past the 'Torwache', the gate guard, had I been able to see the future in a crystal ball, is now idle speculation.

The working day at the foundry passed quickly as if propelled by spasms of nervous tension. The rest of the brigade, eventually, set off for their dreary, tedious trek back to the ghetto (our Jewish brigade leader knew we were not coming back with him) and the three of us, singly, slunk up to our new home.

Vytautas and Joseph had done a marvellous job of completing and equipping our hideout. Its comforts exceeded all my expectations: hair mattresses plus sheets, blankets and pillows graced our plank beds; we had electricity, two bulbs - one inside plus another one outside our box, above an electric cooking ring and a small electric heater. Soap and towel, next to a washstand with bowl and bucket, a few knives, forks and spoons plus a couple of pots and pans, and even a radio - all bade us welcome. Youthful optimism combined with a sense of adventure and novelty appeal soon overcame our blues. In retrospect, we have to thank our lucky stars that the problems, difficulties and dangers did not hit us all at once.

Even so, it was not to be an ideal honeymoon and proved a most trying time for JK's mother. That first of nearly 300 nights we set to disentangling the ropes of our new 'malina' (ghetto word for hideout) existence, exploring and organising, very conscious of the fact that come the day and the morning shift workers, we would have to lie low, stop moving around or making noise for fear of being discovered. Towards dawn we slept fitfully and when, eventually, we started hearing voices and clanking, we hardly dared breathe.

It felt like an eternity until we heard the agreed knock on the trap door built into the ceiling of the canteen food store, located below our hideout and of which Vytautas was in sole charge. We opened it gingerly and were much relieved to read in the eyes of Vytautas' serious face that our illicit move had not been noticed. After a whispered exchange, confirming that on no account were we to stir unless we heard the two plus one knock, Vytautas assured us that he would take every opportunity of visiting us, probably every few days. Then to our surprise, a basket was hoisted up to us on a devil's fork, containing a traditional welcome of bread and salt, plus a chunk of bacon meat - a great luxury at the time.

From the very first day, though slowly, a pattern of life started emerging by trial and error. We tried to confine all activity to between 6pm and 6am. During the foundry's working day we read, listened to low-level radio and slept. Besides, I tried to teach Joseph Russian and he taught me English. Evenings were devoted to fetching water from a tap in the foundry, disposing of refuse, washing, cooking, eating and the like. We discovered very soon that these simple sounding household chores could be unimaginably nerve-wracking experiences and potential give-aways of our presence in a hundred and one ways.

For example: to get to a water tap we had to go down the creaking staircase, cross the sand covered foundry floor and fill our metal bucket without making a sound, so as not to alert the ever-present night watchman. It took weeks of practice to become sure footed enough not to keep bumping into objects and having to freeze until we felt sure the night watchman had not heard us. Even worse - sometimes his little dog, the bane of our lives in hiding, would start barking and we would have to abandon our expedition and flee. We had never imagined how much noise water from a tap could make hitting a metal bucket. Eventually we tumbled to the simple device of filling our bucket through a towel. Once full the bucket had to be taken back upstairs through the sand covered foundry; which meant coming back and retreating backwards on all fours in order to obliterate our tracks. During this exercise one of us would have to stand on guard in the canteen, which was across the yard from the night watchman's office, to alert the water fetcher of any suspicious movements, sounds or lights. More than half of our water expeditions had to be abandoned uncompleted.

There were countless other obstacles we had to contend with: night burglars, splintering glass sounds from the cooling of the castings, the location of the only toilet, right next to the night watchman's quarters, fire precaution inspections and Johannes Bruess covering his guilty knowledge by telling Vytautas to make sure no Jews were hiding in the factory, iron foundry rats (whom I succeeded to befriend, but who terrified my mother-in-law), sundry ailments and, last but not least - quarrels and disagreements within our own ranks.

To conduct our rows in stage whispers needed a lot of self-control, sometimes beyond our ken. Today it seems incredible that such an absolute identity of interests with such a limited amount of options should leave scope for disagreements, yet it seemed we each had our own ideas of how much risk and how often we were to take. For instance, mother-in-law would use inordinate amounts of water for washing laundry, besides insisting on the use of a washing board in our metal tub. We had all agreed on the urgent need to create an emergency escape exit, but disagreed on where, how and when.

Try as we might not to add our own strains and stresses to the already enormous burden resting on the shoulders of our guardian angel,Vytautas, they did, somehow, inevitably land on his plate. Always he would find the appropriate words and actions to sort things out. How he managed to remain so calm, unrattled and supportive throughout those nine months will forever remain a mystery to me. We Jews were under sentence of death and in this "no choice- ein breira" situation would, not unnaturally, have to accept risk and deprivation in an effort to save our own skins. Yet, there was Vytautas, risking not only his own life but also his family's, out of his own free will, without any financial incentive or hope for reward, simply in order to save our lives.

What is more, Vytautas was far more successful in keeping his worries and problems from us than we were with ours. Slowly, very slowly, we did, however, manage to piece some of his together. For instance, we did, eventually, realise how difficult it had been to keep us as his secret in order not to inflict his worries on his wife. Apparently she had noticed that Vytautas now seemed preoccupied and absent minded more often than before; besides, valuable food items started missing out of her larder. This led her to start suspecting Vytautas of being involved with another woman. It was only when faced with this suspicion that Vytautas confessed to hiding us.

Elia - a generous, kind-hearted person (as we were to find out) proved sympathetic to our plight, but questioned whether they, as parents, had the right to put the life of their own child at risk. Thus Vytautas had to continue carrying the additional burden of not being able to share many a dangerous moment either with us, or with his wife.
We had come to depend on Vytautas' face lighting up our difficult existence, At the same time we worried ourselves sick about his safety and found it difficult to get reconciled to the fact that at any moment we could prove the involuntary cause of his undoing. So that any day Vytautas would not materialise through our trap door, would cause us double concern - one, we missed him, and two, was it a routine obstacle which had kept him away, or had some disaster befallen him?

On one particular February morning in 1944 Vytautas appeared at our trap door looking tense, pale and crestfallen. Our whispered solicitous enquiries elicited only that he had had a bad night due to a stomach upset, but we remained unconvinced. Later the same day - another knock, a most unusual occurrence. Vytautas had decided that on second thoughts he had to warn us that Mr. Garkauskas - and he knew about our hide out - had been arrested the previous night. It had been impossible to ascertain whether or not his arrest was in connection with us yet, as there seemed to be no indication it was. We were not to worry. But we all knew what this meant and none of us could have got much rest that night.

Earlier than the usual time next morning an exceptionally agitated Vytautas came to tell us that Mr Garkauskas had managed to smuggle a letter out of jail to tell us that his arrest was unconnected with us. Sadly, he had been denounced by a neighbour for harbouring a Jewish child - and the inevitability of tragic consequences marred our own relief at not having come to the end of our road. As it happened, Garkauskas managed to escape death; the child did not. To reconcile our double-edged emotions of horror and relief was hard. Our inner turmoil was inexpressible. Gloom and silence reigned in our hut. Had we been denounced, I remember musing, could we have escaped through our unfinished emergency exit, and if so, how could we have destroyed the evidence of our hide out and Vytautas' culpability.

Yet life, such as it was, continued. We were learning to read Vytautas' deep set eyes,
and he, slowly, to share some of his worries. Half jokingly he would tell us about his recurring nightmares. One such was that as we were about to be discovered and with the sound of German jackboots approaching he would shove all three of us under our plank bed and would then try in vain to squeeze himself in on top of us. Now that Vytautus' wife Elia was in on us, the Rinkeviciuses would happily deprive themselves in order to share rare goodies with us and so we would get special food treats more often than before.

Whenever a new threat of being discovered loomed up, such as an outsider discovering the fresh saw marks we had created in order to make a disused little gate into an emergency exit, or our parcel of excreta landing on the roof, rather than on its designated resting ground, or a zealous meter reader reporting a suspicious increase in electric consumption, or indeed, the tragic Garkauskas episode, we would revert to discussing ways of leaving and somehow finding new hiding places. This not only to save our own necks, but also to get Vytautas out of the direct firing line of questioning and torture. But he would have none of it. Come what may, he would say, we were safer in our loft, than at large and he was ready and prepared to face any consequences.

I still can't imagine how we could have coped without his extraordinary moral fortitude. For instance one day my mother-in-law decided that she could not survive 'buried alive' as it were. In her claustrophobic delusion the ghetto became her 'fata morgana'. It was Vytautas who, with help of a letter from my mother still living in the ghetto, dissuaded her from returning to the ghetto. We did all agree, though, that Mira, my mother-in-law did need to get away in order not to crack up. Again, it fell to Vytautas to arrange for her to be given refuge for a short break, away from our hideout, with another devoted family of Lithuanian friends -the Serapinases. Our secret emergency exit was by now completed and was used both for Mira leaving and coming back a week later.

We seemed to have lived through a century when the tide of the war started turning. The news from Stalingrad had already raised new hopes and now the reassuring sounds of occasional air raid sirens made us feel we were not totally forsaken by the Allies. Through Vytautas we heard that my brother Alik and his rescuers had found someone prepared to shelter our mother. Unfortunately by then escape from the ghetto had got much more difficult and it proved impossible for her to get out. Thus she finished up in the East Prussian Concentration camp at Stutthof with other ghetto deportees, where she eventually met her death in November 1944.

By early summer 1944 it was obvious that the Germans were losing the war. Vytautas told us that rumour had it they would be blowing up factories before retreating. He had therefore contacted my brother's rescuers and together they had hatched a plan for our transfer to their house. Now that the Germans were in full retreat and one could see light at the end of the tunnel it seemed more important than ever not to make mistakes. The foundry was no longer operating. It was arranged that my little brother, 13 by then, was to signal that the coast was clear for Joseph and his mother to emerge and follow him to the Macenavicius house by appearing with his goat on a little hill visible from our hideout. I was to follow as soon as a safe place was prepared for me. And so one sunny July morning I found myself alone in the loft. Measuring time by minutes, hours and days, seemed to have lost all sense until I too was collected by Alik and his white goat a few days later.

Subsequent knowledge tells us that the Soviet advance was halted on the
Eastern side of the Vilija river, thus leaving Vilijampole, where we were, to be liberated on the 31st of July 1944, one week later than Kaunas. In the meantime the ghetto was set on fire by the retreating Germans, and those ghetto inmates who had hoped to survive this final phase of the war in shelters they had built underneath the ghetto all met a horrible death, be it in their shelters, or surfacing to be consumed alive by the flames of the ghetto blaze. My little brother Alik described the scene in vivid terms with lurid details, while we walked from the foundry to the Macenavicuises house.

There I found my mother-in-law and Joseph comfortably installed in a little spare room. Joseph neither looked nor sounded Jewish, nor were my mother-in-law Mira's looks likely to betray her Jewishness, but her distinctly Jewish accent was a sure give-away. She, therefore, had to act a deaf-mute. As for me, I was neither blond, nor blue-eyed (no matter that I spoke very good Lithuanian), and if spotted and denounced by a malevolent neighbour or German soldier it could, even at this late stage, spell disaster for everyone.

Thus, once again, a loft became my abode. This time a hayloft over the stable. It was warm and comfortable and Alik would bring me up food and news and would also stay for long chats, keeping me up to date on events. The last flare-up of imminent danger happened when retreating German soldiers demanded to be lodged overnight. I heard angry voices and steps up to the loft, then Macenavicius's voice: "you see how poky and stinky a place this is - totally unfit for human habitation" Buried deep in the hay I held my breath until the footsteps retreated.

It wasn't many days after that when Soviet reconnaissance troops reached Vilijampole. My mother-in-law narrowly missed being killed by the first wary soldier to enter the little house as she fell round his neck in a welcoming bear hug.

Although our own personal nightmare was at an end, we had yet to assimilate the magnitude of the tragic results of this war. Here again, Vytautas proved our mainstay and support. This was no time for brooding or mourning, he seemed to say, for we must get on with restarting our lives. And so Vytautas installed us in what he called his humble house - to us - a palace. To live openly, not having to jump at every sound, was the ultimate luxury. Possessions we had few, but it was summer and the least of our worries.

We soon found a flat of our own to rent and took in a little Jewish girl survivor who had also been saved by the Macenaviciuses. She was eventually claimed by relatives, who had survived the war in the Soviet Union. The next five months were spent on an emotional roller coaster trying to come to grips with the devastating post war reality. We kept in close touch with both the Rinkeviciuses and Macenaviciuses until we left in early January 1945 on our trek westward to try and join Joseph's family living in England. Little did we know how well nigh impossible the Iron Curtain would make it to stay in touch not only with our saviours but also with Alik and a surviving cousin.
Joseph, his mother and I did not reach England until 1946.

My first trip back to what was now the Soviet Baltic republics was in 1964. Twenty-one years had passed since I, then a member of a slave labour brigade, had caught my first glimpse of Vytautas in the Vilijampole foundry yard. The man I was now approaching on the beach in Riga was tall and lean, bareheaded, and wore a business suit and tie. His deep-set eyes were sheltered behind even thicker lenses than I remembered. Words failed us both at this indescribable moment, but our emotions mingled in a long silent embrace.

I soon lost count of the hours we spent bringing each other up to date on our lives and showing each other photographs of our families. I was now a well-established working mother of two sons; Vytautas and Elia now had 2 daughters, Monica, whom we knew, and Vitalija, born after the war. It had become possible to send parcels to Soviet Lithuania and these had helped the Rinkeviciuses to build themselves a little brick house. Characteristically, they claimed it was as much ours as theirs and would not hear of our eternal indebtedness to them.

The first post-war meeting between Joseph and his friend and saviour took place in the winter of 1972. For that meeting Vytautas came to Moscow with his younger daughter - Vitalija, and Antanas Macenavicius, Alek's saviour, brought his wife Maria. So many shared experiences, spanning the 28 years, required no major bridge building programme. The one-and-a-half days spent together passed in a flash. Visits, contact and parcels continued, but due to the Cold War our dream to have all these wonderful people over to stay with us in the UK was not to come true. In March 1980 Antanas Macenavicius died, a year after his wife Maria. Elia Rinkievicius died the following year. I last visited Vytautas in 1988 and he died a few months later. How sad that they did not live to see the new dawn in Eastern Europe and above all an independent Lithuania.

Vitalija, Vytautas' daughter, and her husband were at last able to visit us in 1989 and to receive on her parents' behalf the heroes' medals which Yad Vashem awards to Righteous Gentiles. During a short ceremony at the House of Lords in the presence of the Chaplain of Westminster Cathedral, Dr Kahle, family and friends, the then Chief Rabbi Dr Jakubowits made the presentation and a moving speech. Vitalija's words were few but memorable. Naturally she was happy and grateful for this honour to her parents and thanked everyone; but above all she wanted to convey what she felt her father would have said on this occasion: "I am no hero, have done nothing out of the ordinary, nothing other than any normal human being would have done".