Hanna (Hanni) Kolumbus Krispin (1924–2012) was born in Klaipėda (also known as Memel), Lithuania, to a religious Jewish family. In 1938, Hanni began attending the Reali Hebrew secondary school in Kovno. In late June 1941, as the German military approached Kovno, local Lithuanians attacked Jews throughout the city. Hanni’s family was rounded up and taken to a nearby school. Hanni and her mother were separated from Hanni’s father and imprisoned in a municipal jail. Once released from jail, Hanni searched for her father but did not find him. She later learned that he had been murdered at the Seventh Fort killing site near Kovno. In July 1944, Hanni and her mother were deported to the Stutthof concentration camp. Both survived the Holocaust.
And there was a rumor that perhaps those men who had been taken prisoner just like me— they’re led to work every day out of prison. And it is the first day that I put a star on myself. I put on a clean dress, and I went to the prison at five o’ clock in the morning. You can imagine my mother, out of touch, no telephone, and I'm gone. And I stand there, and the men were taken out, but I never saw my father. And I did that about five or six or eight days consecutively, standing there, hidden in the yard opposite to prison and trying to see, but I never saw my father. It took me years afterwards and to get out till I found out that I could not see him because he was shot to death that day, on the Seventh Fort. He never reached the Ninth Fort.
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