Wedding in prewar Kovno

Family and friends are gathered for a Jewish wedding celebration in Kovno. Among those pictured are Jona and Gita Wisgardisky (standing at the back on the right).  

In the summer of 1941 soon after the German occupation of Lithuania, the Wisgardisky family was forced into the Kovno ghetto. During a roundup of children in the ghetto in 1942, Henia (Gita and Jona's daughter) was hidden in a secret room that her father built in a pantry in their apartment. Later she was smuggled out of the ghetto and placed with the Stankiewicz family. Jonas Stankiewicz had worked as the foreman in Jona Wisgardisky's chemical plant before the war, and had taken it over after the occupation.

After successfully securing a hiding place for their daughter, the Wisgardiskys fled from the ghetto. They found refuge on a potato farm, where they lived in a root cellar.

Photograph taken in Kovno, Lithuania, ca. 1938.