Povilas Alekna was born in the Kupiškis region in the late nineteenth century. His life was connected both with rural Lithuania and with the history of Lithuanian emigration to the United States. In 1910, Povilas left for America and settled in Lewiston, Maine, where he worked in a shoe factory. After about fifteen years, he returned to Lithuania with his wife Paulė, also known as Paulina. They bought a farm at the isolated homestead of Paliepiai in the Kupiškis region and gradually turned it into a model farm.

Although self-taught, Povilas was well read, interested in many aspects of life and held progressive views. His stories attracted folklore collectors, who recorded considerable folklore and ethnographic material from him. Above all, however, people valued the Alekna family for their attitude towards others. The couple had no biological children, but took in and raised several children, helped people living in poverty and cared for their hired workers. The children in their care later received an education and began independent lives.

During the Second World War, this family’s kindness took on particular significance. After Nazi Germany occupied Lithuania, Povilas and Paulina Alekna sheltered a young Jewish girl, Ruta Jofaitė, who had been rescued from the Šiauliai ghetto.

Ruta was born in Šiauliai in 1937 to physician Riva Trusfus-Jofienė and lawyer Aaronas Jofė. In the summer of 1941, her parents sent Ruta and her brother Mošė, two years her senior, to the countryside with their nanny. When war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union on 22 June, their father was mobilized into the Red Army, and their mother was evacuated east with the hospital. Their aunt, teacher Eta Koladnienė, brought the children back to Šiauliai. Soon Ruta, Mošė, their aunt and grandmother Batia Trusfusienė were imprisoned in the Šiauliai ghetto.

In November 1943, when news spread in the ghetto of a planned operation to murder children, Juozas Petrulis of Šiauliai came to the family’s aid. Together with like-minded people, he organized the escape of children and their relatives from the ghetto. At first, they all hid for several days at his home at 39 Basanavičiaus Street. When neighbours began suspecting that Jews were being hidden there, other shelters had to be found urgently. The family was separated and hidden in different homes. Young Ruta stayed with Petrulis for a time, until he found her a safer refuge with Povilas and Paulina Alekna.

The girl spent about eight months at the Paliepiai homestead. The Aleknas welcomed her as their own daughter and cared for her food, safety and daily needs. Ruta was not constantly confined to a hiding place: she could stay with her guardians and take part in ordinary farm life. Yet this required exceptional caution. People visited the farm to churn butter, so the girl was told to remain silent around strangers lest her speech reveal her Jewish identity.

Even in the apparently peaceful countryside, danger was ever present. Hiding Jews exposed both the person sheltered and their guardians to the threat of death. Povilas and Paulina knowingly accepted this risk. They offered Ruta more than a roof over her head: in their home, she could briefly experience the warmth and care of a family that the war had taken from her.

Later, Ruta was moved to other rescuers, Eduardas and Teresė Levinskas, in Žagarė. After the Nazi occupation ended, the surviving members of the Jofė family reunited and left for Kazan, where Ruta’s mother Riva had lived during the war. Her father Aaronas had been killed at the front. In 1967, Ruta visited Lithuania for the first time since the war and re-established contact with her rescuers’ families. Povilas did not live to see her return.

The Aleknas’ kindness also mattered after the war. Biographical material from the Kupiškis region recounts that, during Soviet repression in 1944–1953, their former hired workers spoke up for the family and helped protect them from persecution. This is a telling testimony to the relationships the Aleknas had built with those around them.

Povilas Alekna died in 1960. He is buried in the Kupiškis Freethinkers’ Cemetery.

Their story reminds us that humanity is expressed not only through exceptional acts of heroism, but also through everyday choices. Before the war, the Aleknas’ home sheltered children in their care and people seeking help; during the Holocaust, it became a place where a human life was saved.