Adelė Milvidaitė-Blažaitienė was born in 1903. She and her husband Antanas Blažaitis raised two children, their son Leonas and daughter Valentina Eugenija. The family had also lived in Canada. Later they lived in Panemunė, Kaunas.

During the war, more than their own children were growing up in the Blažaitis home. A basket containing a baby girl a few months old had been left outside, with a note from her parents. The Jewish parents, being led to execution, begged them to save their baby: if they survived, they would return for her; if not, they asked the family to raise her. The Blažaitis family took her in.

Soon the family had to make another decision.

Before the war, Chava and Rafaelis Finas, later confined in the Kaunas ghetto, had been prosperous. Rafaelis worked in trade and owned a shop, and the family lived in their own house in Vilijampolė. Their daughter Roza was born in 1934. Almost the entire extended Finas family was murdered during the Holocaust, and Roza’s younger sister died in the Kaunas ghetto.

After the Children’s Aktion in the Kaunas ghetto, it became clear that Roza could no longer remain there. Her father Rafaelis, who had entered the city with a labour brigade, met warehouse worker Antanas Blažaitis. Seeing his sadness, Antanas asked what had happened. On hearing that Rafaelis was seeking someone to save his daughter, Antanas offered to shelter her.

Rafaelis did not want to hand over his child without Antanas’s wife’s consent as well. The following day, he met Adelė. She too agreed to take Roza in..

The girl was smuggled out of the ghetto beneath sacks in a truck used to deliver bread to it. The truck stopped in Šančiai, where Adelė was waiting for Roza. She took the girl and brought her by cart to the family’s home in Panemunė.

Roza spoke almost no Lithuanian, so her presence posed an additional danger. The Blažaitis family told acquaintances and relatives that she was a deaf and non-speaking relative from the countryside whom they had taken into their care. Their fifteen-year-old daughter Valentina bore considerable responsibility: she stayed constantly with Roza so that the girl’s speech would not reveal her origins.

Roza survived until the end of the war with the Blažaitis family. Her parents Chava and Rafaelis were deported to concentration camps when the Kaunas ghetto was liquidated, but both survived. After returning to Kaunas, they found their daughter.

The parents of the baby left outside the Blažaitis home never returned. Adelė and Antanas fulfilled the request in their note. Named Irena Margarita Blažaitytė, the girl grew up as their daughter.

Additional family testimonies

Additional family recollections recorded by the project author’s father describe Irena Margarita, whom Antanas and Adelė Blažaitis sheltered as an infant. The notes call her the Blažaitis family’s daughter and mention that she later used another surname. This adds an important aspect of postwar family relationships to the rescue story.

The manuscript records that the family had lived in Canada and lived in Kaunas during the war. It mentions that Adelė and Antanas also took Roza Finaitė into their home and devised a safer identity to present to others. These facts agree with the rescue described earlier in the biography; additional family connections are presented as family testimony.