About the rescuer and the rescue story

The shoemaker Bronius Urbelis lived in the town of Kelmė with his wife Ona and their three children. Their private house stood close to the town center. The family led a farming life, working their plot of land, and raising domestic animals. The children, Elena, Robertas and Jasius were 16, 14 and eight years old in 1941. At the end of 1943, the Urbelises took under their care a six-year-old Jewish boy, Isaak Krom. From the beginning of the German occupation, he had stayed with his mother, grandmother and an aunt in the ghetto of Šiauliai. He survived the "Children’s Aktion" of November 5, 1943, being one of only a few Jewish children who had not been found by the Germans and the police. After that, he could no longer live in the ghetto legally, so his aunt, Esther Thon, secretly took him to the “Aryan” side of the city. She left the boy with a local train-worker, whose family had agreed to care for him. But soon, Isaak was returned since the train-worker's children beat and insulted him. After two more unsuccessful attempts to place Isaak with a Lithuanian family, Esther and the boy headed for Kelmė, where a certain woman agreed to help. The journey from Šiauliai to Kelmė took many hours. Isaak was exhausted; his feet were bleeding because the shoes he wore were too small for him. When the supposed host saw a gloomy black-haired boy, holding tight on Esther's hand, she changed her mind. At a loss, Esther entered the house of Petronelė Urbelienė, who was already caring for a Jewish teenager, Jonina Meraitė, since the beginning of the occupation. Esther hoped that Petronelė would accept her nephew too. She, however, refused, but sent Jonina to her distant relative, Ona Urbelienė, asking whether she'd agree to help. Ona, who knew Jonina from her childhood and was aware of the Jews’ plight, agreed to accept Isaak. In that family, little Isaak finally found warmth and compassion. He developed a special bondwith Elena, the eldest daughter of Ona and Bronius. In the spring of 1944, when the atmosphere in town became tense, Isaak was sent with Elena to village relatives and stayed there until the liberation in October 1944. After they had left, Ona and Bronius sheltered for some time a seven-year-old Jewish girl from the Kaunas ghetto, Ida Kapeliushnik. At the beginning of 1945, Motl Krum, Isaak's father, who had returned from the front, came to pick up his son. Isaak did not remember him and refused to leave. Elena had to accompany them both and then stayed with the Krums in Kaunas (Isaak's mother survived too) until the boy got used to his parents again. The after-war fate of the Urbelis family was tragic: their son Robertas joined the Lithuanian partisans, fighting the Soviets for Lithuania's independence, and fell in battle. The parents, with their youngest, Jasius, were deported to Siberia. En route, Jasius jumped out of the moving train and his fate is unknown. Elena followed her parents into exile and died there at a young age. Ona and Bronius returned to Lithuania in the late 1950s, ill and broken. The Krums supported Ona Urbelienė, who was soon widowed, until they left for Israel in 1972. On January 4, 2006, Yad Vashem recognized Ona and Bronius Urbelis and their daughter Elena Urbelytė as Righteous Among the Nations.