Devorah Urgeshevitz Radin papers

Devorah "Dorothy" Urgeshevitz [later changed to Hirsh] Radin (1910-2000) was born in Lithuania to a devout Jewish family. She was educated in Catholic schools, the only option available at the time, and attended a Red Cross nursing school. She worked as a nurse at a Jewish hospital in Kaunas, the Lithuanian capital. In 1937, after visiting the World's Fair in Paris, she began to think it was unsafe for Jews to remain in Europe. Though she had reservations about leaving Lithuania, she successfully bribed officials to hurry her visa application along, and in 1939 she bought a ticket to the United States aboard the SS Nieuw Amsterdam. While she was able to escape and join her sister and two of her brothers, other relatives who remained in Lithuania-her mother, another of her brothers, two of her brothers' wives, and their children-were all shot and thrown in a communal grave.

After Urgeshevitz's arrival in the United States, she signed up for an English class, realizing that she would need to speak English in order to work as a nurse. In an effort to further assimilate into American culture, she changed her name from Devorah Urgeshevitz to Dorothy Hirsh. Before the start of World War II, she met Samuel Radin (formerly Radinsky), a doctor and fellow Lithuanian who had come to America in 1910 at the age of eight. After serving in the U.S. Army in India and Burma from 1941-1945, he returned home and resumed his friendship with Urgeshevitz. They married in 1946.