Vilna Ghetto
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The Vilna Ghetto or Vilnius Ghetto was one of the Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany in the city of Vilnius during the Holocaust in World War II. During roughly two years of its existence, starvation, disease, street executions, maltreatment and deportations to concentration camps and extermination camps reduced the population of the ghetto from an estimated 40,000 to zero. Only several hundred people managed to survive, mostly by hiding in the forests surrounding the town, joining the Soviet partisans or finding shelter among sympathetic locals.
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[edit] General history
German troops entered the city on 26 June 1941, followed by units of the Einsatzgruppe A. Over the course of the summer, German troops and Lithuanian civilians and police killed more than 21,000 Jews living in Vilnius in a rapid extermination program. Vilna or Vilnius was a predominantly Polish and Jewish city until Joseph Stalin gave it back to Lithuania in October of 1939 in exchange for a concession allowing Red Army bases to be set up and troops garrisoned in the country. The Republic of Lithuania had claimed it as its capital and the dispute between Poland and Lithuania was a long-standing one at the League of Nations. The Republic of Lithuania, operating out of the provisional capital Kaunas, sent in the Lithuanian Army to reclaim the city and embarked on a project to Lithuanianize the city. This included operations by the Lithuanian State Security agency, who seized on the opportunity for ethnic cleansing offered by the arrival of the Third Reich and helped orchestrate the kidnapping and murder of Jews in the city before the ghetto was set up. The deportation from the United States of Aleksandras Lileikis to face (an ultimately unsuccessful) trial in Lithuania revolves around the role he played in the Lithuanian State Security apparatus in the murder of Jews. These kidnappers were known in Yiddish as hapunes, meaning grabbers or snatchers. In the months that followed Poles were also targeted by Lithuanian and German authorities. Newspapers published by the Polish underground in Lithuania and Poland were rabidly anti-Semitic early on and remained so until late into World War II. The Jewish population of Vilna on the eve of the Holocaust was probably more than 60,000, including refugees from Poland and subtracting the small number who managed to flee onward to the Soviet Union.
[edit] The Great Provocation
The Great Provocation refers to the incident the Nazis staged as a pretext for clearing the predominantly (poorer) Jewish quarter in the Vilna Old Town in order to force the rest of the (predominantly more affluent) Jewish residents into the Nazi-created ghetto. Specifically, the Great Provocation of 31 August 1941, was led by SS Einsatzkommando 9 Oberscharführer Horst Schweinberger under orders from Gebietskommissar of the Vilnius municipality Hans Christian Hingst and Franz Murer, Hingst’s deputy for Jewish affairs, under “provisional directives” of Reichskommissar Hinrich Lohse. Murer, Hingst and Vilnius mayor Karolis Dabulevičius selected the site for the future ghetto and staged a sniping at German soldiers in front of a cinema from a window on the corner Stiklių (Glezer, also known as Szklana) and Didžioji (Wielka, meaning Great Street, hence the name for the event) streets by two Lithuanians in civilian clothes who had broken into an apartment belonging to Jews. The Lithuanians fled the apartment, then returned with waiting German soldiers, seized two Jews, accused them of firing on the German soldiers, beat them and then shot them on the spot. Stiklių and Mėsinių (Jatkowa) streets were ransacked by the local militia and Jews were beaten up. At night, in “retaliation,” all Jews were driven out of the neighbourhood the Nazis had selected as the future ghetto territory, street by street, and the next day the women and children on remaining streets were seized while the men were at work. Men at workplaces were also seized. Jews were taken to Lukiškės prison, then to Paneriai, also known as Ponar or Ponary, where they were murdered between 1 September and 3 September. Five to ten thousand people were murdered, including ten members of the Judenrat. The objective was to clear a territory for the establishment of a ghetto to imprison all the Jews of Vilnius and suburbs.
On 6 September and 7 September 1941, the Nazis herded the remaining 20,000 Jews into the parameters of two ghettos by evicting them from their homes during which 3,700 were killed. Converts, "half-Jews" and spouses of Jews were also forced into the ghetto. The move to the ghetto was extremely hurried and difficult and Jews were not allowed to use transportation. They could only take what they were physically able to carry. Huge crowds of Poles formed to watch the Jews march into the ghetto.
The area designated for the ghetto was the old Jewish quarter in the centre of the city. While Vilna never had a ghetto per se except for some very limited restrictions on the movement and settlement of Jews during the Middle Ages, the area chosen by the Nazis for their ghetto was predominantly and historically inhabited by Jews. The Nazis split the area into two ghettos with a non-ghetto corridor running down Deutschegasse (Niemiecka or Vokiečių Street). This made it easier for the Nazis to control what the victims knew of their fate beforehand, facilitating the Nazis' goal of total extermination. Like the other Jewish ghettos Nazi Germany set up during World War II, the Vilnius Ghetto was created both to dehumanize the people and to exploit its inmates as slave labour. Conditions were extremely poor and crowded, and the victims were surrounded by unsanitary conditions, disease and daily death.
By the end of October 1941, the Nazis had murdered all the inhabitants of the smaller second ghetto. They declared from that point on only 12,000 Jews would remain in the larger ghetto to serve the needs of the German military and economy. In reality, 20,000 remained all together. The Germans systematically carried out Aktionen, or massive killing sprees, to reduce the number of sick and elderly and to meet quotas on the total of the population allowed. These Aktionen were conducted on a regular basis from the creation of the ghetto until January 1942. The period between January 1942 and March 1943 was known as the time of ghetto stabilization when German murder in the ghetto decreased. From 6 August to 5 September 1943, however, 7,130 Jews were deported to Estonia by order of Heinrich Himmler. Under the supervision of Oberscharführer Bruno Kittel the ghetto was "liquidated" on 23 and 24 September 1943 and the majority of the Jewish population were sent to Nazi camps in Estonia, killed in the forest of Paneriai or sent to the death camps in German-occupied Poland.
A small remnant of Jews remained after the liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto, primarily at the Kailis slave labour camp and at the HKP slave labour camp. The HKP camp (short for Heereskraftpark and an outfit involved in repairing German military automobiles) was commanded by Wehrmacht Major Karl Plagge, who, with the help of some of his men, managed to shield many of his workers from the murderous goal of the SS. Two-hundred and fifty Jews at HKP survived the war. They represent the single largest group of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Vilnius.
[edit] Resistance
The United Partisan Organization-Fareinikte Partisaner Organizatzie - F.P.O.- was formed on 21 January 1942 in the Vilna Ghetto. It took for its motto "We will not go like sheep to the slaughter," a phrase resurrected by Abba Kovner. This was one of the first resistance organizations established in the Nazi ghettos during World War II. Unlike in other ghettos, the resistance movement in the Vilna Ghetto was not run by ghetto officials. Jacob Gens, appointed head of the ghetto by the Nazis but originally chief of police, ostensibly cooperated with German officials in stopping armed struggle. The FPO brought together socialist-Zionists, right-wing conservatives, communists and Bundists and represented the full spectrum of political persuasions and parties in Jewish life. It was headed by Yitzhak Wittenberg, Josef Glazman, and Abba Kovner. The goals of the FPO were to establish a means for the self-defence of the ghetto population, to sabotage German industrial and military activities and to join the partisan and Red Army’s fight against the Nazis. Initial studies of how to defend the compact space of a few city blocks, cut off from outside contacts and sources of arms, made some believe that the only real defence would be classical hit-and-run partisan warfare from bases outside the ghetto, but the FPO pursued the idea of defending the actual territory of the ghetto up until the Wittenberg incident.
The FPO did not succeed in its mission. In early 1943, the Germans caught a member of the Communist underground who revealed some contacts under torture and the Judenrat, in response to German threats, tried to turn Yitzhak Wittenberg, the head of the FPO, over to the Gestapo. The FPO was able to rescue him after he was seized in the apartment of Jacob Gens in a fight with Jewish ghetto police.
The Judenrat, in essence Gens, knew about efforts to smuggle weapons into the ghetto, and after incidents at the ghetto gate and after a Jew was arrested for trying to purchase a revolver, carried out searches for weapons caches within the ghetto. The rationale seemed to be that if the Jewish ghetto police could find the weapons, so could the Germans, thus the underground had better do a good job of hiding guns.
During the Wittenberg incident, Gens brought in heavies, the leaders of the work brigades, and effectively turned the majority of the population against the resistance members, claiming they were provoking the Nazis and asking rhetorically whether it was worth sacrificing tens of thousands of lives for the sake of one man. Ghetto prisoners assembled and demanded the FPO give Wittenberg up. The FPO was faced with literally a life-or-death crisis: how could they engage in a fight against the ghetto population they had taken an oath to defend? Ultimately Wittenberg himself made the decision to submit to the Nazi demands. He was taken to Gestapo headquarters in Vilnius and was reportedly found dead in his cell the next morning. Most people believed he had committed suicide. The rumour that went around the ghetto was that Gens had slipped him a cyanide pill in their final meeting so that he could kill himself. The FPO was thoroughly demoralized by the chain of events and began to pursue a policy of sending young people out to the forest to join the partisans. This was controversial as well because the Nazis attempted to kill all family members of people who had joined the partisans. In the Vilna ghetto a "family" often included non-relations who managed to survive by registering as a member of a family in order to receive housing and a pitiful food ration. Further, Gens spoke out against the "youth drain" saying it left the more vulnerable behind in the ghetto. Gens was convinced the Nazis would allow Jews to survive, despite all evidence to the contrary, if the Jews in the ghetto were economically useful to the Germans and their war effort. The youth, the most energetic and productive members of "ghetto society," by fleeing to the forest left a proportionally higher population of the elderly and infirm in the Vilna ghetto and thus Gens believed their loss hurt the general outlook. Gens also feared the Germans would not tolerate the ghetto sending reinforcements to the partisans operating mainly in Belarus under Soviet command and might act rashly to prevent this from continuing.
While Gens is a controversial figure at best - some would say a Nazi collaborator - he does seem to have harboured secret support for the FPO and the Jewish partisans, and especially for Betar, the right-wing reform Zionists. Herman Kruk (see references below) called Gens outright a Revisionist Zionist, or member of Betar. The Revisionist Zionists maintained a relationship with the the Italian Fascists and were in ill-favour with traditional and leftist Zionists, not to mention with the Bundists, Socialists and Communists. Among other measures, Gens ordered Vilna ghetto educational institutions to provide instruction in Hebrew, a language mostly unknown to children raised in a Yiddish milieu.
When the Nazis came to liquidate the ghetto in 1943, members of the FPO went on alert. Gens took control of the liquidation in order to keep the Nazi forces out of the ghetto and away from a partisan ambush, but helped fill the quota of Jews with those who could fight but were not necessarily part of the resistance. The FPO fled to the forest and fought with the partisans.
During the failed stand-off with the Germans inside the ghetto, Abba Kovner refused to come out of the command centre to meet his mother, who was desperate and wanted to know what she should do. He did so as an example to the men and women on the front lines: the decision had already been made to get the FPO fighters out to the forest, as many as possible. Kovner was among the first of the Vilna ghetto youth to see the big picture, that actually the Germans intended to murder every single Jew they could. After the war he emigrated to the Palestine where he fought in the Givati Brigade in the Israel War of Independence. He lived until the age of 69 and died in 1987.
[edit] Cultural life
The Vilna Ghetto was called "Yerushalayim of the Ghettos" because it was known for its intellectual and cultural spirit. Before the war, Vilnius had been known as "Yerushalayim d'Lita" (Yiddish: Jerusalem of Lithuania) for the same reason. The center of cultural life in the ghetto was the Mefitze Haskole Library which was called the "House of Culture". It contained a library, reading hall, archive, statistical bureau, room for scientific work, museum, book kiosk, post office, and the sports ground. Groups were set up, such as the Literary and Artistic Union and the Brit Ivrit Union, that organized events commemorating Yiddish and Hebrew authors and put on plays in these languages. The popular Yiddish magazine Folksgezunt was continued in the ghetto and its essays were presented to the public in the form of lectures. Yitskhok Rudashevski (1927-1943), a young teen who wrote a diary of his life in the ghetto during 1941 to 1943, mentions a number of these events and his participation in them. He was murdered in the liquidation of 1943, probably at Paneriai. His diary was discovered in 1944 by his cousin.
A scientific institution called the "Ghetto University" was established to study mathematics, physics, chemistry, philosophy and other social sciences. Its intellectuals wrote many scholarly papers, hoping to publish them after the war. Many works of poetry and literature were also created by the Jews in the ghetto. Performances and concerts featuring the Symphony Orchestra and the two ghetto choirs were put on in the ghetto. Initially, this matter was controversial because many Jews were offended by the idea of artistic performances in a place where thousands of Jews had been murdered. Gens, who had originated the idea, pushed through on the initiative and it was successful in raising the morale of the people. Art was seen as a source of stimulation and hope to the people. During 1942, over 120 performances were presented in the ghetto.
Poet Hirsh Glik, a Vilna ghetto inmate who later died after having been deported to Estonia, penned the words for what became the famous Partisan Hymn, Zog nit keynmol, az du geyst dem letstn veg, still sung by survivors around the world. As FPO member and survivor Rachel Margolis recalls, she ran into him in the ghetto during a very cold time of winter with snow all around. He was delighted and said he had been looking for her because he wanted to recite his new poem. He did, as passerby looked on in amazement at the two young people standing around under-dressed in the freezing temperatures. Margolis said as she listened, the poem began to sound like a song, she detected melodies between the lines and finally remembered it was a song from a Russian film. They put the Yiddish poem to the music and it was suggested as a theme song at a meeting of the FPO and was adopted as the FPO hymn.
[edit] Pictures of the Ghetto
[edit] Primary documents consulted
- http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Gens3.html - Gens in response to resistance
- http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Gens2.html - Gens in response to the concert
- http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Vilna3.html - partisans on their program
[edit] References
- Shneidman, N.N. Jerusalem of Lithuania: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Vilnius, A Personal Perspective. (Okaville, ON: Mosaic Press, 1998).
- Arad, Yitzhak. Ghetto in Flames. (Jerusalem: Ahva Cooperative Printing Press, 1980).
- Feierstein, Daniel. “The Jewish Resistance Movements in the Ghettos of Eastern Europe.” In: Life in the Ghettos During the Holocaust. Ed. Eric J. Sterling. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005).
- Kostanian-Danzig, Rachel. Spiritual Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto. (Vilnius: The Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 2002).
- Kruk, Herman. The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
- Rudashevski, Yitskhok (1927-1943). Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941-April 1943. (Israel: Ghetto Fighters' House, 1973).
