Actions in the Wilno Ghetto in December

On 3 December 1941 Germans and Lithuanian policemen entered the Wilno Ghetto with a prepared list of names. This time they were not looking for people without work permits, but for Jews whom the police regarded as criminals: people with pre-war records, petty thieves, smugglers and people caught trading illegally in the ghetto. The round-up continued the following day. Those detained were marched off to Ponary. In the history of the ghetto it is known as the “criminal action”. It was the first of three December operations that brought to a close the period of great round-ups in Wilno (Vilnius), which had begun in September with the creation of the ghetto.

Some tallies give a figure of 157 killed at Ponary. Yad Vashem writes of about 150 people, some of whom managed to escape and return to the ghetto. The two figures thus agree in order of magnitude. The chronology of the Association of Jews of Vilna and Vicinity in Israel moves this action a day later, to 4 December.

The ghetto after the selections

By the beginning of December the ghetto was a different community from the one of September. After the yellow permits action and the November round-ups, its inhabitants were divided into the “legal” – holders of yellow work permits, with their families entered on them – and the “illegal”, who had survived the selections in hiding places. According to estimates cited by Lithuanian historians, at the end of 1941 there were some 12,000 people in the ghetto with the right of residence and about 8,000 without it. The illegal received no bread ration, could not go out through the gate to work, and faced death at every inspection.

On 1 December Karl Jäger signed in Kaunas a tally of the executions carried out by his unit, known today as the Jäger Report. For Wilno he recorded that some 15,000 Jews needed for labour remained there. Jäger made no secret of the fact that he had agreed to this reluctantly, under pressure from the Wehrmacht and the civil administration. The December actions in Wilno can be read as an adjustment of the ghetto to this figure: the Germans removed groups that from their point of view were superfluous or troublesome, while at the same time formalising the status of those they wished, for the time being, to leave alive.

On the same day, 1 December, Franz Murer, the district commissioner’s official for Jewish affairs, handed over to the city the deserted area of the former small ghetto. From then on the Wilno Ghetto consisted only of the area of the former large ghetto, a few densely built-up and overcrowded blocks around Rudnicka, Szpitalna, Straszuna and Żydowska streets.

6 December: a figure that cannot be confirmed

Under 6 December some war chronologies record an “action against Gestapo workers”, in which 800 Jews and ten Poles are said to have been killed at Ponary in a frost of minus 23 degrees Celsius. The main histories of the ghetto do not confirm this information. Yad Vashem dates the action against the Jewish workers of the Gestapo to 15 December and estimates its victims at about 300, while the chronology of the Association of Jews of Vilna places it on 5 December, that is, closer to this date. It seems, therefore, that this version combines two different pieces of information: a shifted date for the action against the Gestapo workers, and the executions at Ponary, where in those weeks it was not only Jews from the ghetto who died, but also people brought from Łukiszki prison, from the surrounding small towns and from prisoner-of-war camps, as well as Poles arrested by the German police. The figure of 800 must therefore be treated with caution.

The frost, on the other hand, is credible. The winter of 1941 came early to Lithuania and Belarus, and December was exceptionally cold throughout Eastern Europe. The ghetto was short of fuel, and those detained were driven on foot to Ponary or taken there by lorry in whatever they were wearing. The same frost paralysed the German offensive before Moscow in those days.

15 December: the Gestapo workers

The workers of the German Security Police in Wilno – Jews employed in its workshops, stores and garages – held a special position in the ghetto. Their permits, issued by the police itself, allowed them to register not only their wives and children, as the yellow permits did, but also their parents, brothers and sisters and other relatives. For many families this was the surest protection the ghetto could offer.

On 15 December Germans and Lithuanians entered the ghetto and called on the Gestapo workers to come with them, together with their families. The workers were convinced that “their” Germans had come to take them out before another round-up, as had happened in earlier actions. They were taken to Łukiszki. According to Yad Vashem, about 300 of them were murdered at Ponary, while about 200 were allowed to return to the ghetto, but only with a wife and two children each. In some tallies this operation appears as the “Gestapo block” action, likewise with a figure of 300 killed. For the inhabitants of the ghetto it was a shattering experience: it turned out that even a permit from the very police that carried out the executions gave no protection from death.

At this time the Germans also agreed to issue new documents, pink family permits, to the family members of yellow-permit holders. The Jewish council distributed about 1,600 of them, including to skilled workers without a yellow permit, rabbis, former community activists and members of the intelligentsia. A pink permit made a person “legal”. Thousands of inhabitants, however, received no document at all.

20–22 December: the last round-up

On 20 December 1941, during Hanukkah, Germans and Lithuanian policemen entered the ghetto for the third time that month. They were hunting for people without permits, whether yellow or pink. Over three days they seized about 400 people and took them by lorry to Ponary. The Lithuanian unit Ypatingasis būrys, commanded by German NCOs of the Security Police, took part in the executions.

It is often said that 400 Jews were “killed by Lithuanian militias inside the ghetto”. This needs correcting: according to the testimonies collected by Yad Vashem, most of those detained died at Ponary, not in the ghetto. Those who died in the ghetto itself were people who resisted. During the action the Lithuanians discovered two hiding places on Szpitalna Street. The people hidden in one of them, led by Moshe Haus and a man remembered only as Goldstein, threw themselves at the policemen and were shot in the fight. Their act was an isolated one, but it was remembered in the ghetto. It was one of the first instances of active resistance in Wilno.

With this the round-up ended. According to Yad Vashem’s chronology, the period of the December actions closes on 22 December. In December, then, at least 850 people were taken from the ghetto to Ponary: about 150 in the criminal action, about 300 Gestapo workers and their relatives, and about 400 people without permits.

The balance of half a year

By the end of 1941, according to estimates by Yitzhak Arad, author of the standard monograph on the ghetto, about 33,500 Jews had been killed in Wilno. Some 3,500 had managed to flee into the interior of the USSR in the summer, and about 20,000 remained in the ghetto. Lithuanian studies calculate that of the 57,000 Jews in the city in June 1941, 33,500 had been murdered by the end of December. The discrepancies arise because it is not known exactly how many refugees from German-occupied Poland were in Wilno when the German-Soviet war broke out. Other estimates, based on a higher population figure, speak of more than 50,000 murdered before the end of the year.

These crimes were documented in detail from several sides. The German perpetrators kept statistics of the executions. In the ghetto the librarian Herman Kruk kept a diary in which he recorded each action, the rumours and the mood. On the edge of the forest at Ponary the Polish journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz noted down what he saw and heard from his house: lorries arriving, columns of people being driven along, and the sound of shots. His notes, hidden in his garden, were found and published only decades later.

Place in the war

The December actions ended the period of mass round-ups in Wilno. From January 1942 to the spring of 1943 no action on the scale of those of autumn 1941 was carried out in the ghetto. The inhabitants called this time the “stabilisation”, or the quiet period. The Germans needed workers for the Wehrmacht and for industry, and Jacob Gens, commander of the Jewish police and from July 1942 head of the ghetto, argued that work would save at least some of its inhabitants. The repression did not stop: illegal trading, forged documents or hiding outside the ghetto still meant Łukiszki and Ponary. In February 1942, according to surviving tallies, the ghetto numbered about 17,000 people, of whom some 3,000 were still living there illegally.

At the same time communal life in the ghetto revived. Schools, a library and a hospital operated, and in January 1942 the first theatre performance took place, despite the protests of those who said that one does not put on plays in a cemetery. Some of the young people drew a different conclusion from the autumn actions. On 1 January 1942 Abba Kovner read out at a meeting of Zionist youth a proclamation in which he wrote that Ponary meant death and that Hitler intended to murder all the Jews of Europe, and called on them not to let themselves be led “like sheep to the slaughter”. Three weeks later the United Partisan Organisation was founded, one of the first Jewish armed organisations in occupied Europe.

December 1941 was also the moment when the killings in the East began to turn into the planned annihilation of all the Jews of the continent. On 8 December the shooting of the inhabitants of the Riga ghetto in the Rumbula forest outside the city was completed, and at Chełmno nad Nerem in the Warthegau the Germans began for the first time to murder Jews in gas vans. A conference of Reich officials on the “Final Solution”, called by Reinhard Heydrich for 9 December, was postponed and took place on 20 January 1942 at Wannsee.

The Wilno Ghetto survived until September 1943. When it was liquidated, those fit for work were sent to camps in Estonia and Latvia, and the elderly, women and children to their deaths in extermination camps or at Ponary. Franz Murer, sentenced in Wilno in 1948 by a Soviet court to 25 years in the Gulag, returned to Austria in 1955, and in 1963 a jury court in Graz acquitted him. Wilno, before the war one of the most important centres of Jewish culture in Europe, known as the “Jerusalem of the North”, lost almost its entire Jewish community: according to the American historian Timothy Snyder, of some 70,000 Wilno Jews about 7,000 survived the war.