The founding of the FPO in the Wilno Ghetto

On 21 January 1942, in the flat of Josef Glazman, deputy commander of the Jewish police in the Wilno (Vilnius) Ghetto, representatives of four youth and political organisations that before the war had had little in common met together: the communists, the left-wing Zionist Hashomer Hatzair, the centrist Hanoar Hatzioni and the right-wing Revisionist Betar. They decided to join forces in a single armed organisation. They named it in Yiddish Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye, FPO for short – the United Partisan Organisation. The communist Yitzhak Wittenberg was elected commander, and the staff included Abba Kovner of Hashomer Hatzair, Glazman of Betar and Nissan Reznik of Hanoar Hatzioni. It was one of the first – and in the view of many historians the very first – Jewish armed resistance organisations in the ghettos of occupied Europe.

The date of the FPO’s founding is given variously. Most studies, including the work of the Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad, give 21 January 1942; Polish publications also cite 23 January, and the final shape of the organisation was approved at a further meeting in February.

Six months of Ponary

The organisation grew out of an experience that no other large Jewish community in Poland had yet been through. When the Germans took Wilno on 24 June 1941, several tens of thousands of Jews lived in the city – according to some estimates, together with refugees from the surrounding small towns, as many as about 70,000. From July German Einsatzkommando units and their Lithuanian auxiliaries took men to the forest at Ponary (Paneriai) outside the city and shot them there. On 6 September the Germans shut the rest into two ghettos, and in the autumn carried out a series of large-scale “actions”: on Yom Kippur, during the distribution of the yellow work permits, in November and in December. By the end of the year most of Wilno’s Jews had died at Ponary. The head of Einsatzkommando 3, Karl Jäger, reckoned in his report of 1 December 1941 that some 15,000 Jews needed for labour remained in Wilno, together with their families. At the beginning of 1942 just under 20,000 people were living in the ghetto, several thousand of them illegally, without permits or rations.

For a long time the ghetto’s inhabitants refused to believe that the deportees were dead. Rumours circulated of labour camps in Belarus and Russia, and the Judenrat and the Jewish police maintained that work for the Germans would protect at least some of the people. The truth was brought by the few survivors who, wounded, had crawled out of the pits at Ponary and returned to the ghetto. Their accounts were heard by activists of the youth movements, too, some of whom, like Kovner, had hidden in the summer of 1941 in a Dominican convent near Wilno, sheltered by its prioress, Anna Borkowska.

“Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter”

On New Year’s Eve, 31 December 1941, some 150 members of the Zionist pioneer organisations gathered in the ghetto in the premises of a public soup kitchen on Strashun Street. The gathering looked like a social occasion, but its purpose was to hear a manifesto written by the 23-year-old Kovner. Some accounts date the reading to 1 January 1942, because the meeting went on past midnight. The manifesto spoke plainly: Ponary was not a camp – everyone there had been shot. Hitler intended to murder all the Jews of Europe, and the Jews of Lithuania had been chosen to be the first in line. Rather than trusting in rescue, they had to defend themselves: “Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter!” It was true that they were weak and defenceless, the manifesto went on, but the only answer to the murderer was resistance.

Historians stress that this was one of the first texts in which the victims recognised the killings as part of a single plan directed against all the Jews of the continent, rather than as local pogroms. Not everyone in the ghetto believed it: many considered it an exaggeration or a dangerous provocation. Those present, however, accepted its central idea. Three weeks later the FPO was founded. The phrase about sheep led to the slaughter, taken from the Book of Isaiah and the Psalms, became for decades one of the best-known and most contested sentences in the history of the Holocaust.

The organisation

The FPO was intended to be a military organisation, not a party one. According to the principles it adopted, its aim was to prepare the armed self-defence of the ghetto in the event of its liquidation, to carry out sabotage in German factories and on the railways and, in the longer term, to move into partisan warfare and fight alongside the Red Army. Members were divided into cells of five, three of which formed a platoon; several platoons made up a battalion. Representatives of all the groups sat on the staff. In the spring of 1942 members of the Bund joined the FPO, which put an end to the quarrel between socialists and Zionists. A separate group, oriented more towards leaving for the forests than towards fighting in the ghetto, was formed by Yechiel Scheinbaum; it merged with the FPO only in 1943.

Weapons were obtained with difficulty: they were stolen from German depots where Jews worked, bought from Lithuanians and Poles, and smuggled into the ghetto, even in coffins and through the sewers. Grenades and incendiary bottles were made on the spot. By 1943 the organisation had some 300 members. It sent couriers, above all young women with “Aryan” papers, to the ghettos of Grodno, Białystok and Warsaw, carrying news of Ponary and the idea of resistance. In the summer of 1942 its members blew up a German military train near Wilno for the first time. FPO members employed by the German Rosenberg task force (Einsatzstab Rosenberg) to sort plundered Jewish book collections also hid the most valuable books and manuscripts in the ghetto; among them were the poets Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski. Also linked to the FPO was Hirsh Glik, author of the song “Zog nit keyn mol” (“Never say”), which became the anthem of the Jewish partisans.

The ghetto’s dilemma

From its first weeks the FPO had to work out its relations with Jacob Gens, commander of the Jewish police and, from July 1942, head of the ghetto. Gens, a former officer of the Lithuanian army, knew of the organisation. He tolerated it as long as it did not threaten the ghetto’s work, on which he based his entire strategy: the Germans, he argued, would not destroy a ghetto that paid its way, so people had to work and avoid provocation. January 1942 marked the beginning of a period of relative calm in the ghetto. After the December actions the great round-ups stopped for more than a year; schools, a library and a hospital operated, and on 18 January the first concert was held in the ghetto hall, despite protests from the Bund and some of the inhabitants, who put up leaflets declaring that one does not put on theatre in a graveyard. For Gens and the Judenrat this was a sign that the strategy of work was succeeding. For the founders of the FPO the calm was merely a pause to be used for preparations. In 1942 the two attitudes could coexist. They parted ways in 1943, when the ghetto faced the question of whether armed resistance saved people or brought destruction down upon them.

Place in the war

The FPO was founded the day after the Wannsee Conference, at which Reich officials co-ordinated the murder of the Jews of all Europe, and a few days after trains in the Warthegau began taking the inhabitants of the Łódź Ghetto to Chełmno. Its founders knew of neither event, but from what they had seen at Ponary they drew a conclusion that proved correct.

Wilno did not become the scene of a ghetto uprising. In July 1943 the Germans, who had picked up the trail of the communist underground, demanded that Wittenberg be handed over. On 15 July Gens summoned the FPO leaders and had Wittenberg arrested; the fighters freed him from the police. Gens, however, convinced the ghetto’s inhabitants that the Germans would destroy them all in reprisal, and the crowd turned against the organisation. On 16 July Wittenberg, to prevent Jews from fighting Jews, gave himself up to the Gestapo and soon died in prison: according to some accounts he took poison, according to others he was tortured to death. Kovner became commander of the FPO. From 24 July groups of fighters began leaving for the forests. When the Germans began liquidating the ghetto on 1 September 1943, the FPO’s call to arms went unanswered; there was only a skirmish on Strashun Street, in which Scheinbaum was killed. Gens was shot by the Gestapo on 14 September. On 23 September, the day of the ghetto’s final liquidation, Kovner led the last group of fighters through the sewers to the Rudniki Forest. Glazman was killed in October 1943 fighting the Germans in the forests of Belarus.

Several hundred FPO fighters fought until July 1944 in Jewish units of the Soviet partisan movement and entered Wilno together with the Red Army. The idea that Kovner had formulated also survived. Carried by couriers to Białystok and Warsaw – among them Arie Wilner, Kovner’s companion from the Dominican convent, who in Warsaw became the Jewish Combat Organisation’s representative to the Home Army – it became one of the sources of the resistance that broke out in April 1943 in the Warsaw Ghetto and in August 1943 in the Białystok Ghetto.