The Wilno Ghetto

From early on the morning of Saturday 6 September 1941, German and Lithuanian policemen went from house to house throughout Wilno (Vilnius), ordering the Jews to leave their homes within a few minutes, half an hour at most. With bundles on their backs, with children and old people, tens of thousands of people walked under escort to a block of streets in the Old Town which the occupiers had emptied a few days earlier by murdering its inhabitants at Ponary. By the evening some 40,000 Jews were inside two ghettos cut off from the rest of the city and separated from each other by Niemiecka (German) Street: around 29,000–30,000 in the so-called large ghetto (Ghetto No. 1) and around 10,000–11,000 in the small one (Ghetto No. 2). Not everyone reached the gate, however. Several thousand people, around 6,000 according to Jewish sources, were diverted on the way to Łukiszki prison. According to a German list of executions, on 12 September more than 3,300 Jews from Wilno, most of them women and children, were shot at Ponary. Thus was created the Wilno Ghetto, in which over the next two years one of the largest and most celebrated Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, the “Jerusalem of the North”, was destroyed.

Popular chronologies record events in the Wilno Ghetto under three dates: 3, 6 and 15 September. Each of these entries needs qualifying. Under 3 September they state that on that day the murder at Ponary of all 3,700 inhabitants of the old Jewish quarter began, together with ten members of the Judenrat. In fact this was the culmination of the so-called Great Provocation: the round-ups had been going on since 31 August, and the main execution, in which 3,700 people were killed according to a German report, took place on 2 September; the members of the Jewish council were also arrested that day. Under 6 September the chronologies speak of 6,000 Jews shot at Ponary “the day after the order to create the ghetto”. The order to resettle and the resettlement itself, however, fell on the same day, 6 September; around 6,000 is an estimate of the number of people detained during the resettlement, and the German report recorded their execution only on 12 September and gave a figure half as large. Finally, under 15 September they describe a “resettlement action” in which, of 3,500 Jews being moved between the two parts of the ghetto, only 550 arrived and 2,950 were shot. These figures are approximate: Yad Vashem states that around 3,000 people reported at the gate and around 600 were moved to the small ghetto.

After the Great Provocation

For two months after the Wehrmacht’s entry on 24 June the Jews of Wilno still lived throughout the city, though marked with armbands, deprived of their rights and decimated by round-ups. The decision to confine them in a ghetto was taken by the German civil administration, which assumed power in Lithuania in August 1941. The country was incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ostland, and the provisional guidelines of Reich Commissioner Hinrich Lohse envisaged isolating the Jews in ghettos and using them for forced labour. In Wilno this policy was carried out by the district commissioner (Gebietskommissar) Hans Christian Hingst and his deputy for Jewish affairs, the Austrian Franz Murer. The site chosen for the ghetto was the historic Jewish quarter between Wielka, Niemiecka and Dominikańska streets, with its narrow lanes, its synagogue and the famous Strashun Library. Several thousand people lived there at the time, most of them poor Jews. The occupiers decided to get rid of them first.

The pretext was supplied by a staged incident on 31 August: shots fired from the window of a building on the corner of Wielka and Szklana streets, which were blamed on the Jews. Over the next three days Germans, Lithuanian policemen and members of the Ypatingasis būrys unit dragged whole families from their homes and drove them to Łukiszki, and from there to the forest at Ponary. On 1 September a proclamation by Hingst appeared in the local press: the “reprisal” was to apply to all Jews, who until further notice were forbidden to leave their homes from three in the afternoon until ten in the morning, except those sent to work. On 2 September, according to the report of Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3, 864 men, 2,019 women and 817 children, 3,700 people in all, were shot at Ponary. Jewish sources speak of 5,000, and some studies of as many as 8,000 murdered between 31 August and 3 September; the German list probably included only the largest execution. On the same day an officer of the German Security Police, Horst Schweinenberg (also given in the sources as Schweinberger), took a dozen or so people from the offices of the Jewish council, among them ten members of the first Judenrat with its chairman, Shaul Trocki. All of them were killed at Ponary. The community lost its representatives a few days before the occupiers’ most important operation.

Some lists also record under 3 September “the first written testimony of a survivor” of Ponary. It is not known which document is meant; the phrase is often repeated but is not confirmed by historians of the ghetto. What is known is that in the first days of September six lightly wounded women and girls who had survived the execution, lain beneath the bodies of the dead and crawled out of the pits at night, returned to the city. With the help of local peasants they reached Wilno and were taken to the Jewish hospital. Their accounts were among the first direct testimonies that Ponary was not a labour camp but a killing site. According to historians of the ghetto, the hospital’s management, and later the Jewish police, tried to keep them secret, fearing panic and German revenge on the witnesses. Knowledge of what was happening at Ponary therefore spread slowly and for many months was mixed with the hope that those taken away were still alive. A systematic record of Ponary was kept from July by the Polish journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz, who lived next to the execution site, but he was not a survivor but an outside witness, and his notes were found only after the war.

The mention found in some lists of an order requiring the Jews to hand over their gold and silver also calls for comment. The best-documented levy imposed on the Jews of Wilno was the “contribution” demanded by Murer on 6 August 1941: 5 million roubles, 2 million of it by the next morning. The terrified community collected money, gold and watches through district committees; according to Yad Vashem, Murer ultimately received about 1.49 million roubles, 16.5 kilograms of gold and 189 watches, without any receipt. Many believed that the ransom would save the lives of the men who had been detained, who were in fact already dead. In September the robbery took another form: the people driven into the ghetto could take only what they could carry, and the flats, shops and workshops they left behind were taken over by the occupiers and the city. As early as 25 September the Wilno municipal authorities reported to the district commissioner that 429 Jewish flats and 71 workshops had been seized. The date of 3 September for a separate order to hand over gold and silver cannot be confirmed in the available sources.

Two ghettos

Between 3 and 5 September the deserted quarter was fenced off from the rest of the city with wooden fences and barbed wire, and the ends of the streets were sealed. The Germans divided the district into two parts. The large ghetto took in Rudnicka, Jatkowa, Oszmiańska, Szpitalna, Straszuna, Dziśnieńska, Szawelska and neighbouring streets, with its entrance gate on Rudnicka Street. The small ghetto occupied the oldest part of the former Jewish quarter, around Żydowska, Szklana, Gaona and Antokolskiego streets, with the Great Synagogue. They were separated by Niemiecka Street, which was excluded from the ghetto so that troops and vehicles could pass freely through the city centre. An area in which a few thousand people had lived before the war was now to hold ten times as many.

Which ghetto a person ended up in was decided by where they lived, and in practice by chance. People from some districts were sent to the large ghetto, those from others to the small one, and the residents of certain streets straight to Łukiszki. Most of the workers with work certificates found themselves in the large ghetto, while more of the old, the sick and those not employed by the Germans went to the small one. Within a few weeks this division, seemingly administrative, turned out to be a death sentence.

6 September

The resettlement began without warning. Soldiers and Lithuanian policemen entered flats and gave families a few minutes to pack. Vehicles were not allowed; people took only what they could carry. The librarian and Bund activist Herman Kruk, a refugee from Warsaw who throughout the occupation kept a chronicle of the Wilno Ghetto, noted at two in the afternoon that day that on the market square people had been given five minutes to pack, that they were dragging bundles wrapped in sheets, that soldiers were driving them “like cattle”, and that the march to the ghetto went on for hours. Thirteen-year-old Yitskhok Rudashevski wrote in his diary that people wept as they looked at the bundles they were unable to carry, and that the Lithuanian policemen would not let them stop. Some non-Jewish neighbours sympathised with those being driven out; some kept their belongings for them or, for payment, helped carry their luggage, while others snatched bundles from their hands or waited for abandoned property. It was raining; many people, lacking the strength to carry their loads any further, left their luggage by the roadside. Samuel Bak, then eight years old and later a well-known painter, recalled that Jews were not allowed to walk on the pavement, so the columns trudged along the road through puddles, and the pillow he was carrying soaked up so much water that in the end he threw it away.

The first to arrive found the flats of those murdered a few days earlier, with half-eaten meals on the tables and photographs on the walls. Later there was no room left. People slept in courtyards, gateways, stairwells and cellars, a dozen or more to a room. Kruk described his first night in the ghetto, spent in a damp cellar on top of bundles, in a “cage” into which ever more people were being pushed from the city. The poet Abraham Sutzkever wrote at the time the poem The First Night in the Ghetto, in which the first night in the ghetto is the first night in the grave.

At the same time a selection was under way. Columns from certain streets, such as Mickiewicza or Portowa, were led straight to Łukiszki. According to accounts gathered by historians, some 3,000 Jews who were walking to the large ghetto from the area of Nowogródzka Street were turned into Lidzka Street and taken to the prison, while columns from other directions entered the ghetto. On the night of 6–7 September Germans entered the overcrowded ghetto, took away people camping in the streets on the pretext that they had come there “by mistake” and were to move to the other ghetto, and likewise led them off to Łukiszki. Yad Vashem estimates the total number of people detained during the resettlement at around 6,000.

The most reliable figure for those murdered is given by the Jäger Report, the list of executions carried out by Einsatzkommando 3, compiled on 1 December 1941. Under the date of 12 September it records in the “city of Wilna” 993 Jewish men, 1,670 Jewish women and 771 children. These figures add up to 3,434, although the report entered 3,334; it is one of several arithmetical errors in the document. The discrepancy between the roughly 6,000 detained and the figure in the report has not been fully explained. Some people may have been ransomed or released at the request of German employers, others may have died in other executions, and estimates based on testimonies may be too high. The statement found in chronologies that 6,000 were shot “the day after the order” thus combines an estimate of the number detained with a date that does not correspond to the execution.

New councils and the Jewish police

On 7 September the Germans appointed a separate five-member Jewish council for each ghetto. In the large ghetto it was headed by Anatol Fried, one of the few surviving members of the first Judenrat, and its members were well-known community activists. The council of the small ghetto, led by Ajzyk Lejbowicz, was made up of people chosen at random. Both councils were to allocate housing, organise food, health care and, above all, work, while at the same time carrying out the occupiers’ orders. The council of the large ghetto had its seat on Rudnicka Street. A Jewish police force, the Jewish Order Service, was also created in both ghettos. Fried appointed as police commander of the large ghetto Jacob Gens, a former captain in the Lithuanian army who had been running the Jewish hospital since July. Gens, convinced that some of the Jews could be saved only by working for the Germans and by obedience, was to play a decisive role in the ghetto over the next two years, one that is judged in sharply differing ways to this day.

The first days were spent fighting for a corner to sleep in, for water and bread. Food rations were at starvation level and bringing food in from the city was forbidden on pain of death; even so, workers returning from their jobs smuggled whatever they could through the gate. As early as 18 September Kruk noted that Jewish policemen at the gate were taking money to let parcels through and to bring in from the city bundles that Jews had left with Christian acquaintances. The real document of life became the work certificate, the so-called Schein, issued by German offices, military units and firms employing Jews. Those who had one considered themselves protected; those who did not lived in fear of every “action”. Lithuanian policemen, however, were known to tear up a certificate during a street check and take its holder straight to prison.

Despite the terror, the ghetto tried to live from its first weeks: Kruk set up a library on Straszuna Street, the hospital kept working, and services were held in the prayer houses. In time the ghetto, called the “Jerusalem of the ghettos”, became famous for its theatre, schools and archives, kept up in the shadow of the executions.

The “resettlement action” of 15 September

The first great “action” in the new ghettos came less than ten days later. On 15 September the Jewish police announced in the large ghetto that everyone without a work certificate had to move to the small ghetto that very evening. According to Yad Vashem, around 3,000 people turned up at the gate with their bundles, but only around 600 were taken through to the small ghetto. The rest were led away by Germans and Lithuanian policemen to Łukiszki, and from there to Ponary. Under the date of 17 September the Jäger Report records the execution in Wilno of 337 Jewish men, 687 Jewish women, 247 children and 4 Lithuanian communists, entering a total of 1,271 people (the figures add up to 1,275). These were most probably the victims of the action of 15 September, although, as with 12 September, the difference between the number of people detained at the gate and the number killed in the report remains unexplained. The figures given in chronologies (3,500 being moved, 550 moved and 2,950 killed) are of the same order of magnitude as Jewish testimonies, but are not precisely confirmed in the scholarly literature.

After this action the transfers between the ghettos continued: the old and the sick were moved from the large ghetto to the small one, and holders of work certificates from the small one to the large. The division became ever sharper. The small ghetto became a concentration of people whom the occupiers deemed superfluous, and its inhabitants did not yet know what that meant. Many still believed that those taken away from Łukiszki were working in a camp somewhere.

Place in the war

The Wilno ghettos were created in the same weeks as the other large ghettos of occupied Lithuania and Latvia: the Kaunas ghetto in Vilijampolė was sealed on 15 August, and the Riga ghetto at the end of October. Everywhere the ghetto served above all for selection: the occupiers separated those fit for work from those they deemed superfluous, and murdered the latter in successive “actions”. In the east, where since the attack on the USSR the squads of the Einsatzgruppen and their local helpers had been shooting Jews by the hundred and the thousand, the ghetto was a holding pen for those who were still allowed to live for a while. All this happened at the same time as the Jews in the Reich were marked with the Star of David, and at the summit of power Reinhard Heydrich, under an authorisation from Hermann Göring, was preparing a “total solution of the Jewish question”.

The autumn of 1941 was the most terrible period of the occupation for the Jews of Wilno. On 1 October, the day of Yom Kippur, Germans and Lithuanians under Schweinenberg’s command took several thousand people from both ghettos; for the first time the Jewish police itself helped round up the victims, including holders of work certificates. In three further actions, up to 21 October, the whole small ghetto was liquidated. In the second half of October the Germans cancelled the existing certificates and issued only 3,000 “yellow Scheins”, each of which protected a worker, his or her spouse and no more than two children. People without them were murdered in actions that went on until 22 December. By the end of 1941, according to estimates by Yitzhak Arad based mainly on the Jäger Report, some 33,500 Wilno Jews had been killed, and other studies give higher figures. Around 20,000 people remained in the ghetto, some of them living there illegally.

It was this autumn that gave birth to organised resistance in the ghetto. On 1 January 1942 the young Zionist activist Abba Kovner read out at a meeting of young people a manifesto in which he wrote that Ponary was not a camp, that all those taken away had been shot, that Hitler intended to murder all the Jews of Europe and that the Jews of Lithuania were first in line; he urged them not to let themselves be led “like sheep to the slaughter”. That same month the United Partisan Organisation was formed, one of the first armed resistance organisations in the ghettos. From the spring of 1942 to the spring of 1943, while the ghetto under Gens, chairman of the council from July 1942, worked for the German war economy, there were no large actions in Wilno. In the summer of 1943, however, Himmler ordered the liquidation of the ghettos in the east. On 14 September 1943 the Gestapo shot Gens, and on 23–24 September the ghetto was liquidated: men fit for work were deported to camps in Estonia, women to camps in Latvia, and children, the old and the sick were murdered at Ponary or sent to extermination camps. Some of the fighters escaped to join the partisans in the surrounding forests. Herman Kruk died in September 1944 in the Lagedi camp in Estonia, the day before the Red Army arrived; the notes he had buried were found after the war.

Of the several tens of thousands of Jews who lived in Wilno in June 1941, a few thousand survived the war: those hiding in the city and the countryside, partisans, a few survivors of the camps, among them several hundred workers whom the German major Karl Plagge protected in his vehicle repair works until July 1944. Murer, who stood trial in Graz in 1963, was acquitted. The Wilno Ghetto, with its theatre, library, chronicles and resistance movement, has remained one of the best-documented and most moving testimonies of the Holocaust, and in the memory of the Jews of Wilno 6 September 1941 is the day on which the “Jerusalem of the North” was shut away behind barbed wire.