The yellow permits action

On the morning of 24 October 1941 families lined up at the gate of the Wilno (Vilnius) Ghetto on Rudnicka Street: a man or a woman holding a yellow work permit, and beside them a spouse and at most two children. The Germans had ordered the holders of the new documents to leave the ghetto with their families for their workplaces. Anyone not entered on a yellow Schein stayed inside. Once the columns had left, Germans and Lithuanian policemen entered the ghetto and began searching houses, cellars and attics. According to Yad Vashem, that day they seized 4,000–5,000 people without permits and took them to Łukiszki prison, from where they were taken to Ponary (Paneriai) and shot. Three days after the liquidation of the small ghetto, the occupiers had begun to “sift” the large ghetto in this way. The actions against people without permits continued, with interruptions, until 22 December.

Popular war chronologies record this action under two dates. Under 24 October they state that 5,500 Jews, including 140 elderly and paralysed people, died in the “yellow permits action”. This figure falls within the range of estimates: Yad Vashem speaks of 4,000–5,000 seized that day, the chronology of the Association of Vilna and Vicinity Jews in Israel of about 5,000, and some German researchers of 5,000–8,000. The detail about 140 elderly and paralysed people is not confirmed in the available studies. Under 29 October the chronologies state that ghetto no. 2 was liquidated that day and 2,500 Jews were killed. This is a mistake: the small ghetto was liquidated on 21 October, and it was then, according to Yad Vashem, that about 2,500 of its last inhabitants were taken to Ponary, at the end of the Yom Kippur actions. On 29 October a different crime took place, connected with the deserted area of the former small ghetto, described below.

The yellow permits

After the Yom Kippur action the inhabitants of the ghetto knew that the white work permits issued until then did not guarantee protection. In the second half of October the Germans cancelled them and introduced new, yellow permits for skilled workers employed in the factories, offices and units that the occupiers considered necessary. According to Jewish sources, about 3,000 were issued. The holder of a yellow Schein could enter on it a spouse and two children under 16. In this way about 12,000 people were counted as “legal” inhabitants of the ghetto. Roughly the same number were left with no protection at all.

The permits were distributed by German employers, and the Jewish council received only a small allocation for its own employees. Jacob Gens, commander of the Jewish police, asked the Germans for permits for everyone employed by the council, but according to Yad Vashem he received only 400. A council committee decided who was to get them. The ghetto doctor Mark Dworzecki, later one of the pioneers of research into medicine during the Holocaust, described after the war how he and a colleague, Dr Kolocner, waited in a dark corridor of the council building for the decision. Both knew that a permit for one meant a death sentence for the other. Dworzecki received yellow Schein number 777 and, as he wrote, was ashamed to raise his eyes, but he took it.

The ghetto was gripped by fever. People entered into fictitious marriages with permit holders and “adopted” other people’s children; younger brothers were registered as sons, fathers as husbands, mothers as wives. Some Schein holders demanded money for registering others, and prices rose; there were people who gave away everything they had. At the same time everyone entered on a permit had to choose which of their relatives to leave off it: parents, brothers and sisters, older children. Those who could prepared a hiding place, a malina, in a cellar, in an attic or behind a false wall.

24 October

On the day of the action the permit holders and their families gathered at the gate to go out to work. According to Yad Vashem, the Germans separated the council employees and their relatives and checked them; people not entered on permits were taken straight to Ponary, and the rest were let out to work. Then the round-up began. Lithuanian policemen and Germans smashed locks and doors, tapped walls and tore up floors. Thirteen-year-old Yitskhok Rudashevski, who sat out one of the yellow permit actions with his family and neighbours in a hiding place in the storerooms in the courtyard of 4 Szawelska Street, wrote in his diary that they felt “like animals surrounded by the hunter”: the banging and sawing came from below them, from above and from the sides. When a child began to cry in the hiding place, people in panic pressed pillows over its mouth. After a while the hunters went away. Those who were found were taken to Łukiszki.

The most precise German figures are given in the Jäger Report, the tally of executions carried out by Einsatzkommando 3. Under 25 October it records in Wilno 1,766 women and 812 children, 2,578 people in all, without a single man. Under 27 October it records 946 men, 184 women and 73 children, 1,203 people in all. Together this makes 3,781 murdered in the space of three days. The absence of men from the first entry matches the course of the action: men more often worked and held permits, while their wives, mothers and children, who could not be entered on any Schein, remained in the ghetto. The discrepancy between the report and the Jewish estimates is similar to that for the earlier actions and has not been fully explained.

29 October

After the first round-up, thousands of people without permits who had survived in hiding places were still in the large ghetto. The Germans ordered them to move to the area of the former small ghetto, deserted since 21 October. According to Yad Vashem, on 29 October the Germans surrounded the people who had been moved there, about 1,500 in all, and locked them up in Łukiszki; the following day they took them to Ponary and murdered them. The Jäger Report records under 30 October in Wilno 382 men, 789 women and 362 children, 1,533 people in all. It is this crime, committed in the area of the former ghetto no. 2, that lies behind the entry found in chronologies about “the liquidation of ghetto no. 2”; the figure of 2,500, on the other hand, refers to the action of 21 October.

November and December

The actions did not end in October. On 3 November the Germans ordered all holders of yellow permits and their families to move to the area of the former small ghetto. At the crossing point Gens and the Jewish policemen, supervised by Germans, checked documents and counted the members of each family. Dworzecki described how Gens pushed away with a stick a twelve-year-old boy, a surplus child in his family, and a moment later, shouting at another father that he had “lost his second son”, attached the same boy to a family with only one child. This is how the ghetto remembered Gens: a man who took part in the selections and at the same time tried to rescue from them whoever he could. Once the permit holders had crossed over, Germans and Lithuanians combed the large ghetto. According to the chronology of the Association of Vilna Jews, about 1,200 people died at that time, and the Jäger Report records 1,341 killed in Wilno under 6 November. After two days the permit holders returned to the large ghetto. No one checked them on their return, so people who had been hiding in the ruins of the small ghetto since 21 October came back with them.

In December the Germans introduced additional pink family permits. They went to family members of yellow Schein holders, as well as to skilled workers without a yellow permit, former community activists, rabbis and some of the intelligentsia; the council distributed about 1,600 of them. On 20–22 December Germans and Lithuanians seized about 400 people with no documents at all in the ghetto and took them to Ponary. During this action people concealed in a hiding place on Szpitalna Street threw themselves at the Lithuanian policemen; they were killed in the fight. After this action the great round-ups ceased. At the end of 1941, according to Yad Vashem, about 20,000 Jews were living in the ghetto, some of them illegally.

Place in the war

The yellow permits action was Wilno’s version of the selections that the Germans carried out in the autumn of 1941 in all the large ghettos of the occupied Reichskommissariat Ostland. The logic was the same everywhere: keep as many Jews as the war economy needed and kill the rest. In Kaunas (Kovno), during the so-called Great Action of 28 October, the Germans held a selection on Democrats’ Square in the ghetto, and the next day, according to the Jäger Report, they shot 9,200 people at the Ninth Fort, including 4,273 children; in Riga, at the end of November and the beginning of December, most of the inhabitants of the ghetto there were murdered in the Rumbula forest. That same autumn mass executions were taking place across the occupied Polish and Soviet territories, from the Bloody Sunday in Stanisławów to the Odessa massacre, and the Jewish populations of one town after another vanished into pits, as the Jews of Wilno did at Ponary.

For Wilno, the October and December actions closed the first and bloodiest period of the occupation. By the end of 1941, according to Yitzhak Arad’s estimates, about 33,500 Wilno Jews had been killed. From the spring of 1942 to the summer of 1943 there was relative calm in the ghetto. The survivors worked in German factories and for the army, and the workers of the Kailis fur factory lived with their families in a closed labour camp outside the ghetto. Later, in 1943, Major Karl Plagge, head of an army vehicle repair works, set up a similar camp for his workers, thanks to which some of them survived the war. Gens, chairman of the council from July 1942, built in the ghetto a system based on work and obedience, believing that in this way he would save at least some of the people. The ghetto had schools, a theatre and a library, and the autumn of 1941 remained in memory as the time when a piece of yellow paper separated life from death.

Yet that same autumn gave rise to a different answer. In January 1942 young activists of the Zionist movements and communists founded the United Partisan Organisation, which collected weapons and prepared to fight when the time came for the ghetto to be liquidated. In July 1943 the Germans demanded that its commander, Itzik Wittenberg, be handed over; under pressure from the ghetto’s inhabitants, who feared reprisals, Wittenberg gave himself up and was killed. In September 1943, after Gens had been shot by the Gestapo, the ghetto was liquidated: men and women fit for work were deported to camps in Estonia and Latvia, while the elderly and the children were murdered. Some of the fighters made their way to the partisans in the surrounding forests. The yellow permits, which in October 1941 were supposed to decide who lived, proved to be no more than a stay of execution.