The Yom Kippur actions in the Wilno Ghetto

1 October 1941 was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. The festival had begun the previous evening, and from the morning the prayer houses in both Wilno ghettos, sealed less than four weeks earlier, were full. At noon Germans and Lithuanian policemen entered the small ghetto under the command of Horst Schweinenberg (also given in the sources as Schweinberger), an officer of the German Security Police who a month earlier had directed the Great Provocation. People were dragged out of synagogues and flats and driven to Łukiszki prison. In the afternoon Schweinenberg demanded that the Jewish council of the large ghetto hand over a thousand people by 7.30 p.m. When he did not get them, the Germans and Lithuanians went in there too. So began a series of actions in which, within three weeks, the small ghetto ceased to exist and tens of thousands of Wilno Jews understood that a work permit was no sure protection for anyone.

In popular chronologies these actions appear under two dates. Under 1 October they state that 3,900 Jews were seized in four separate round-ups and shot at Ponary, and another 2,000 over the next two days. Under 16 October they speak of an action in which 3,000 people were killed. These figures correspond to estimates based on Jewish accounts and cited by Yad Vashem and the Association of Jews of Vilna and Vicinity in Israel: 2,200 people taken from the large ghetto on 1 October and 1,700 from the small one, 2,000 from the small ghetto on 3–4 October and 3,000 on 15–16 October. The reference to “four round-ups” cannot be confirmed. The German tally of executions gives considerably lower figures, as discussed below.

Two ghettos before the holidays

From 6 September the Jews of Wilno had lived in two parts of the Old Town walled off from the rest of the city and separated by Niemiecka (German) Street. Some 29,000–30,000 people remained in the large ghetto and about 11,000 in the small one. Within a few days this division turned out to be a selection. People with work permits, the so-called Scheine, were moved from the small ghetto to the large one, and the old, the sick and those not working for the Germans from the large to the small. The action of 15 September, after which only about 600 of some 3,000 people sent to the small ghetto actually arrived there, showed what awaited those without permits. Yet few accepted that those taken away were dead. Six women who had survived an execution at Ponary (Paneriai) in the first days of September and made their way back to the city told the staff of the Jewish hospital and Jacob Gens what they had seen, but the news was kept secret. Rumours still circulated in the ghetto about labour camps to which those taken were supposedly being sent.

At the end of September the councils of the two ghettos met to agree on a common course. According to Yad Vashem’s findings, the chairman of the large ghetto’s council, Anatol Fried, rejected close cooperation: three-quarters of the inhabitants of his ghetto were of working age, whereas the old and sick predominated in the small ghetto, so a shared fate could, in his view, only harm the large ghetto. The leadership of the large ghetto believed that the annihilation of some of the Jews could not be avoided and that a ghetto of people the Germans needed for work had to be preserved in order to save as many of them as possible. The police forces of the two ghettos did, however, begin to cooperate, and Gens, commander of the large ghetto’s police, also took over supervision of the small ghetto’s police. The small ghetto’s council was headed by Ajzyk Lejbowicz.

By then the occupiers had the whole system mapped out. The German civil administration of the Reichskommissariat Ostland in Wilno, with the district commissioner Hans Christian Hingst and his deputy for Jewish affairs Franz Murer, decided how many workers the economy and the army needed. The Security Police and SD, including a detachment of Einsatzkommando 3 commanded by Karl Jäger, dealt with “the rest”. The round-ups and shootings were carried out mainly by Lithuanian volunteers of the Ypatingasis būrys under the supervision of a few Germans. In the autumn of 1941 a wave of executions was sweeping the small towns all over Lithuania: in the second half of September alone Jäger’s commandos murdered the Jewish populations of, among other places, Niemenczyn (Nemenčinė), Nowa Wilejka (Naujoji Vilnia), Ejszyszki (Eišiškės) and Troki (Trakai).

Yom Kippur

The choice of day was no accident. The Germans repeatedly carried out actions on Jewish holidays, when people gathered in prayer houses and at home rather than at their workplaces. In the small ghetto, according to Yad Vashem, the Germans and Lithuanians rounded up some 1,700 people and marched them to Łukiszki.

In the large ghetto events took a different course, and one more shattering for the people there. When the council failed to hand over the people demanded, Germans and Lithuanians entered the ghetto and began taking residents from their homes. Holders of work permits, convinced that they were protected, presented themselves at the gate with their families of their own accord. But they too were taken. According to Yad Vashem, about 2,200 people were stopped at the gate and marched to Łukiszki, many of them holders of Scheine; most of those without permits managed to hide. As histories of the ghetto record, the Jewish police of the large ghetto took part in an action for the first time. In the following days up to 800 people, according to various sources, were got out of the prison: some at the request of the German units and institutions that employed them, some through bribes paid to Germans and Lithuanians. The rest were taken to Ponary and shot.

The Yom Kippur action shook the foundation on which the ghetto’s hope rested. Until then it had seemed that whoever worked was needed and would survive. Now it turned out that even the “golden” Schein might not be enough. From then on the number of hiding places grew in the ghetto – known, from Polish thieves’ slang, as maliny: cellars, attics and rooms walled up behind wardrobes, in which people waited out the actions.

The liquidation of the small ghetto

After Yom Kippur the Germans turned to the small ghetto. On 3–4 October some 2,000 people were taken from it, according to Jewish estimates. During one of the October actions in the small ghetto the Germans told those being led out that they were going to a “third ghetto” that was short of workers. When the people saw the column turning towards Łukiszki, some lay down in the road and refused to go any further. Eighteen-year-old Mosze Frumkin shouted to his companions not to give in and to run into the side streets. Chaos broke out; Schweinenberg ordered his men to open fire. According to accounts collected by Yad Vashem, several dozen people were killed and the rest were forced to carry the dead. Many, however, escaped.

The second action came in the middle of the month, on 15–16 October, as the festival of Sukkot was ending with its last days, Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. It is this action that chronologies place under 16 October. Despite the earlier actions, and although the old and sick were still being transferred to the small ghetto from the large one, there was as yet no sense in the ghetto that the end was approaching. People went out to work in the city every morning. According to Jewish sources, about 3,000 people were taken to Ponary this time.

The third and last action took place on 21 October. According to Yad Vashem, some 2,500 people were then taken to Ponary and murdered. The small ghetto ceased to exist. Between 2,000 and 3,000 of its inhabitants survived by hiding in their hiding places or getting through to the large ghetto. The deserted houses around Żydowska (Jewish), Szklana and Gaona streets, with the Great Synagogue, were left empty for the time being; at the end of the month the occupiers used them once more in a further action, this time against the inhabitants of the large ghetto.

What the Jäger Report says

The most important German document from these weeks is the Jäger Report, a tally of Einsatzkommando 3’s executions compiled on 1 December 1941. For Wilno it contains no entry for 1 or 2 October. Under 4 October it records 432 men, 1,115 women and 436 children, a total of 1,983 people; under 16 October 382 men, 507 women and 257 children, a total of 1,146; under 21 October 718 men, 1,063 women and 586 children, a total of 2,367. The preponderance of women and children in these figures matches the people the occupiers had concentrated in the small ghetto.

The discrepancy between the report and the accounts is large: Jewish sources speak of some 11,400 people taken in the actions of 1–21 October, the report of fewer than 5,500 killed. It is not known exactly which round-ups the entry for 4 October covers, just as similar discrepancies for the September actions have not been fully explained. Some people were released from Łukiszki, some survived in hiding and were later counted as deported, and estimates by people shut in the ghetto who did not witness the executions may have been inflated. On the other hand, the Jäger Report, compiled for superiors, contains arithmetical errors and need not have covered everyone who was killed. Historians such as Yitzhak Arad base their overall estimates of the ghetto’s losses mainly on this document, noting that other studies give higher figures.

Place in the war

The Yom Kippur actions and the liquidation of the small ghetto fell in the weeks when the annihilation of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories reached a new scale. Two days before Yom Kippur, on 29–30 September, the Germans shot more than 33,000 Jews in the ravine of Babi Yar near Kiev. In Lithuania, where the murder of Jews had begun immediately after the Wehrmacht marched in in June, Jäger’s commandos were then completing the destruction of the communities of the small towns. The ghettos in Wilno and Kaunas were to survive as reservoirs of labour, but only at the size the Germans considered necessary. At the same time Jews in the Reich were marked with the Star of David, and in mid-October the first deportation transports left Germany, Austria, the Protectorate and Luxembourg for the east.

For the large ghetto the lessons of October were cruel. Fried’s council and Gens’s police concluded that salvation lay in work and obedience, and that meant that in future actions the ghetto itself would help to separate the “needed” from the “superfluous”. The occupiers took the next step in the second half of October: they cancelled the existing permits and issued a small number of new, yellow ones for skilled workers and their immediate families. On 24 October actions began against those who had not received them. By the end of 1941, according to Arad’s estimates, some 33,500 Wilno Jews had been killed; about 20,000 remained in the ghetto.

The memory of the Day of Atonement 1941 survived in the ghetto as one of its heaviest recollections. When on 1 January 1942 young activists of the Zionist movements gathered in Straszuna Street, the manifesto of Abba Kovner, which called on Jews not to be led “like sheep to the slaughter”, asked plainly where the Jews taken on the Day of Atonement were, and where their brothers from the second ghetto were. The answer it gave was that all Gestapo roads lead to Ponary, and Ponary is death. A few weeks later the United Partisan Organisation was founded. On 1 December 1941 Murer handed over the area of the small ghetto to the Wilno municipality to be prepared for non-Jewish residents. After the war the Great Synagogue, around which the weakest of Wilno’s Jews had lived in the autumn of 1941, was demolished, and on the site of the former small ghetto little recalls what happened there in October 1941.