The heroes and the tragedy of Vilna

By Paul R. Bartrop, Professor Emeritus of History, Florida Gulf Coast University

Early on Sept. 1, 1943 — 80 years ago this month — the Vilna ghetto was surrounded by German and Estonian security forces who began arresting Jews and removing them from the ghetto. This was the culmination of an action that had begun on Aug. 6, when SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered that the Germans commence the deportation of Vilna’s Jews to Estonia. The Germans demanded that the Jewish Council (Judenrat) provide 3,000 men and 2,000 women for deportation to Estonia.

Immediately, the Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye (United Partisan Organization or FPO), led by Yitzhak Wittenberg, issued a general call to arms.

Inspired by the Warsaw ghetto fighters who rose in rebellion in April 1943, the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (FPO) was organized in the ghetto on Jan. 21, 1942, led by Wittenberg, Abba Kovner and Josef Glazman. The group was one of the first resistance groups to form in a ghetto in Nazi-occupied territory during World War II.

The FPO hid weapons for self-defense throughout the ghetto, with Kovner making the call to the remaining inhabitants of the ghetto: “Hitler plans to destroy all the Jews of Europe, and the Jews of Lithuania have been chosen as the first in line. We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter! True, we are weak and defenseless, but the only reply to the murderer is revolt!”

After World War I, both Lithuania and Poland had claims on Vilna (in Lithuania, modern-day Vilnius), and it was part of Poland prior to World War II. After the Germans and Soviets signed their nonaggression pact in August 1939, Vilna, along with the rest of eastern Poland, was handed over to Soviet occupation. The Soviets in turn, then considered Vilna to be part of Lithuania.

A city of 200,000 people, 30% of whom were Jewish, Vilna was known as the “Jerusalem of the North,” with 106 synagogues, despite a 60% Catholic presence. Approximately 265,000 Jews lived in various parts of Lithuania at the time of German occupation in 1941, though the majority were in Vilna.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Vilna was quickly overrun. Nazi administrators and policemen were not far behind the German army. By July 1941, the Nazis had implemented a series of antisemitic laws in Vilna and the rest of Lithuania, and soon after this, mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen together with Lithuanian collaborators, began to murder the Jewish population.

In short order, they were responsible for the murder of 5,000 Jewish men in the Ponary Forest, eight miles outside of Vilna. Such killings at Ponary would continue well into 1944, resulting in the death of over 100,000 people. Of these, approximately 70,000 were Jews.

In June 1943, Himmler issued his first instructions for the ghetto’s liquidation, which commenced on Sept. 1, 1943. The FPO found their moment, just as the Germans were closing in and entering the ghetto to begin the deportations. Many of the fighters stepped forward, but about 100 who had mobilized around secret arms caches were surrounded by German troops before they managed to arm themselves. Their subsequent removal was a bitter blow to the already small FPO force.

Unfortunately for the FPO, the ghetto inhabitants did not respond. Yechiel Scheinbaum, a fighter who led his own underground force known as the “Yechiel Group,” was one of the first casualties. Jacob Gens, the leader of the Judenrat, refused to support the revolt.

Following an order of Rudolf Neugebauer, the Nazi head of the Vilna Gestapo, the ghetto was liquidated on Sept. 23-24, 1943, under the command of Oberscharführer (Sergeant First Class) Bruno Kittel.

The FPO fighters were defeated quickly, and Kovner’s proclamation calling on the Jews of the ghetto to arms became irrelevant. When the battle seemed lost, all that was left was for the remaining fighters to escape. Moving through the city’s sewers, some 80 to 100 members of the FPO managed to make their way to the forests, where they could continue the fight outside of Vilna. Establishing their own units and becoming transformed into Soviet partisans to continue the war from there, FPO resisters lived to participate in the liberation of Vilna by the Red Army on July 13, 1944.

Meanwhile, back in the ghetto, the liquidation process proceeded apace. Most of those who did not join the revolt — the majority — were captured and sent to labor camps in Estonia, where they were eventually killed by the SS, with few survivors. By the end of World War II, 95% of the Jews of Vilna had been exterminated.

No other Jewish population was so devastated in the Nazi-occupied areas of Eastern Europe. Of the 57,000 Jews who lived in the city when the Germans invaded Vilna, it is estimated that only 2,000 to 3,000 survived the war.

Paul R. Bartrop is Professor Emeritus of History and the former Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Research at Florida Gulf Coast University.