The Vilna Ghetto Resistance is the most morally complex of the major Polish ghetto resistance organisations. The Vilna underground, organised under the leadership of Yitzhak Wittenberg and the poet Abba Kovner, prepared for armed insurrection from January 1942 onwards. When the moment came in July 1943, the planned uprising did not happen. The story of why is one of the unsettling chapters of the Holocaust resistance literature, and it has produced an argument that has continued for eighty years.
The setting
Vilna had been one of the great centres of European Jewish learning, sometimes called the Jerusalem of the North. The pre-war Vilna Jewish community of around 60,000 was around a third of the city’s population. After the German occupation in June 1941, the killings at Ponary outside the city, described on the Ponary Massacre page, reduced the community by around 90 per cent in the first six months. The remaining 20,000 Vilna Jews were concentrated in two ghettos in the autumn of 1941. The smaller ghetto was liquidated within weeks. The larger ghetto, holding around 12,000 to 15,000 people, was left as a labour reserve.
By 1942 the ghetto had stabilised under the leadership of Jacob Gens, a Lithuanian Jewish veteran of the inter-war Lithuanian army who had been appointed by the Germans to run the ghetto police and then the Judenrat. Gens pursued the strategy of survival through cooperation: keep the ghetto productive, deliver the demands of the German authorities, hope to outlast the war. The strategy was bitterly contested by parts of the ghetto, particularly the underground.
The underground
The United Partisan Organisation (Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye, FPO) was founded on 21 January 1942 by Yitzhak Wittenberg, Abba Kovner, Joseph Glazman and others, drawing on the Zionist youth movements and the Communist underground. Kovner, the poet, wrote the FPO’s founding manifesto, which became one of the most widely circulated documents of the Holocaust resistance. The opening line was: Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter. The phrase, often misquoted as a description of how Jews actually went to their deaths, was originally a call to refuse to do so.
The FPO acquired weapons over many months, smuggled into the ghetto in pieces and reassembled. By summer 1943 the organisation had around 300 fighters with a small but functional armoury. The plan was to fight when the final liquidation came.
The Wittenberg Affair
In July 1943, the Lithuanian Communist Party informant in the German Sicherheitsdienst was caught and gave up Yitzhak Wittenberg’s name. The Germans demanded that Gens hand over Wittenberg, threatening that if Wittenberg were not produced, the entire ghetto would be liquidated. Gens passed the demand to the FPO. The FPO refused. Wittenberg himself was hidden in the ghetto.
The crisis built over several days. Gens organised the ghetto police and the wider ghetto population to demand that the FPO hand Wittenberg over to save the ghetto from collective punishment. The FPO faced a choice between protecting their commander and forcing a confrontation with the rest of the ghetto. They chose to protect him.
Wittenberg himself made the decision. He emerged from hiding on 16 July 1943, walked out of the ghetto, and surrendered to the Germans. He died that day, by suicide using poison provided by Gens, before he could be tortured. The FPO, having lost its commander and the political support of the wider ghetto, was unable to call the planned uprising.
The escape to the forests
The FPO’s alternative plan was a mass escape to the surrounding forests to join the Soviet partisans. Some FPO fighters made the escape during July and August 1943. The escape was not easy: the surrounding countryside was patrolled by Lithuanian auxiliary police and German forces, and the partisan reception was uncertain. Some escapers reached the partisans and survived. Others were caught and killed.
The Vilna ghetto was liquidated on 23 to 24 September 1943, the day after the Jewish New Year. Around 7,000 ghetto inhabitants were sent to Sobibor and murdered. Around 4,000 were sent to Estonian labour camps where most died over the following year. Around 1,000 were killed at Ponary in the final round-ups. Gens himself was shot by the Gestapo on 14 September 1943, ten days before the liquidation; the SD had concluded he could no longer be relied on. He had stayed in the ghetto when he could have escaped, on the principle that the head of the Judenrat should not abandon his people. The argument over whether his strategy of cooperation was right or wrong has continued ever since.
The Vilna partisans
Around 200 to 300 FPO fighters reached the partisan units in the Rudniki forest south of Vilna. They formed a Jewish partisan brigade under Abba Kovner. The brigade fought as part of the Soviet partisan command for the rest of the war. Kovner survived to liberation, emigrated to Israel, and became one of the principal poets of the Hebrew language and of the Holocaust. He led the Nakam (Avengers) group after the war, which planned and partially carried out poisoning attacks on German POWs and on a German bakery in 1946 as revenge for the Holocaust. The full story of Kovner’s post-war life is on his own page.
What it tells us
The Vilna case is the one that disposes of the simple model of armed resistance as the morally correct response to the Holocaust. The FPO, with weapons and training and willing fighters, did not fight in the ghetto when the moment came, because doing so would have produced the immediate murder of the entire ghetto population. The FPO instead escaped to the forests and fought from there. Some ghetto inhabitants survived as a result of the strategy of cooperation under Gens. Some survived as a result of the partisan escape. Some died because of one strategy, some because of the other. The argument over which was right is part of what makes the Vilna story enduringly difficult.
See also
Sources
- Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews of Vilna in the Holocaust, Macmillan, 1980
- Abba Kovner, Scrolls of Testimony, Jewish Publication Society, 2001
- Dina Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner, Stanford University Press, 2010
- USHMM: Vilna