Vilnius Ghetto

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Street scene in the Vilnius ghetto
today's street in the former Vilnius ghetto

The Vilnius Ghetto , at that time the Vilnius Ghetto , was a National Socialist ghetto in the old town of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius (German: Wilna), into which the German occupiers locked the Jewish population. The ghetto consisted of two parts, the large and the small ghetto, which were separated from each other by Niemiecka Strasse ( jidd. Deitsche Strasse , lit. today Vokiečių gatvė ). The proportion of the Jewish population in Vilnius, which was considered the Jerusalem of the East , was 28 percent or 55,000 people in 1931. Most of them were murdered, mostly in Ponar near Vilnius , now a suburb of the city.

Establishment of the ghetto

The troops of the German Wehrmacht reached Vilnius just a week after the attack on the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941). Very few Jews were able to flee inland in time. The remaining Jewish population was initially at the mercy of the local population and the German task forces. On July 4th, the German authorities set up a so-called Judenrat , which was responsible for the implementation of the orders of the new rulers. On July 8, the ordinance on the wearing of a Jewish star came into force, according to which Jews were prohibited from being on the streets after 6 p.m. At the same time, the Jews able to work received certificates that were supposed to protect them (and their families) from being shot. People without a certificate were picked up by Lithuanian auxiliary forces (Ypatingis burys) and taken to Lukiškis prison. From there, almost without exception, they went to Ponar to be shot.

On August 31, 1941, preparations were made for the establishment of the ghetto: the residential area intended for the Jewish population in the traditionally Jewish streets of the old town of Vilnius was “cleared” of the previous population in the “Great Provocation” campaign. For the Jews among them who did not have a certificate of employment, this meant the shooting in Ponar on September 2 (around 3,700 people). On September 6, the new ghetto was occupied by the city's Jews, with around 29,000 coming to the Great Ghetto (streets: Rudnitzkegass, Spitalgass, Fleischergass, Straschungass) and around 11,000 to the Small Ghetto (streets: Judengass, Gaongass, Gläsergass) . The small ghetto was primarily intended for the elderly and those unable to work. Both ghettos were separated by Deitsche Strasse . The ghettos were fenced with barbed wire and each had a ghetto gate and a connection via Deitsche Strasse.

In the period that followed, there were repeated so-called "actions" in which the non-working population of the ghetto was singled out and brought to Ponar to be shot. In such actions, 3,334 people died on September 12, 1,271 people on September 17, 1,983 people on October 4, and in the "yellow note campaign" on October 24, 1941 Jews without work permits were singled out and 3,781 people from 25 to Shot in Ponar on October 27th.

Life in the Ghetto

After these first selections, life in the ghetto “normalized”. Great hunger (it was forbidden to bring food into the ghetto under the penalty of death), cold and poor hygienic conditions continued to make life a torture. Despite the adverse circumstances, an infirmary, a school, a library and later even a theater were established in the ghetto . In 1943, a musical with melodies and texts by Leib Rosenthal was performed here, who had to live here himself and was later killed in the Estonian concentration camp Klooga .

From August 1943, the German commanders began to clear the ghetto. The remaining ghetto residents were deported to Latvia and Estonia in several transports . On September 23, 1943, the Vilna ghetto was completely evacuated.

Resistance in the ghetto

On January 21, 1942, the Zionist resistance groups in Vilnius joined forces to form the Fareinigte Partisaner Organizatzije (FPO) to provide armed resistance against the Germans. Since it could not count on the support of the majority of the ghetto residents, the FPO withdrew to the surrounding forests and joined the Soviet partisans . Well-known FPO leaders were supported in their actions by Anton Schmid . He helped them transport weapons and fighters.

In addition, thanks to Karl Plagge's constant efforts to bring Jews to his labor camp and to keep families together, hundreds of imprisoned Jews were able to survive the Holocaust.

Perpetrator in the Vilna ghetto

Reception in art and literature

Romain Gary wrote imaginatively in his novel General Nachtigall in 1944 about the partisan fight in the woods around Vilna. The partisans had manifold contacts in the ghetto, the main character Janek also with German occupiers, of whom he finally kills one. Barter deals are organized in the ghetto to support the struggle, Germans are eavesdropped on upcoming operations, and even the music plays a role. Janek, who is on the threshold of puberty, is hidden by his father in a large forest area. The four years until the end of the war, in which Janek matures from child to man, he spends in a cave, becomes a partisan, he gets to know love. The novel from Gary's hometown takes the experience of Jewish persecution and armed resistance against it as the model of a coming new Europe, as the original title shows.

The Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol deals with the fate of the people in the Vilnius ghetto in his play Ghetto , which was staged in German by Peter Zadek in Berlin and Hamburg in 1984 . Sobol mainly used the records of the Jewish librarian Herman Kruk from 1941–1943 as a source . The piece describes u. a. the dispute between Kruk, who belonged to the “left” socialist General Jewish Workers' Union and fought underground against the German occupation, called for a future for Jews in Europe and rejected the Zionist project, with the “right”, Zionist, group around Vladimir Jabotinsky related elders of the Judenrat Jacob Gens , who collaborated with the German rulers, set up business operations in the ghetto for the SS and Wehrmacht and carried out selections for the Germans himself in order to create the conditions for a complete emigration to Palestine . Since in the end all inmates of the ghetto are killed by the SS (embodied in the play by the officer Kittel), both Kruk and Gens fail. The play was filmed in 2006 under the title Ghetto .

Since the beginning of the 1990s Roswitha Dasch has been committed to the survivors of the Vilna Ghetto and is the organizer of the traveling exhibition Say Never You Are Going the Last Path , which sheds light on the fate of the Lithuanian Jews. In this context, the premiere Ess is gewen a sumertag - the history of the Vilna ghetto as reflected in its songs took place in the Wuppertal theater in May 1994 . In 1997 the association “MIZWA - Time to act e. V. “, which supports former ghetto and concentration camp prisoners in Lithuania through donations.

In 2009, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever (1913-2010) published the book Wilner Getto 1941-1944 in German translation, which had been published in Paris in an edition of 100 in 1946 (written in Yiddish). The collection of poems by Abraham Sutzkever Gesänge vom Meer des Todes contains poems that he wrote in the ghetto (published in German in 2009).

See also

literature

Film and theater

  • Joshua Sobol: Ghetto. Play in three acts. Quadriga, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88679-120-3 (with documents and articles edited by Harro Schweitzer).
  • Roswitha Dasch, Sabine Friedrichs: Never say you're going the last way. Documentary film about the fate of the Lithuanian Jews.

Web links

Commons : Ghetto Wilna  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Matthias Kolb: The former Jerusalem of the East. Vilnius is this year European Capital of Culture. In: Deutschlandradio Kultur on August 24, 2009.
  2. ↑ Virginija Rudiene, Vilma Juozeviciute: The Museum of Genocide Victims. Vilnius undated , ISBN 9986-757-72-X (museum brochure , English), p. 79.
  3. ↑ a b c Wassili Grossman / Ilja Ehrenburg : The Black Book - The Genocide of the Soviet Jews. Pp. 460-463.
  4. ↑ Biography Leib Rosenthal (English)
  5. ↑ Wassili Grossman / Ilja Ehrenburg: The Black Book - The Genocide of the Soviet Jews. Pp. 532-535.
  6. ↑ a b LG Würzburg, February 3, 1950 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German convictions for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. VI, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, Christian F. Rüter . University Press, Amsterdam 1971, No. 192, pp. 71-91. Mistreatment and individual killings of Jews from Vilna and participation in mass shootings in Ponary of at least 30,000 Jews from the Vilna ghetto, the Lukischki prison and the vicinity of Vilna ( memento of March 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive ).
  7. ^ Diana Verlag, 1962. First published in English ( European education , London 1944), then in French ( Éducation européenne , Paris 1945) due to the war.

Coordinates: 54 ° 40 ′ 47 "  N , 25 ° 17 ′ 11"  E