Jacob Gens
Jacob Gens (* 1905 in Illoviečiai , Šiauliai Oblast ; † September 14, 1943 in Vilnius ) was chairman of the Jewish Council in the Vilna ghetto .
Life
Jacob Gens had served as a volunteer in the Lithuanian army in 1919. As a Zionist , he was close to the revisionists .
Jacob Gens came to Vilnius in July 1940 to evade the access of the Soviet secret police of the NKVD , fearing that he would be arrested as a supporter of revisionist Zionism as an anti-Soviet element .
After the German attack on the Soviet Union and the occupation of Vilna by the Germans at the end of June 1941, he was appointed head of the Jewish hospital. At the beginning of September 1941 he was commissioned by Anatol Fried , then chairman of the Judenrat, to organize and direct the police in the ghetto. The ghetto police supported the SS in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to the German extermination camps . As head of the ghetto police, Gens was responsible for selecting the victims. In this position he tried to save as many ghetto residents as possible from deportation.
His attitude towards armed resistance was ambivalent. He maintained contact with individual brigade leaders and seemed to be in favor of an uprising against liquidation.
After the German police had tracked down the resistance movement in the Fareinigte Partisaner Organisatzije (FPO) ghetto , he arrested its leader Jitzchak Wittenberg at the request of the Germans . After Wittenberg was initially liberated from the FPO, he surrendered to the Gestapo in order to avert the threatened destruction of the ghetto. Gens is said to have leaked a potassium cyanide capsule to Wittenberg , with which he later committed suicide while in German custody .
In September 1943 the Vilna ghetto was cleared. On September 14, 1943, Gens was ordered to join the Gestapo. Although he was warned that the Germans wanted to kill him, he obeyed the order and was shot by the Gestapo at 6:00 p.m.
His story was filmed in 2006 under the title " Ghetto " with Heino Ferch in the title role.
literature
- Israel Gutman : Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Volume 1, Piper-Verlag : Munich and Zurich 1995 ISBN 3-492-12120-9 (German edition edited and edited by Eberhard Jäckel and Peter Longerich )
- Mascha Rolnikaitė : I have to tell. My diary 1941-1945 . From the Yidd. by Dorothea Greve. With a preface by Marianna Butenschön. Berlin: Kindler Verlag, 2002 ISBN 3-499-23555-2 . (First, abridged German edition: Berlin: Union-Verl. VOB, 1967)
Web links
- Pedigree of the Gens family
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ghetto in the Internet Movie Database (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Gens, Jacob |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Lithuanian chairman of the Judenrat in the Vilna ghetto |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1905 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Illoviečiai , Šiauliai Oblast |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 14, 1943 |
| Place of death | Vilna |