THE VILNA GHETTO
THE JERUSALEM OF LITHUANIA
Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, Vilna is once again the capital of Lithuania. For centuries it was a centre of Jewish culture. Jews were to be found in Vilna from the fifteenth century. Driven out of Western Europe, they went steadily further east. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Vilna was still part of Poland, and the Jews enjoyed a high degree of freedom there. Travel was freely permitted, many professions were open to Jews, they could pursue their own religious practices, govern their own communities and so on. In 1551, however, Vilna was granted the 'right' not to allow Jews to live within the city boundaries, and to ban them from certain branches of economic and social life.Nevertheless, the first synagogue in Vilna was built at the end of the 16th century, and over the next two hundred years the city developed into a centre for Jewish spiritual life. Apparently in 1812, on his way to defeat in Russia, Napoleon cried out when he saw the interior of the Vilna synagogue, 'It is truly the Jerusalem of Lithuania.'
In 1795, Vilna became part of Czarist Russia, and only after the First World War did Lithuania gain independence. There then followed a disturbed period after which Vilna became part of Poland in 1932, fell into the hands of the Russians in 1939, was briefly part of independent Lithuania again, and was retaken by the Russians in 1940.
In this year the city had a population of over 200,000, of whom 80,000 were Jews, 60,000 Poles, and 60,000 Lithuanians and other nationalities.
The German army took only two days to reach Vilna after invading the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Received with flowers and by applauding Lithuanians, they immediately began the hunt for Jews, aided by Lithuanian fascists who went Jew-hunting for 10 roubles a day. In the first month of German occupation, 12,000 Jews disappeared.
It soon became clear where they had been taken: to Ponar, a rural area some kilometres outside Vilna, in the middle of a forest. In the next few years, more than 100,000 Jews met their deaths in Ponar.
A familiar pattern of rules was drawn up in the first few days of the occupation. Jews were compelled to wear the yellow star. They had to hand in anything of value, and to adjust to frequently altered sets of stipulations.
When the Germans, helped by the Lithuanian police, drove the Jews together into two ghettos, totally cut off from the rest of the city, 36,000 Jews were murdered. The city of Vilna had about 580 streets. The Jewish population occupied seventeen, later no more than seven. The restrictions increased. Jewish women were not permitted to get pregnant, flowers were not allowed inside the ghetto, fatty foods were forbidden, when one met a German one had to remove any head covering but not say good-day or bow. Women must not dye their hair or use lipstick. At the entrance to the ghetto, the Germans placed notices saying: "Caution / Jewish Area / Danger of infection / Non-Jews Keep Out".
Soon the smaller ghetto was liquidated and all the Jews were required to live together in the already overcrowded seven streets of Ghetto 1: about 29,000 people in an area of 27,000 square metres. After the liquidation of Ghetto 1 in September 1943, fewer than 600 survived. Vilna is now called Vilnius. Guide-books praise the city for its beautiful old buildings and the lovely woods surrounding it.
CULTURE IN THE GHETTO
18 January 1942People laughed and cried. They cast off the depression that had been weighing on their spirits. The alienation that had hitherto existed among the ghetto population seemed to have been thrown off. . . people awoke from a long difficult dream. (Dr Lazar Epstein, on the opening of the Ghetto theatre)
Leaving for Ponar, a drawing by Faival Segal
Despite violent protests from certain political groups and intellectuals, an artists' society was formed in the Ghetto and gave its first public performance on 18 January 1942. It was not only an artistic but a financial success (Kruk mentions in his diary the sum of 4,000 roubles that was taken and spent entirely on charity in accordance with the rule "Not a single hungry person in the Ghetto").
In its first year, the theatre put on no fewer than 111 performances, selling a total of 34,804 tickets. The hall was usually packed and the shows were often sold out weeks in advance. By the time the Ghetto was liquidated, on 23 September 1943, the number of performances had doubled. A population of 20,000 people had bought 70,000 tickets.
In its two-year history, the theatre put on four revues, based on original material written in the Ghetto, mainly by Katriel Broide and Leib Rosenthal whose poems and songs were especially popular. The repertoire also included five plays: Grine Felder by Peretz Hirschbein, first performed in August 1942, Der Mentsh Untern Brik by Otto Hindig, Der Oytser by David Pinski, and Der Mabul by Hening Berger (performed in the final weeks of the ghetto).
Rehearsals for Sholem Aleichem's Tevie the Milkman (which later served as the basis for Fiddler on the Roof ) were well under way when the Ghetto was liquidated. On its first anniversary, the theatre held a Theatre Week in the Ghetto at its home at 6 Rudnitzki Street. This was a fully-fledged festival including a revival of the first concert, two performances of Grine Felder and one of the revue Men Ken Gornisht Visn, Yiddish choir recitals, light music concerts, and a jam-session of the jazz ensemble, as well as a symphony concert and a performance of the Hebrew choir.
Saturday 27 March 1943
In a hall filled to capacity, the premiere of Der Oytser took place. Outside, the police were guarding the arrivals from Swieciarny. Here in the theatre, as if nothing were happening - a premiere! The performance is smooth, the play is unblemished, the sets really beautiful - as if this were not the Ghetto. (from Hermann Kruk's diary)
Cultural activity in the Ghetto was not confined to the theatre. Two days after the Vilna Jews were forced into the Ghetto, a library was opened at 6 Strashun Street by Hermann Kruk, one of the cultural leaders of the Bund party. By 19 September, 1,485 readers had registered at the library. Books were being borrowed at a rate of four hundred a day.
13 December 1942
There was a party in the ghetto today - the 100,000th book was borrowed from the ghetto library. We all celebrated in the theatre building. We went there straight from class. There were speeches and an entertainment programme too. The lecturers talked about the readers in the ghetto. There are hundreds of readers. Reading is the greatest pleasure I have here in the ghetto. Books remind us of freedom. Books remind us of the world. (from the diary of Rodaskevsky, a Vilna schoolboy)
It demonstrated that despite all suffering and persecution, a vigorous cultural life flourishes in the ghetto. (Kruk's diary)
15 January 1943
We wanted to give people the opportunity to free themselves from the ghetto for several hours, and this we achieved. We are passing through dark and difficult days. Our bodies are in the ghetto, but our spirit has not been enslaved . . . Before the first concert it was said that concerts should not be held in graveyards. True, the statement is true, but all of life is now a graveyard. Our hands must not falter. We must be strong in body and soul. (Jacob Gens, on the first anniversary of the Ghetto theatre)
For Kruk, as for many ghetto inhabitants, the preservation of Jewish culture was an act of self-preservation; making art was a gesture to the future, a show of faith. Through art the spirit of the Jews, the truth of their humanity, would endure. (Jessica Teich)
THE JEWISH COUNCILS
The Chief of the Reich Central Security Office, Reinhard Heydrich, instructed a conference, held in Berlin on 21 September 1939, that as a prerequisite of the ‘final solution’, Polish Jews were to be concentrated in larger cities. If possible large areas of Western Poland ‘should be cleared completely of Jews’, or should at least have in them ‘as few concentration centres as possible’. Elsewhere in Poland Jews should be concentrated only in cities situated at railway junctions, or along a railway, ‘so that future measures may be accomplished more easily’. To ensure that all instructions for the movement of Jews were carried out on time, a Council of Jewish Elders, a Judenrat, was to be set up in each city. This was formally ordered on November 28, 1939.The Jews who formed the Council regarded it as the successor to the kehilla, an organisation that had traditionally maintained Jewish religious institutions, supported their functionaries and cared for the communities’ needy, aged and sick. The Council hoped to perform these functions too, but they also became responsible to the Jewish community for providing services normally within the province of a municipality - housing, utilities, food supply, police and fire protection, a judiciary system, public health and sanitation, and a host of other services. By isolating the Jews in ghettos the Germans forced the Council to shift its emphasis from Jewish needs and objectives to general ones.
It was the German intention to issue all orders to the Jews through these Councils who would then be responsible for ensuring those orders were obeyed. As a basic rule directives had to be carried out promptly and with exactitude, no matter whether they were beneficial, innocuous or disastrous; any ‘sabotage of such instructions’ would lead to ‘the severest measures’ being taken against the Council.
The Councils relieved the burden on the overtaxed German apparatus; in supplying information, money, police and labour, they performed tasks for which the Germans themselves did not have sufficient means–they financed ghetto walls, kept order in ghetto streets, and made up deportation lists. As long as the food ration did not exceed the amount allowed for, so long as the quantity of forced labour was delivered as required, and so long as the Jews obeyed the orders, the Germans were not interested in what went on inside the Jewish community. The Germans could reduce their costs to a minimum, keep guarding forces small, and exploit scarce Jewish labour until the last moment.
Benzion Dinur wrote in the first issue of Yad Vashem Studies in 1957: ‘The councils . . . constituted an expression basically of what remained of the confidence the Jews had in Germany even under its Nazi regime. The Jews obediently carried out the various regulations enacted even when at a certain risk they could avoid them; they registered when they were required to do so. The Jews of the Netherlands hurried with luggage to embark upon the trains carrying them to the East, disbelieving the tales that they had been told of death journeys. Even in Warsaw and Vilna, in Bialystok and in Lvov for a long time such reports were discredited.’
The very fact that the Council members were ‘authentic’ Jewish leaders and were always regarded as part of Jewry by the Jewish community, even if they passed on calamitous German orders, or sent Jewish Police into Jewish homes to arrest recalcitrant taxpayers or reluctant deportees, made them all the more lethal. They were given tasks that were to serve German ends, specifically those leading to the Final Solution.
Although seen by some commentators as spineless and submissive, ruled by a disastrous blind obedience, the Jewish Councils, West and East, tried to postpone disaster or, failing that, to reduce its extent; they cautioned against provoking the Germans and sought out ways to create work projects that would make as many Jews as possible indispensable to the war economy. The Council chairmen were mostly guided by the thought not of how many people would be going to their destruction, but how many could be saved.
THE CHARACTERS
THE SONGS
THE AUTHOR'S NOTES
THE COMPANY
THE STORY AND PRODUCTION PHOTOS