The Vilna Ghetto, Wilno Ghetto or Vilnius Ghetto was a Jewish ghetto established by Nazi Germany in the city of Vilnius, during the Holocaust in World War II. During roughly two years of its existence, starvation, disease, street executions, maltreatment and deportations to concentration camps and extermination camps reduced the population of the ghetto from an estimated 40,000 to zero. Only several hundred people managed to survive, mostly by hiding in the forests surrounding the town, joining the Soviet partisans or finding shelter among sympathetic locals.
I haven't started the book yet, though it looks terrific. The reason I was distracted from beginning was because I was drawn into the map on the inside cover of the Vilna Ghetto. I tried to locate our apartment on the map, and after several minutes of comparing maps and looking online, I learned the chilling fact that our living room window, which currently looks out onto a grassy area where children are currently playing, 69 years ago would have looked into the Ghetto itself.
Take a look at this map. You'll see two ghettoes outlined and a street called Niemiecka dividing them. Today, that street is called Vokiečių and is the street where we currently live. If you look at the Google Map image on the right, you'll see on the street between the two outlined areas a yellow blotch - that's an outdoor eating area near us. Our apartment is a bit to the right, looking north into the area outlined in green.
Jessica wrote in the last post that it is easy to feel the sorrow when walking past certain monuments and museums. Learning about where exactly we live now provides a different experience, an eerie sense of near-death that we might look out our window slightly further to the left and see not a woman coming home with her groceries but a Jewish woman with no food to eat.
Lithuania was a battleground between Poland, Germany, and the Soviet Union before and during WWII, and the fact that the country has been able to progress from that fought-over piece of territory through the years of Soviet control to arrive at the modern state that it is amazes me. I can't blame Lithuania for wanting to distance itself from its war-torn path. But I hope that Lithuania will forgive me for spending a bit of my summer in the past, remembering and mourning the glorious Jewish community that was snuffed out less than seventy years ago.
We'll never get the "Jerusalem of Lithuania" back, but I'm grateful to be in Vilnius taking part in the revival of Yiddish language, literature, and culture, which flourished so brightly here. I'm exceedingly proud of Jessica and others in her field who make this revival their life work, and I look forward to learning from them for a month. As we remember the tragedies of the past, I hope we will also be able to recovery the joys of lost generations in our own lives.
Take a look at this map. You'll see two ghettoes outlined and a street called Niemiecka dividing them. Today, that street is called Vokiečių and is the street where we currently live. If you look at the Google Map image on the right, you'll see on the street between the two outlined areas a yellow blotch - that's an outdoor eating area near us. Our apartment is a bit to the right, looking north into the area outlined in green.
Jessica wrote in the last post that it is easy to feel the sorrow when walking past certain monuments and museums. Learning about where exactly we live now provides a different experience, an eerie sense of near-death that we might look out our window slightly further to the left and see not a woman coming home with her groceries but a Jewish woman with no food to eat.
Lithuania was a battleground between Poland, Germany, and the Soviet Union before and during WWII, and the fact that the country has been able to progress from that fought-over piece of territory through the years of Soviet control to arrive at the modern state that it is amazes me. I can't blame Lithuania for wanting to distance itself from its war-torn path. But I hope that Lithuania will forgive me for spending a bit of my summer in the past, remembering and mourning the glorious Jewish community that was snuffed out less than seventy years ago.
We'll never get the "Jerusalem of Lithuania" back, but I'm grateful to be in Vilnius taking part in the revival of Yiddish language, literature, and culture, which flourished so brightly here. I'm exceedingly proud of Jessica and others in her field who make this revival their life work, and I look forward to learning from them for a month. As we remember the tragedies of the past, I hope we will also be able to recovery the joys of lost generations in our own lives.
Must be strangely disconcerting that your window faces a former Ghetto. Look forward to reading your blog.
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