Today, Fania took us on a day-long field trip that was powerful and sobering. Fania is an energetic speaker, a devoted educator about the Holocaust, with a deep sense of obligation to the millions who were murdered during the war, and especially the history of Vilna during the war. She has a generous and optomistic outlook despite all that she has seen and experienced in her life, and learning from her, watching her talk for hours on end, recalling facts and names and places, telling stories both horrifying and heartwarming with a singleness of purpose and a strength of spirit was truly inspiring.
Fania was born and raised in Vilna, she attended a Yiddish school. Her father was an instructor for ORT, and he was taken to Estonia and killed during the war. Her mother was sent to Riga in a large group of women. All of the women over the age of 35 were sent on a boat into the sea, and the boat was sunk. The rest of her father's side of the family was killed in Panar, while her mother's side of the family, who had emigrated to Israel before the war, survived. Fania survived in the ghetto and joined the Faraynikte Partisaner Organizatzia (FPO, United Partisan Organization) at the age of 17. She served in that organization, living in the forest and fighting to contribute to the downfall of the Nazis. After the war, she worked in statistics, and she now works for the commitee for Holocaust survivors in Lithuania, which has more than 100 members, and works at the Vilnius Institute as the librarian. She herself is responsible for having started the library at the Institute, all of the books were gifts.
The first place that Fania brought us to was to the Jewish cemitary in the Seskine district. There were three Jewish cemetaries in Vilna before the war. The oldest and largest one was located accross the Neris River from the central part of the city. In it, many famous rabbis were buried and it was a veritable historical record for Jewish Vilna. The tsarist authorities closed the cemetary in 1831, and the Soviet government later destroyed the cemetary and built a sports complex in its place, as well as some housing units. The building was finally stopped due to protests, but not until the damage had already been done. The next cemetary was active from 1848 until 1943. In the 1960's it was destroyed by the Soviet authorities and tombstones were used for staircases and stoops around the city. The third cemetary, the one we visited, contains about 6,500 Jewish graves. We visited several graves and monuments in the cemetary. The first were symbolic gravestones for some of the leaders of the partisan movement, whose bodies are not located at the cemetary itself. We saw a tombstone for Itsik Wittenberg, the leader of the Vilna FPO, as well as one three graves for the three partisans who were caught sneaking out of the ghetto through the sewage system and hanged. Deeper in the cemetary, there is a monument we did not have a chance to see, for 400 children who were taken by the Nazis and bled dry so that the Nazis could use their blood - the bodies were then discarded. We did see a monument for Jewish teachers, which Fania was instrumental in creating, both because she believes that teachers were essential in keeping up the morale of the community in the ghetto, and because her father was a teacher. There are graves in the cemetary as well for those Jewswho died while in the ghetto. Fania marveled that while 70,000 people were thrown into mass graves in Panar, the Germans chose to bury these people who died in the ghetto each in their own grave with a tombstone. Every year on May 8th, the Vilna Jewish Community gathers at these graves to celebrate the liberation of Vilna. Fania said that this is a holy day, children come from the schools, and everyone sings the partisan hymn. In the cemetary, we also saw the grave of the Vilna Gaon and of the Ger Tseddik. Their remains were btought to this cemetary when the other cemetary was destroyed, but many remains of rabbis and other historical figures were not saved.
We next went to Ponar, and listened to Fania speak of the shocking and unthinkable murders that occured in that terrible place. Before the war, the Soviets dug pits in Ponar, located 6.2 miles from Vilna, where they intended to store fuel storage tanks, but they evacuated before they ever used the pits for this purpose. The Nazis used the site as a death factory - they killed people here every day starting about a week after they first entered Vilna, until the end of the war. At first, they recorded names, but shortly after beginning the killings, they stopped keeping records. We do have documents about what happened in Ponar, though. A Polish journalist lived nearby and kept a journal recording how many people were murdered, and who was killing them. People were brought here, told to disrobe, shot in the head, and thrown into pits. They were covered with lime, and then new bodies were layered on top. Their clothing was sold for profit. A Polish journalist bicycling through a train tunnel saw a beautiful girl on a train heading toward Ponar. He wrote that he later saw German soldiers playing football with her head. The Nazis used Ponar not only as a site to kill the Jews of Vilna but also brought in people from surrounding towns. The Jews of Vilna were forced to march here on foot, along a winding old road. Jews from other places came by busses and trains, and some of the last people to be killed were gassed on the trains heading to Ponar. The victims were told that they were going on the trains heading to work, and because that had been their prior experience of what happens during a war, they believed that they were going to Kovno for forced labor, and didn't suspect that they would be systematically killed. Not all of the victims at Ponar were Jewish - 100,000 people were murdered in Ponar, 70,000 of them were Jews. Polish priests were murdered here, as well as Polish professors, and any person suspected of opposition to the German authorities. After the war, the Jews who survived came here and erected a monument, which the Soviet authorities dismantled. In Soviet times, the signs posted at the site said only that the Germans killed Soviet citizens here, and made no specific mention of Jews. The current sign, which was displayed after a long-fought battle, is written in Hebrew, Yiddish, Lithuanian, and Russian, and states the numbers of Jews and non-Jews murdered, and that the killing was done by the Nazis and their local collaborators. There are individual momuments to the Poles, Lithuanians, and Jews killed here - we had the opportunity to see these monuments, and we were reminded that as we walked, although we were on a paved path, we could very well be walking over mass graves. We saw a monument to the last Jews who were killed in Ponar, on the 5th of July, 1944, ten days before Vilna was liberated - these were Jews who had been working as slaves in Nazi workshops. While we were at this monument, Fania told us about a German officer who saved many Jewish lives by trying to treat Jews as human beings, even from his position of authority. He was overseeing these Nazi workshops, though he was not affiliated with the SS, and there was little oversight of him and his work. When he was told that the SS would take over the workshop, he warned the Jews working there, and several of them were able to flee before the SS arrived. Fania told us that when she was in the ghetto they didn't know that the Ponar death factory existed. They thought that people were being sent on trains to work, as they had been during the first World War. When the first survivor of Ponar came to the ghetto, shot through and covered in blood, and was taken to the ghetto hospital and hidden, people thought that she was crazy and did not believe her that unarmed people were being gathered en masse to be shot and killed. Fania took us to one of the open pits, now covered with grass and wildflowers, with butterflies darting around it. The partisans referred to the grave as the "child grave" because when they found it, they found a lot of children's parephanalia around it - shoes, clothes, etc. Fania told us about one child who survived the murders in Ponar because the shooters somehow missed the target and he was thrown into the pit alive. He managed to crawl out, covered in blood, and he went to a town where the locals had pity on him, washed and clothed him, and brought him to the partisans. He is still living now in Tel Aviv. There are currently seven open pits in Ponar, but many more were covered over. In December of 1943, when the Nazis knew that they were going to lose, they wanted to get rid of the evidence so there would be no sign of what they had done. They brought 84 laborers from workshops, and four women to cook for them over an open pit, and had them perform the gruesome work of destroying the evidence. These people were forced to chop wood, dig up the mass gravs, make piles of corpses and wood stacked together, and burn them. They had a quota of how much to burn each day. If the bones didn't burn, tey would hit them with a hammer until they were pulverized. Then they would put the ashes through a seive in case they could find a gold tooth or a ring. One of the workers, named Dogim, while digging in Ponar, found the corpses of his own wife and children, and had to burn them. If one of the workers got sick, he was thrown onto the pile to be burnt. The workers knew that they wouldn't be allowed to live after this work, they were working in a sealed place that even some Germans weren't allowed in and they knew they would be killed so Fthat they could not testify to what they had seen. They devised an escape plan so that the world wiuld know what had happened in Ponar. They decided to tunnel out. In their first tunnel attempt they ran right into a pit of bodies and had to start aghain. They dug using plates and spoons, carrying the earth out in their pockets so that they could scatter it where it would not be noticed. They made a cabinet where they would store their clothes, and they dug the entrance to the tunnel underneath the cabinet. Their feet were chained together and they had to use a file to saw through the chain sin order to make their escape. Only 12 of them survived the escape. They were easily caught because reeked so terribly of death that the dogs could find them easily. Those who survived hid in cow dung being used as fertilizer, which masked their odor so the dogs could not find time. The Nazis sent out radio reports that criminals had escaped and said that they would pay a reward of 100,000 marks for anyone who found one of them, which illustrates how desperately the Nazis wanted to hide what they had done. The partisans went to meet the esaped workers and their smell was so terrible that they threw up when they encountered them. The escaped workers had to bathe in the partisan camp ever day. Some did not survive the ordeal. Some of them later gave very detailed testimony, and some of them were witnesses in a trial in Riga about people who were killed during the war in Baltic countries. One of the survivors gave reportage about his experiences in Ponar while standing at the place where Fania was speaking to us, and it was directly from him that she learned all that she told us. Once a year at the anniversary of their escape, people gather to memorialize them and their bravery and the horror they faced. No witnesses are alive from this ordeal any longer, but their testimony is accessible and speaks on for them. Fania told us about the official events that occur in Ponar several times a year, both within the Jewish community and with officials and dignitaries of Lithuania and other nations. Fania herself often leads tours in Ponar, and she says that it is her obligation, as long as her feet can still carry her, that she must speak for the people who cannot rise from the dead and speak for themselves.
We next went to the Rudnitsky woods, where Fania lived for about a year as a partisan. It is about 40 Kilometers from Vilna, and there were partisan bases throughout these woods, which were at the time quite swampy. Fania told us that three months after the Vilna ghetto was formed, the United Partisan Organization begun, uniting the heads of many political parties who had been starkly opposed during the prewar years. They created two divisions. They had first to figure out how to get weapons and to decide if they would fight from the ghetto iteself or in the woods. They decided that it was unrealistic to resist from the narrow streets of the ghetto and decided to go into the farest. Jews who were dragooned into working in factories, revamping old World War I weapons, would smuggle in parts to make guns in the ghetto. They smuggled in gunpowder and explosives, wicks and lamps for making molotov cocktails. Chimney sweeps were especially helpful in this effort because they were able to leav the bounds of the ghetto, so they carried a false bottom case with their tools on the top and smuggled items underneath. People invented all sorts of means to smuggle in resources, wrapping themselves in bandages with weapons underneath, or smuggling them through the sewage system (Shmuel Kaplinsky was a civil engineer who knew the sewage system through and through and was essential to the Vilna resistance.) Some guns were bought from Lithuanians that partisans had relationships with, and others were stolen from Nazis. Wittenberg, the commander of the FPO, was reported to German authorities for insurgent activity and was called before the Judenrat and told to turn himself over to the Germans. He hid from the Judenrat, dressing himself as a woman, and was able to make his way into the woods. The partisans knew that they had to leave the ghetto in part because they felt that the population of the ghetto would not support their work because they didn't want to risk their lives, not understanding the scope of the danger they faced. The slogan of the partisans was "Lisa is calling" - Lisa was the name of one of the partisans who was killed very early on. The first division of the partisans went to Belorussia, and the second group, Fania's group, went to the forest near Vilna, where there were already other organized partisan groups. Fania was chosen to be a messenger between the ghetto and the partisans, and received formal training for this. This was a job specifically for women, because it was harder for Germans to know that they were Jewish. Fania left the ghetto for good with a friend on a day when she knew someone who had permission to leave, so they could sneak out of the gate behind him. They went down one street, saw German officers, and turned around and went another way. As they were walking, they saw German convoys and trucks heading toward the ghetto. They made their way into the forest. On their way they got lost, and had to spend the very rainy night in the forest. They cme to a village and asked for directions, saying that they were going to their aunt's house to help did potatoes. As they headed on their way, they saw German soldiers, but just kept on going, rather than turning around and causing suspicion. They met a young man who they told this potato story to, and he, understanding who they really were, brought them into the forest and said they should wait there and trust him. Fania marveled that after escaping from the ghetto, she so easily left her life in a stranger's hands. But sure enough, in the morning the young man brought them bread and milk and walking sticks and hed them on the way toward the partisans. He then left them, saying that he was afraid that if the partisans saw him, they might kill him. As they started walking toward the partisans, they were excited and started singing, and someone rushed toward them and told them to halt and asked for the password. They were so nervous that all they could do was giggle, and they were held by the partisans in an area for suspects. While they were waiting there, they saw a friend, who told them that the ghetto had been liquidated the day they left. Fania showed us around the camp - at first they lived in little wooden structures like sukkot, but then they had to prepare for the winter and they made more permanent structures, which still stand and we were able to go into. They survived a forest fire and a terrible storm during which the trees fell like matchsticks. They had a "hospital" run by a former medical student, a bath, and a kitchen area (a campfire). Men and women fighters lived there, as well as people who were night fighteres but who had managed to escape and needed a place to hide. There were four Jewish partisan groups in the forest, among many non-Jewish groups, and among the Jewish groups not everone was Jewish - sometimes they would find other people who would join them. Fania told us about a Dutch man named Hank who had been fored to dig peat for the Germans for fuel and escaped and joined the partisans. He worked in the workshop as a mechanic, fixing weapons. The partisans shared a sense of unity of purpose, and they all got along. Fania met her husband in the partisan camp, and now has three daughters and lots of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A number of couples were formed in the partisan camps - they were people who had lost everything and everyone, and they clung to each other. Life was very difficult - they lived on rye flour with hot water and occasional fat from sheep, and there was barely enough to feed everyone. But they lived with an elevated mood - they were young and resilient, and they would sing together and rais each other's spirits. And they fought. They were fighting for thier dignity and their humanity, and to contribute to the defeat of Hitler. They were extraordinarily brave, and it was an honor to hear Fania's story and to see the place where she lived and fought first-hand.
It was an exhausting and emotional day, but a very important one. We will post pictures here and invite you to look at them. Thank you for the opportunity to share some of what we have heard and seen.
No comments:
Post a Comment