The Vilna ghetto and the FPO

Vilna before and after June 1941

In 1939 Vilna (Wilno, today Vilnius) had about 200,000 residents, more than 55,000 of them Jews, and 12,000 to 15,000 Jewish refugees from German-occupied Poland arrived soon after, according to USHMM. The city passed from Poland to Soviet rule, then to Lithuania, and in 1940 back to the Soviet Union.

Germany attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and German forces took Vilna on 24 June. In July 1941 Einsatzgruppen units and Lithuanian auxiliaries shot about 5,000 Jewish men in the Ponary forest, about eight miles from the city, and at the end of August about 3,500 more. In early September the Germans set up two ghettos. In October ghetto no. 2, which held people deemed unable to work, was destroyed and its people killed at Ponary. By the end of 1941 about 40,000 Jews had been murdered there (USHMM). The Hebrew site covers the Vilna ghetto in more detail.

The call to resist

Members of the Zionist youth movements hid where they could. Abba Kovner and others sheltered for a time in a Dominican convent run by Anna Borkowska, then returned to the ghetto. On the night of 31 December 1941, according to the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation (JPEF) and the Jewish Women's Archive (JWA), Kovner read aloud a manifesto that united the divided factions of the ghetto's youth movements behind armed resistance. It said that the Germans planned to destroy all the Jews of Europe, and that the only answer was revolt. English Wikipedia dates it to the start of 1942 and notes that its authorship is disputed.

Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter.

Abba Kovner's manifesto, Vilna ghetto, 31 December 1941 (as translated by the Jewish Women's Archive; other translations say "lambs")

The FPO is founded

The FPO was founded on 21 January 1942 at 6 Rudnicka Street in the ghetto, according to English Wikipedia. Its founders came from groups that were rivals before the war:

• Yitzhak Wittenberg, a communist, who was elected commander
• Abba Kovner, of the socialist Zionist Hashomer Hatzair
• Nissan Reznik, of the Zionist youth
• Josef Glazman, of the right-wing Revisionist Betar

Members of the Bund joined in the spring of 1942, and a separate group of Hehalutz-Dror under Yechiel Sheinbaum merged with the FPO in the spring of 1943 (English Wikipedia). JWA calls the FPO the only organisation in the ghettos that included all the Zionist youth movements. Members were organised in cells of five, platoons and battalions.

One of its first actions was outside the ghetto. Vitka Kempner studied the timetable of German military trains, and with Itzke Matzkevich laid explosives on the line and blew up a German train near Vilna (JWA).

1943: the Wittenberg affair and the end of the ghetto

The Wittenberg affair left a lasting mark. JWA quotes Vitka Kempner on the shock the fighters felt when it became clear that most of the remaining Jews in the ghetto supported handing over their commander. The Hebrew site has a page on Yitzhak Wittenberg.

Through the sewers to the forests

USHMM writes that some ghetto fighters escaped through the sewers to join the partisans in the Rudniki (Rudninkai) and Naroch forests. JPEF says Kovner sent most of the partisans, about 300, to the forest, while those who stayed with him fought briefly from abandoned buildings before escaping. According to JWA, Vitka Kempner moved between the ghetto and the outside through the sewers and led the last group of sixty fighters, including Kovner, to the forest.

In the Rudniki forest, Kovner, Kempner and Rozka Korczak led the Jewish unit known as the Avengers. JPEF credits it with destroying about 180 miles of railway track, 5 bridges and 40 train cars, killing 212 enemy soldiers and rescuing at least 71 Jews. JWA says the Jewish camp in the forest grew to six hundred people. Glazman's group fought in the Naroch forest.

In July 1944 FPO fighters took part in the Soviet offensive on Vilna. According to JPEF, Kovner and the surviving Avengers returned with the Red Army on 7 July 1944, and the city was taken from the Germans on 13 July.

A song and a legacy

In 1943 the young poet Hirsh Glick wrote "Zog nit keyn mol" for the FPO in the Vilna ghetto, inspired by news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, to a melody by the Soviet composers Dmitri and Daniil Pokrass. Partisan groups across eastern Europe adopted it, and it became a standard memorial song (English Wikipedia). Its history is told on the Hebrew page The partisans' song.

Another name linked to Vilna's underground is Yitzhak Arad, a Soviet partisan in the Naroch forest who slipped into the Vilna ghetto in April 1943 to meet Kovner, and who later wrote a history of Vilna Jewry in the war.