The Creation of the Resistance Movement--F.P.O.

Abba Kovner * Leyzer Ran

"Jewish Youth!

Do not place your trust in those who deceive you. Of the 80,000 Jews in "Jerusalem of Lithuania," only 20,000 are left. Before our eyes our parents, brothers, and sisters were torn from us.

Where are the hundreds of men who were seized for labor by the Lithuanian kidnappers? Where are the naked women and the children seized from us on the night of the Provocation? Where were the Jews sent on the Yom Kippur? And where are our brothers from the second ghetto?

No one returned of those marched through the gates of the ghetto. All the roads of the Gestapo lead to Ponary. And Ponary means death. Those who waver put aside all illusion: your children, your wives, and husbands are no more. Ponary is no concentration camp. There they were all shot! Hitler aims to destroy all the Jews of Europe. It is the lot of the Jews of Lithuania to be the first line.

Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter! True, we are weak and without a protector, but the only answer to the murderer is--revolt! Brothers! Better to fall as free fighters than to live at the mercy of murderers.

Let us revolt! We shall fight until our last breath!"³

During the period of relative calm the Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye, referred to as the F.P.O., began to smuggle weapons into the ghetto in various ways. One way

Borka Freidman * Leyzer Ran

was with the help of underground Jewish gate guards who helped pass weapons through the often brutal German supervised inspection process.⁴ In spring of 1942 another underground faction organized called the Struggle Group, through the initiation of Borka Freidman, led by Shlomo Brand and aided by Dr. Leon Bernstein. Although the group of twelve's leadership was aligned with Betar, the membership cared more about the person's readiness to fight than about party affiliation. Most of its members were older, more mature than the FPO youth, and were ghetto policemen--some were even refugees from the same hometown in Poland. Jewish police and gate guards affiliated with the Struggle Group helped smuggle arms into the ghetto, informed the underground of possible Aktions ordered by the Nazis, and assisted those suspected of underground activities. Late in 1942, the Struggle Group was joined together with Yechiel Scheinbaum's Combat Group, a predominately Zionist organization that swelled in numbers made up youth coming from ghettos that had been previously liquidated. The smuggling of arms increased when the various groups united together into one organization.⁵ In April 1943, after the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Borka Freidman was the first to escape the ghetto and led a group to the Rudnicki forest. Borka's wife Chasia recalled what happened next,

"My husband was best friends with Joesph Glazman...He was in Betar...He wanted to create a brigade of partisans to revenge the enemy, to explode trains. Staying in the ghetto was impossible. No one was in the forest in April 1943. Freidman got help from some partisans from Belarus. Then Gens gave a warning that anyone leaving the ghetto to the partisans, their families will be destroyed. Myself, his parents, his niece, his brother, and our two 1/2 year old son were all taken to the prison on Lydos Street. At 12 midnight the Gestapo was coming to take the people from the prison. We were all in the prison waiting. But at 11:30 pm we were stolen from the prison. Our family went and hid at Strashun 1 in a maline for three weeks."⁶

The first act of sabotage was carried out by a trio of F.P.O. members on July 8, 1942 when a railroad line was mined damaging a train's engine and several of its compartments.⁷ As the underground organizations grew in the ghetto, there was a relatively peaceful co-existence between the Judenrat and the underground. However, Gens's attitude changed

Josef Glazman * Leyzer Ran

Issac Wittenberg * VGJSM

when he began to feel that the underground threatened the existence of the ghetto. The first clash with the F.P.O. occurred on June 26, 1943 when Gens tried to arrest Josef Glazman, the second in command of the underground organization. Glazman, pictured to the right, was Gens's former deputy and now a thorn in his side that he wanted sent from the ghetto to the Rzesza labor camp.⁸ Another serious confrontation took place in July 15, 1943, when the commander of the F.P.O., Issac Wittenberg was freed by the underground members while under arrest. The Nazis demanded his return, threatening the ghetto population with a final liquidation. The F.P.O. finally agreed to surrender Wittenberg, pictured to the left, after threats by the ghetto's inhabitants and Gens. Before Wittenberg was tortured by the Nazis, he was thought to have taken a cyanide pill given to him by Gens. Several days later, Abba Kovner became the leader of the F.P.O. Joseph Glazman was in the ghetto illegally and wanted by the police because he had convinced the inmates at the Rzesza labor camp to escape. When partisan Commander Markov from the Naroch forest sent messengers into the Vilna ghetto with the purpose of bringing underground members to the forest, Glazman was amongst the first group of F.P.O. members to leave the Vilna ghetto. At dawn on July 25th, twenty-one men and women escaped out the side gate from the courtyard of 6 Rudnicki Street and headed towards Naroch.⁹

On June 21, 1943, the ghettos in the Reichskommissariat Ostland were ordered to be liquidated by Heinrich Himmler. Jewish prisoners fit for work were to be scheduled for deportation to work camps, and the rest were to be killed. German soldiers, along with Estonian collaborators surrounded the

12 Strashun * Leyzer Ran / Bart Collection

ghetto. In the August and September Aktionen, over seven thousand men and women capable of work were rounded up and sent to a work camp in Estonia. During the September Aktionen the F.P.O. called on the ghetto population to rise up in rebellion. The inhabitants did not heed the call believing that they were to be sent to work camps, and not to Ponary to be murdered.¹⁰ Street by street in the ghetto, the Germans mined buildings and rounded up the remaining Jews. The underground came together on Strashun Street, located at the end of the ghetto. The tension in the ghetto was extremely high. The underground organized groups in various locations. Kovner's group organized at the dead end of the street, M. Shames headed a group at 7 Strashun in the middle position of the street and was in charge of the underground's only machine gun at the time.¹¹ According to M. Shames's recollections,

"From my position...I could see from quite a distance two soldiers carrying a box of explosives and after a while running away empty handed. Some of my fighters expressed impatience and asked for orders to shoot. But I refused. I understood very well their desire of revenge, no matter what the consequences will be. But I could not afford to be carried away by emotions. It was clear to me at that moment there was nothing we could gain by shooting. The two soldiers were too far away and in my estimation out of range. I also thought that the sound of the machine gun could very well provoke the Gestapo to destroy the Ghetto itself."¹²

12 Strashun: Ruins * Leyzer Ran

Yecheil Scheinbaum * Leyzer Ran / Ghetto Fighters' House

"Ilya Scheinbuam was killed next to me. When the Germans and Estonians entered into the ghetto, the FPO gathered together. We occupied the position at the beginning of the street on the second floor. We were ready to fight. We had rifles, explosives, and explosives with liquid fuel. Another group armed with a machine gun took the position on 6 Strashun, where the library, public bath, and prison courtyard used to be. The Estonians found out that we were armed. We saw through the window that the Estonians were retreating. When Scheinbaum saw them leaving, he leaned out the window and was killed by a bullet through his throat, and fell down. A sniper from below shot him. Then we got the order to retreat to 6 Strashun--there was no fire [from my position]. The ghetto was surrounded by Estonians. Our group leaped out the window."¹⁴

As total liquidation of the ghetto neared, beginning in August of 1943 the first lists of ghetto inmates were drawn up by Wehrmacht officer Major Karl Plagge for those eligible to work at Heeres Kraftahrpark, referred to as H.K.P.,

Heeres Kraftahrpark * ARC

Cheap Houses * Leyzer Ran

a forced labor camp for the repair of German military vehicles, pictured to the right. These laborers were housed at the "Cheap Houses" located at 37 Subocz Street on the outskirts of the city. Over one thousand people went into hiding inside the ghetto, as time went on most were caught.¹⁵ Three groups of Yechiel's underground members from the Vilna ghetto escaped weeks and days before the final liquidation. On September 15th, the last group of fourteen escaped out the side gate located off German Street. Dr. Bernstein bribed a Lithuanian policeman to rent his truck and drove to the outskirts of the city.¹⁶ Dr. Dworzecki states in his memoir,

"The last group of Yechiel's combat organization left for the forest, after Jacob Gens was shot. The group of fourteen included: Leon Bernstein, Pesia Sheinbaum, Mitia Lipenholz, Nisan Roitbart, Leizer and Zenia Bart, Israel Weiss, Shlomo Brand, Zenia Berkowitz, Yanek and Rita Faust, Hugo Griner and Masha Shneider."¹⁷

"Incidentally, yesterday Genkind told me that during the commotion [following Gen's death] Bernstein, Ring, and Gruner boarded a truck together with Lithuanian criminal police and their chief and went there [to the forest]. It cost however good money."¹⁹

At seven o'clock in the morning on September 23, 1943, the final liquidation began. The remaining sixty, some say eighty F.P.O. underground members that still remained in the ghetto

Rossa Square * Bart Collection

escaped by crawling through the city sewers. The underground members emerged out of the sewer at Ignoto Street and split into two groups. The first group gathered themselves in Pushkin's cellar underneath the Gestapo's Central Police Station where they remained for four days before heading to the forest and the second group proceeded to Kailis, a work camp of furriers that produced coats for the German troops on the front. However, on the way to the gathering point three F.P.O. members were stopped by the Gestapo. There were shots fired and Max Gross a Gestapo policeman was killed. All three FPO members were caught alive, brought to Rossa Square, and hanged at the gallows by Nazi officer Bruno Kittel.²¹

"We were taken to Rossa Square...There were two rows of Gestapo facing each other for about 200 feet...they took my father immediately...My brother put rouge on my mother to make her look younger. But when we went through the Gestapo with my mother, they pulled her from his arms to the left, and he went to the right. I was left stunned...The Gestapo hit her to make her keep going...my sister and I went to the right. Right was the path to work, left to death. The older men went to wagons with the older women. The young men went to work...They took us to a gate, and there were two men and a woman hanged on poles. The woman was alive..she was trying to tell us, "No, they won't do this to you."...they were the three partisans who had been caught coming [out of] the ghetto through a sewer."²³

The Escape from the Vilna Ghetto to the Rudnicki Forest

The remaining F.P.O. members escaped the last day of the final liquidation through the city's sewer system. The group of fourteen who escaped out the side gate over a week prior drove by truck to Vilna's outskirts, then walked all night to the forest. The walk

German Guard House * Bart Collection

was about 25 miles from the city. At the edge of the forest, the last two groups of Yechiel's Combat Group met up with one another and together walked through the forest.²⁵ In the words of one escapee, "[the group] walked all night in the forest, it was very difficult to survive."²⁶ On the outskirts of town there was a Nazi guardhouse, pictured to the left. The ghetto escapees had to traverse around the guardhouse without being caught.²⁷ Later one of the other groups came upon armed

Rudnicki Forest * Bart Collection

Russian partisans.²⁸ However, one by one the groups escaping from the Vilna ghetto safely emerged into the forest. About one hundred and fifty of the underground succeeded in escaping from the ghetto during the September Aktionen, establishing themselves in two forested areas: Rudnicki and Naroch. The number of Jewish partisans in the Rudnicki Forest rose to 300. However, in the Naroch Forest most were killed by the Nazis.²⁹ The groups in the Rudnicki forest led by Abba Kovner, split into four detachments and are known today as the "Partisans of Vilna."³⁰ The detachment directly under Kovner's command was Nekamah, also known as the Avengers. The Avengers group built five underground bunkers, and one central bathhouse.³¹ Kovner organized the Jews into a fighting group according to a military structure.

Notes