holocaust studies

In this final chapter of “Remembering Vilna,” several of the survivors whose stories we’ve featured tell of their journeys to safety and new beginnings, even as the traumas they experienced remained ever present.

At war’s end, Vilna’s survivors struggle to regain their health, look for missing family members, and search for ways to leave Europe for the United States or Palestine. But a small group join an effort to seek revenge in Nuremberg, where an international tribunal is underway.

July 1944. For nearly two weeks, the Nazis and the Soviets fight for every street and block in Vilna. When the smoke clears, Jews hiding in the sewers emerge into daylight while other survivors and Jewish partisans filter back into the devastated city.

When the Nazis liquidate the Vilna ghetto, they send thousands of Jews to their deaths or to forced-labor camps. Others escape to the forest to join the partisans. Very few manage to hide. The Nazis also try to eliminate evidence of their efforts to murder Vilna’s Jews.

Young people in the ghetto organize an underground group with the hope of leading an uprising against the Nazis. They risk their lives to build an arsenal, but when it becomes clear most Jews in the ghetto don’t support them, many escape to the surrounding forest to join the partisans. 

Life in the Jewish ghetto demands vigilance and adaptation. Families improvise spaces for hiding. Food is smuggled at the risk of execution. And while young people start to organize a resistance, cultural and sporting events prove to be a much needed diversion.

They are given minutes to pack. A suitcase, a sheet-wrapped bundle, whatever they can carry. Thousands of the city’s Jews are marched at gunpoint to the newly enclosed Jewish ghettos, where the previous inhabitants have already been murdered.

When Germany attacks the Soviet Union in 1941, the Nazis occupy Vilna and begin imposing their harsh antisemitic rule, banning Jews from sidewalks, requiring the wearing of an identifying yellow star, and worse. “Within just a few days,” Mira Verbin recalls, “they started kidnapping Jews.”

With the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the country is split between the Nazi invaders and the Soviet Union. Vilna winds up in the hands of the Soviets, then the Lithuanians, then the Soviets again, who set about seizing property and businesses, and arresting and deporting perceived enemies of the state.

Recollections of life before 1939 evoke the rich diversity of Vilna’s thriving Jewish community, including its multiple synagogues and political and social organizations. The impact on daily life of rising antisemitism foreshadows far darker times to come.

“Those Who Were There” co-producers Nahanni Rous and Eric Marcus introduce a few of the voices that, over the course of 10 episodes, will bring to life the once-vibrant Jewish community of Vilna, Poland (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) and chronicle its destruction during World War II.

Join co-producers Nahanni Rous and Eric Marcus on a research trip to the YIVO Institute in preparation for the upcoming season of Those Who Were There that focuses on the city of Vilna—a once thriving center of Jewish life and culture. Their guide on this exploratory dive into YIVO’s archives is Eddy Portnoy, YIVO’s Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions. Among the documents they’re in search of is a rare, typewritten diary of life in the Vilna Ghetto during World War II kept by Herman Kruk. Join Nahanni and Eric on what they found to be a revelatory and moving journey through time.

When Nazi troops seized the Polish farm where Celia Kassow was in hiding, she fled once again—this time into the forest, where she joined the Soviet partisans.

When Nazi bombs fell from the sky, Celia Kassow fled her Polish boarding school and sought help from a classmate who lived nearby. The response? “Get away from here, you dirty Jew.”

Leonard Linton's story spans half the globe—from Japan to Germany, France, New York, and back to Germany, where as a 23-year-old U.S. soldier he happened upon a concentration camp called Woebbelin.

Renee Hartman was just a child when the Nazis swept into Czechoslovakia.  Her parents and sister were deaf, so she became her family’s ears, alert to the sound of the Gestapo’s boots.

Eighteen-year-old Arne Brun Lie answered the patriotic call to join the Norwegian resistance.  But instead of fighting for his nation’s freedom, he found himself in the hands of the Nazis, fighting for his life.

After liberation from a slave labor camp, Sally Finkelstein Horwitz and her sister returned to Poland where anti-Jewish pogroms forced them to seek refuge in Germany.

When Heda Kovaly was deported from Prague to the Lodz ghetto, along with thousands of other Jews, she never imagined that of her entire extended family, only she and her husband would return alive.

Leon Bass faced racism growing up in Philadelphia, confronted it in the Army, and discovered its “ultimate” endpoint at a German concentration camp called Buchenwald.