Friday, May 02, 2008

The Kovno Ghetto

Today is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Each year Rabbi Birnbaum (retd.) organizes a meaningful ceremony to commemorate Yom Hashoah at the Conservative Synagogue. This year he focussed on the Kovno Ghetto, mainly because one of the few survivors of the Kovno Ghetto was a member of the Shool, and he died a few months ago, so this was also in his memory.
What distinguished the Kovno Ghetto from the other Ghettos was that there the Judenrat and the Jewish leadership cooperated with the Jewish underground in attempting to resist the Nazis. From the day after the German Army swept into Lithuania in 1940, the killing of Jews began. The local Lithuanian population was enthusiastic in cooperating with the Germans and on the first day 3,000 Jews were murdered in the streets, many were beaten to death with iron bars.
At first there were ca. 50,000 Jews in the Ghetto. By 1944, when the Germans razed the Ghetto, there were ca. 8,000 Jews left, and of these only 82 survived until the end of the war. The Kovno Ghetto was also different in that the killing took place right there in the Ghetto and in the nearby Fort 9, one of the forts built by the Russian Czars to defend Kovno. The Germans converted Fort 9 into a killing place, they dug 14 deep pits, into which Jews were thrown, dead and alive.
In the Ghetto, a series of German actions were organized, each one focused on a specialized item, such as collecting of furs (anyone found with a fur not given up would be killed), the collection of books (for burning), the assembly of academics who were marched away and killed, and the collection of children - 1,500 were taken and killed - this is beyond my comprehension! The resistance dug bunkers underneath the Ghetto and hid children and others there. The Jewish Ghetto police cooperated with the resistance, but there were traitors in the Ghetto that gave them away and they were arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, although they divulged nothing.
Near the end of the war a group of 64 Jews were taken to dig up the 100,000 bodies buried in Fort 9, including Jews from as far away as Berlin and Prague. The Germans hoped to destroy the evidence of their crimes against humanity, and this shows they were well aware of the evil of their deeds. This group of prisoners found a small door at the back of their cell and were able to open it and dig a hole under the wall. On Xmas Day, while the guards were celebrating they all escaped. |Several of them returned to the Ghetto and signed a statement and this is how we know of this event.
During the presentation, several congregants read aloud and our friend Batya Fonda sang Yiddish partisan songs. Then six survivors lit candles, one each for the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis. The number 6 million is abstract and distant, but when one focuses on a specific place and what actually happened there, it brings into focus the terrible cruelty of the Germans and their collaborators and the suffering the Jews experienced.

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