The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police

2. The Prehistory of the Kovno Ghetto

65 The First Weeks June 22, 1941, the day when the two giants—the National Socialist Germany and the Bolshevik Soviet Union—collided, is the turning point in the history of the world war, which will determine the fate of all the nations and of all the continents for centuries to come. June 22 is also a fateful day for Lithuanian Jewry—in the months to follow the destiny of eight- to ninetenths of Lithuania’s Jews will forever be sealed. On Sunday, June 22, on the very first day of the war, as soon as it became clear that the Soviet army was retreating and that the principal institutions were being evacuated from Kovno in a strange haste, a terrible turmoil began among the Jews of Kovno. As early as Sunday night, increasingly on Monday, and even into Tuesday, the Jews of Kovno began to flee the city. They traveled by train, by truck, by wagon, by bicycle, and on foot. They left behind and abandoned all their worldly possessions, taking along a bundle of necessities, a suitcase, and headed to the train station or directly to the highway that leads through Vilkomir to Dvinsk. Jews were trying to The Prehistory of the Kovno Ghetto 2 HISTORY OF THE VILIAMPOLE JEWISH GHETTO POLICE 66 escape the black fate that had more than once descended upon them like a dark cloud. They knew that with the arrival of the Germans a terrible time awaited them. When we, the Jews of Kovno, attempted to look ahead, to make even a crude prediction as to what awaited us, we shuddered from the blackness and envisaged terrible things. Even so, the reality greatly exceeded in blackness and dreadful events anything the greatest pessimist could have imagined. The Jews of Kovno ran, but they did not get far. The trains were bombarded from the air, the rail lines destroyed. On the highway, motorized military units caught up with and overran the Jewish refugees. The small group of Jews who managed to reach the Russian front line (to the extent that it is known in the ghetto), were not allowed in for fear that they might be spies. And so thousands of Jews began the return trip, which ended in prisons, at the Seventh Fort (in Kovno),1 in villages, or in ghettos (for example , in Vilkomir). Here they were “annihilated” along with tens of thousands of other Jews. An indeterminate number of the refugees did manage to sneak back into Kovno, but most were unable to reenter their homes: Germans and Lithuanians had already occupied them, or had, at least, taken all their valuable belongings. Immediately, in the first days of the war, Lithuanian partisans2 began to grab Jews in the streets, to brutally drag men and women from their homes, and to take them to prisons and to the forts. At first it was thought that this was a passing event. Increasingly it became clear that the slaughters were organized and orchestrated from one place and carried out in pogrom style. Before there was even a trace of Germans in Kovno, Lithuanian partisans were already raging and planning their bloody treat. Monday, June 23, around noon, there was an announcement on the Kovno radio station, which had already been captured by the Lithuanian partisans, that there were incidents of Jews firing from windows on Lithuanian “freedom fighters”; that for each 1. The seventh of nine fortifications constructed by Tsarist Russia for the defense of Kovno. Each included embankments, artillery placements, and underground storage rooms for munitions. Used between the two world wars as prisons and execution places of political and criminal prisoners. 2. Armed bands of Lithuanian “freedom fighters,” who referred to themselves as “partisans.” Organized with the support of Nazi Germany shortly before June 22, 1941, they emerged into the open to attack the retreating Soviet Army, but mostly to engage in the slaughter of Lithuania’s Jews. The Prehistory of the Kovno Ghetto 67 such shot, 100 Jews would be shot. Numerous provocations started after this announcement. Lithuanian partisans would run into a house and announce that shots had been fired from this house, and the Jews from such a house would immediately be taken to prison or to the fort, or, in some cases, shot on the spot. Partisans would come looking for weapons, which might have been planted—a box of cartridges would be sufficient—and again...