Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Simaite

12. Destruction of the Ghetto

88 chapter 12 Destruction of the Ghetto the destruction of the Vilna Ghetto was rapid and dizzying. No one knew what to think when mass deportations of ghetto prisoners to Estonia began in August 1943. Many in the ghetto believed it was simply a matter of waiting out the war, and remaining alive long enough to see Hitler’s defeat. If they could work in Estonia for a few months, they might just survive. When they arrived there, the prisoners cleared forests and experienced a strange sense of hope and doom. Every day the prisoners of the Estonian camps felt more and more hemmed in by the sky and vast forests around them. Even the sea in which they bathed every day—a pleasure they had almost forgotten in the Vilna Ghetto—was a bittersweet presence, demarcating the limits of where they could flee, if they ever got the chance. Few of these deportees survived to see the end of the war. On September 18, 1944 the work camp inmates of Klooga and Lagedi, many of whom came from the Vilna Ghetto, were ordered to build a pyre, then to lie down naked on the logs, where one by one they were shot in the neck. The living layered upon the murdered, and the whole human structure was burned. The next morning the Red Army reached the area. On September 23, 1943 the Gestapo liquidated the Vilna Ghetto 89 Destruction of the Ghetto and shot its remaining prisoners. The only Jews who now officially remained in Vilna were at two work camps outside the ghetto. As rumors about impending liquidation circulated in the fall of 1943, Šimaitė secreted Sala Vaksman, a university student, out of the ghetto, either carrying her in a sack (as Vaksman’s son in Israel told me) or disguising her in a long coat (as I read in Vaksman’s testimony pages at Yad Vashem) and speaking loudly in Lithuanian (Šimaitė’s Papers, Righteous File). The soldiers at the gate assumed that Šimaitė’s companion was a colleague from the library, and let them exit the ghetto. First Šimaitė hid her friend in her Vilnius apartment, where Vaksman recovered from a fever for three weeks, then in a cupboard in the university’s library. For months she spent her days inside the cramped piece of furniture; during the night, she stretched out on the long tables to sleep. One night in April 1944, Vaksman was discovered by two thieves, who had probably broken into the library looking for material to burn, since wood and coal were at such a premium. The library was no longer safe, so Šimaitė arranged a place for the student at Kailis (Fur), the work camp outside the ghetto walls, where prisoners made warm clothes for German troops. A few days later, on April 28, 1944, the Gestapo arrested Šimaitė. Either her luck had run out, or (as she believed), someone had betrayed her, but in any case, the authorities discovered that she had provided a child with a forged identity document to get her into an orphanage.1 Soldiers seized her, then ransacked her apartment. The notes, manuscripts, and printed texts Šimaitė had been hiding perished in the search. The Gestapo held her for twelve days. They hung her upside down during her interrogation, beat her, and burned the soles of her feet with hot irons. The Germans condemned her to death, but the university rector, Mykolas Biržiška, managed to raise enough money to pay a ransom for her life. Instead of the gallows, Šimaitė was sentenced to imprisonment 90 at Dachau. When they heard of her fate, university friends gathered warm clothes and sent a librarian to deliver them to her in prison. The colleague found Šimaitė only half-conscious, her wrists bandaged following an apparent suicide attempt. Until May 1944 the Germans held Šimaitė in a forced labor camp called Pravieniškės, twenty-nine kilometers east of Kaunas. We know nothing of her internment at the camp, except that Jakubėnas snuck in to visit her. In her unfinished memoir about him, Šimaitė wrote: I panicked when I realized that he had crossed into the restricted area. The Germans gave every brave soul caught committing such a “crime” two weeks in a labor camp where they would be humiliated and severely beaten. Luckily, they never caught Kazys. (Memoir about Kazys Jakubėnas, Šimaitė’s...