The Shoah (1939–1945)
Liquidation of the Vilna ghetto
Sept. 1943·Vilna
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
The ghetto of the « Jerusalem of Lithuania » is liquidated: men sent to Estonia, women and children to Sobibór, the rest shot at Ponary.
Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," had been the intellectual heart of Eastern European Judaism: its yeshivot, its Yiddish research institute, and its printing houses made it an unrivaled center.
Its enclosed quarter was liquidated in the autumn. Able-bodied men were sent to the camps in Estonia, women and children to Sobibór, and those who remained were shot at Ponary, the woodland on the outskirts of the city where executions had begun in the very first weeks of the occupation. Part of the library and the archives had been hidden by those whom the occupier had employed to sort through them.
- Period :
- The Shoah (1939–1945)
- Type :
- Shoah
- Region :
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Country :
- Lituanie
Yad Vashem ; Herman Kruk, *The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania* ; Institut YIVO, New York.