Hakibbutz Ha'artzi Archives Collection: the Vilna Ghetto

The material is divided into 39 files and contains hundreds of original documents dealing with the history of the establishment of the Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye (FPO-United Partisans Organization), the way it worked and the preparations for the uprising. The organization placards calling for armed resistance in the ghettos and the placards intended for the Polish and Lithuanian population and the German soldiers should be noted among other things. The placards reveal the truth about the murder of the Jews. The documents regarding partisan activity in the forests in the Vilna area signed by "Uri" (Abba Kovner) are also worthy of note.

In the collection there are also photographs and documents belonging to fighters and partisans, reports about FPO activities that were submitted to the Supreme Partisan Headquarters in Moscow and contemporary articles from the Soviet and Polish press (from the years 1944-1945) regarding the Vilna Ghetto Uprising and the Jewish fighters.

Among these documents there is a booklet used for teaching partisan warfare (translated from Finnish and published in Moscow in 1940) from which the ghetto fighters gained their knowledge of the subject. There is special importance to the work of the Jewish public leader, Herman Kruk, of Blessed Memory, some of whose works, such as "Mit a Shlus Oifen Moil" (With a Lock on the Mouth) and an excerpt from "The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps 1939-1944", have been preserved in the collection.

Worthy of note: The original protocols from Judenrat meetings in Vilna, statistical reports from the Statistics Department in the ghetto, editions of the "Geta Yedios" (Ghetto News) newspaper, notices and placards from above [?] the ghetto; documents regarding activities of the Jewish Police and its commander, Jacob Gens, as well as documents from the German administration, mainly regarding the forced labor of the ghetto inmates, and the work of the Jewish historian Dr. Heller, who wrote an essay regarding the Jewish settlement in Vilna, 1633-1942, in the German language in the ghetto by order of the "Alfred Rosenberg Institute". Scores of testimonies concerning the events in the Vilna Ghetto, in the nearby settlements and in the camps that were taken down by FPO activists complete the collection. There are also memos and documentation passed on to the Soviet authorities by the last of the ghetto fighters and partisans after the liberation regarding their activities to concentrate the documentation pertaining to the war period. The diaries of Rozka Korczak-Marlé and other journals are also worthy of note.