Tree trunk from the Rudniki Forest

Tree trunk from the Rudniki Forest outside of Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania. The forest was used as a haven for Jewish partisans, mainly from summer 1943 through summer 1944. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, Vilna was part of northeastern Poland. In September 1939, under the terms of the German-Soviet Pact, Vilna, along with the rest of eastern Poland, was occupied by Soviet forces. The Soviet Union then transferred the Vilna region to Lithuania. On June 22, 1941, Germany broke the pact by attacking Soviet forces, and two days later they occupied Vilna. The occupying Germans established the Vilna ghetto in early September. In January 1942, the Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye (FPO, United Partisan Organization), an underground partisan movement, was formed in the ghetto under the direction of Yitzhak Wittenberg. FPO members sabotaged equipment in German factories where they were forced laborers, forged documents for fellow Jews, and smuggled weapons into the ghetto. In September 1943, as the final liquidation of the ghetto began, resistance members fought the Germans who had entered the ghetto to begin the deportations. The Jewish council in the ghetto however, hoping to minimize bloodshed, agreed to cooperate with the deportations. Without widespread support from the ghetto inhabitants, the FPO decided to retreat through the sewers to the nearby forests to continue their resistance. In the Rudniki Forest, the FPO met up with the Soviet partisan movement, and in July 1944, they joined the Red Army in the liberation of Vilna.