Show Notes
Join co-producers Nahanni Rous and Eric Marcus on a research trip to the YIVO Institute in preparation for the upcoming season of Those Who Were There that focuses on the city of Vilna—a once thriving center of Jewish life and culture. Their guide on this exploratory dive into YIVO’s archives is Eddy Portnoy, YIVO’s Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions. Among the documents they’re in search of is a rare, typewritten diary of life in the Vilna Ghetto during World War II kept by Herman Kruk. Join Nahanni and Eric on what they found to be a revelatory and moving journey through time.
More from Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust
Renee Hartman was one of the first four survivors to give testimony to the Fortunoff Archive's predecessor organization in 1979. In this podcast episode, she describes how she was just a child when the Nazis swept into Czechoslovakia. Her parents and sister were deaf, so she became her family’s ears, alert to the sound of the Gestapo’s boots.We’re re-releasing this episode in celebration of her life.
In this final chapter of “Remembering Vilna,” several of the survivors whose stories we’ve featured tell of their journeys to safety and new beginnings, even as the traumas they experienced remained ever present.
At war’s end, Vilna’s survivors struggle to regain their health, look for missing family members, and search for ways to leave Europe for the United States or Palestine. But a small group join an effort to seek revenge in Nuremberg, where an international tribunal is underway.
July 1944. For nearly two weeks, the Nazis and the Soviets fight for every street and block in Vilna. When the smoke clears, Jews hiding in the sewers emerge into daylight while other survivors and Jewish partisans filter back into the devastated city.
When the Nazis liquidate the Vilna ghetto, they send thousands of Jews to their deaths or to forced-labor camps. Others escape to the forest to join the partisans. Very few manage to hide. The Nazis also try to eliminate evidence of their efforts to murder Vilna’s Jews.