The Lithuanian Embassy in London has marked the 75th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto with a special event to honour the culture its beleaguered Jews produced despite their privations.
On September 23 1943 the ghetto’s remaining 10,000 Jews – a quarter of those who had been confined there two years earlier – were taken and shot or deported to camps in Europe.
But evidence of the cultural vitality of the Jews who lived in the city known as the “Jerusalem of the North” remained.
After the ghetto’s liquidation, 241 posters in Yiddish were found that advertised theatre performances, concerts, sporting contests and lectures put on there.
Jewish cultural life was “an act of spiritual resistance,” said Neringa Layvyte-Gustaitiene, head of history research at the Vilna Gaon State Museum in Lithunia, at a memorial event at the Lithuanian Embassy in London on Thursday.
A collection of 17 ghetto posters, from her museum, was displayed at the embassy for the occasion.
One publicised a basketball match between a ghetto team and one representing Kailis, the forced labour camp nearby. Another invited teenagers to lectures on literature and physics.
One celebrated the 100,000th book read from the ghetto library. Another announced the “first concert” by those who policed the ghetto gates. There was even a New Year’s Eve’s party for 1943.
For the victors of one sports competition, “the prize was a kilogram of sugar”, Ms Latvyte-Gustaitiene explained.
Only a few thousand of Lithuania’s Jewish population of around quarter of a million survived the War.
Now the anniversary of the liquidation of the ghetto is commemorated in Lithuania as a day of remembrance for the genocide of the country’s Jews.
Lighting candles for the victims of the Shoah, Rabbi Herschel Gluck, the Stamford Hill-based interfaith activist, recited the memorial prayer. But he noted that while the past should not be forgotten, Lithuania was now making “tremendous efforts” to preserve Jewish life.
Accompanying the poster exhibition, a concert of Yiddish songs – some composed during the War – recalled the creativity of the Jewish community.
One of heart-rending poignancy, A Yiddish Kind, reflected how some had managed to save their children: arranging for them to be smuggled out of the ghetto into the countryside. It sang of a little girl with dark eyes among the blue-eyed and blonde-haired villagers and a mother’s last words to her daughter warning her not to speak Yiddish, “You are not a Jew anymore.”
The song that became the anthem of Jewish resistance, Zog Nit Kein Mol (“Never Say”), was written in the Vilnius Ghetto after news reached it of the Jewish uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto in Pesach 1943.
The songs were sung on Thursday by Rafailas Karpis, who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family. A tenor at the Lithuanian National Opera Theatre by profession, he gives his performances in Yiddish, he said, “for the soul”.
