The Germans occupied Kaunas on June 24, 1941. The anti-Semitic Lithuanians were waving, cheering, and gladly welcomed the Hitlerite invaders. They did not even wait for the Germans to settle in and carried out pogroms against the Jews. The fascists let the Lithuanians do anything they wanted to do to harm the Jews. The first pogrom was at Vilijampole (Slobodka), the suburb of Kaunas, on the night of June 25-26, 1941. That night the local Lithuanian collaborators ruthlessly murdered about 1,000 Jews and then looted their homes.
The pogroms which started in Slobodka spread to the "wealthy" blocks of Kaunas. On June 27, 1941, at Vytautas avenue, a gang of the pro-German, Lithuanian nationalists broke into nearby Jewish homes, dragged the residents out into the street, and pulled them into the nearby garage of the co-operative system "Lietukis," 68 people were brought in. Some of the Jews were beaten to death with shovels and with iron bars. The brutal bandits also shoved fire hoses into the mouths of some of their victims and turned on the water until their stomachs burst. The murders were witnessed by a crowd of men, women, and children who cheered as each Jew succumbed, and after all the Jews had been killed, sang the Lithuanian national anthem. The Germans were watching that massacre with great pleasure wildly saluting their allies.
SS Oberfuhrer Hans Kramer, the German commissar of the city of Kaunas, issued an order in the middle of July 1941. That order declared that the Jewish population was forbidden to walk along city pavements. (The Jews had to walk on the right edge of the pavement one behind the other.) It was forbidden for them to attend public events, including cinemas, athletic fields and parks, or even to use public benches. The Jews were not allowed to use public transportation, to own wireless radios, or telephones. They could not sell, exchange or dispose of their property. The Jews could not live with non-Jews, or have a Christian house worker. It was forbidden to buy food. The Jews were condemned to hunger. They had to wear the mark of recognition, the yellow six-pointed Star of David (Magen David) on their clothes. The Jews were not allowed outside from 8 p.m. until 6 a.m.
On July 10, 1941, the Germans decreed establishment of the Kaunas Ghetto. Nearly 30,000 Jewish residents of Kaunas had to move to Vilijampole where they were herded into the medieval ghetto which was sealed with barbed wire fence on August 15, 1941.
The area of the Ninth Fort was used by the German Command as the main place to carry out mass shootings of Jews from Kaunas. The Hitlerites drove about 1,000 Soviet prisoners of war into the fort and forced them to dig ditches in a field of over five hectares in area, at the western wall of the fort.
During July and August 1941, 14 ditches were dug, each of them three meters wide, over 200 meters long and over two meters in depth. At first, the Hitlerites and their Lithuanian allies executed small groups of Jews there almost everyday.
The mass executions, or so-called "great actions," started on October 29, 1941, when over 10,000 Jews were killed.
During November and December 1941, over 30,000 Jews from Vienne, Prague, Frankfurt, Berlin, and other places of Europe were brought to the Kaunas Ghetto and massacred at the Ninth Fort. Later, more Jews from France, other occupied European countries, and many small Lithuanian towns were killed there.
People in the Kaunas Ghetto lived under unbearable conditions. Because of the crowded living conditions, three to four families lived in one room, separated from one another only by old clothes hanging from the ceiling down to the floor.
The Nazis issued an order under which the Jews were forbidden to bring any food into the Kaunas Ghetto, and whoever was caught with food was hanged. People had to live on meager food rations. The weekly allowance for food contained 700 grams of bread baked with ersatz mixture of flour, various grains, grass, and often sawdust as filler, 125 grams of flour, and 125 grams of horseflesh by person. Sometimes, a few potatoes were given out. The working prisoners were given small extra rations.
In order not to die of hunger the Jews in the Kaunas Ghetto were forced to obtain food by illegal methods, and only those who worked in the city could do it. Many of them were caught with food by the Lithuanian police who then gave the Jews up to the Gestapo and they were executed.
Contraband played a big role in supplying food to the ghetto. There were "specialists for trading over the fence," smugglers who had connections with the Lithuanians who would supply food for large amounts of money or jewelry. There were also go-betweens who provided those prisoners who worked in the city with some goods which were for sale outside the ghetto. Corruption among the Hitlerites, the Lithuanian policemen, and security guards increased with time.
However, not everybody could afford to buy contraband food. Jews in the Kaunas Ghetto were dying everyday of hunger, malnutrition-related diseases, unbearably hard work, and stress. On October 4, 1941, doctors, nurses, patients and visitors were locked by the Hitlerites inside the Hospital for Infectious Diseases and it was set on fire. Several people attempted to escape and were shot down.
The ghetto prisoners suffered from daily humiliation. They had to remove their hats before any uniformed German officer, bow low to the Hitlerites and Lithuanian policemen, and listen to their insults, abuse and disgraceful mockeries. The Germans forced the old Jews to sing and dance; they beat them and made fun of them.
Long incarceration in the ghetto turned into an instinctive fight for survival. Many Jews showed great resourcefulness and shrewdness to survive those terrible conditions.
In the meantime, "actions" in the Ninth Fort were following one after another…
The Nazis and the Lithuanian police conducted raids and lined up Jews for "selection" to separate the children, the old, the sick, and the weak for execution. During those "selections," teenagers and little children tried to look upward. They all rose on their tiptoes, their parents made raised hairstyles for them, and the youth worked as hard as adults to avoid execution. Rachel Shlimovich was one of those children who used a similar trick. She lived in the Kaunas Ghetto from the time she was 11 until she turned 13. Shmuel Tsveigorn was not much older then Rachel and he worked in a metal shop, carrying the same workload as adults.
It was impossible to escape from the ditches of the Ninth Fort without being hit by a bullet. The Germans and their Lithuanian allies watched carefully and caught everyone who tried to escape, tying their hands with barbed wire, beating them with rifle butts, making prisoners go down on top of dead bodies, and then shooting them again. Nevertheless, a few people miraculously survived the Ninth Fort’s ditches which were filled with mutilated dead bodies. One of them is Khasya Green, sister of my fellow countryman Shmuel Green.
Khasya Green was a prisoner of the Kaunas Ghetto. And during one of the "actions" she was brought into the Ninth Fort with other Jews for execution. The Hitlerites and their local collaborators herded the doomed to die prisoners into the ditch. However, before the shots were fired, Khasya caught on the dead body of somebody who had been killed earlier and fell down but the murderers did not see her. When the shots were fired, bloodied dead bodies started falling down on top of her. She never stirred and remained lying under the pile of corpses until nightfall, when she climbed out of the ditch. She did not know where to go. She carefully made her way to the city and then went to one of the Catholic churches of Kaunas where a priest helped her. The priest gave Khasya a forged passport (he used the passport of his dead sister replacing an original photo with an adeptly inserted new one) and sent her to one of the members of his own flock where she was sheltered. However, a relative of the woman said that her tenant looked like a Jew, after which the priest sent her to Vilnius to a Catholic nunnery where Khasya waited until the city was liberated. Now Khasya lives in the city of Haifa, Israel.
In 1942, the young people of the Kaunas Ghetto searched for a way to leave the ghetto to join partisans fighting in the Rudnitzky forest. It was hard to do because most of partisan bases were concentrated far away from Kaunas. Also, it was risky to go such a long way as it was easy to get caught by the Lithuanians who gave every captured Jew to the Gestapo men.
During the summer of 1943, rumors about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and victories of the Red Army gave a great impetus to the resistance movement against the Hitlerites. The leader of that movement in the Kaunas Ghetto was writer Khaim Yelin. A few hundred young people managed to escape the ghetto and join with different partisan groups during the period between the fall of 1943 and the spring of 1944. The former prisoners of the Kaunas Ghetto heroically fought the Nazi killers. In some places they experienced many hardships from the anti-Semitic local partisans and their commanders.
Not all prisoners who fled the Kaunas Ghetto managed to survive. For instance, about 100 escaped Jews were hiding in underground shelters around the town of Yurberg. In an arranged place they built several dugouts and stocked up on weapons, preparing to fight the fascists, but all were discovered by the Hitlerites and murdered in the summer of 1944.
Khaim Yelin fell into Gestapo hands and was killed in April 1944.
There was a successful, mass heroic escape of 64 prisoners of the Ninth Fort who were given the task of removing the traces of the murder of the Jews. They were forced to reopen of all ditches where the victims of the Nazi crimes had been buried, exhume and burn the remains in the bonfires. In those bonfires people were burned alive as well. No one was to know what was being done in the Ninth Fort. That escape had been planned and prepared carefully for a whole month. And, finally, on December 24, 1943, at the eve of Christmas when most of the guards were drunk celebrating the holiday, iron bars of a grid that separated the prison cells from an unwatched corridor were bent back. From there the escapees went up the metal stairs to the second floor. They covered the stairs with blankets to muffle the noise of their heavy steps. They then escaped into a passageway which led to a twisting, underground tunnel which had been cleared of firewood in advance. A section of the passage where the security was able to watch was camouflaged with outstretched white clothes kept by some of the escapees. After that, they rolled down the steep snow slope. The escapees climbed over the 6-meter concrete wall using pre-arranged three-part stepladders. And 64 live witnesses of the Nazi and the Lithuanian allies’ crimes went free…
After escaping, most of them also faced great difficulties in getting to various partisan detachments. Those survivors told the world about the tragedy of the Jews of the Kaunas Ghetto, and the barbaric execution of the prisoners in the Ninth Fort.
The Jews of the Kaunas Ghetto set up hideouts (in the ghetto they were called "malines") at the end of 1943, where they could hide if danger threatened. "Malines" originates from the Hebrew word "malon" which means a hide-out. Water and food were stored in the "malines." Some "malines" had wells; some of them were even equipped with radios to support communication with the outside. The intent was to live there for a long time.
The Kaunas Ghetto was converted into a concentration camp in the fall of 1943 and management was transferred to the SS men. Work routines and security procedures for the prisoners were changed as well.
