Irina Guzenberg
During the preparation for publishing the lists of prisoners of the Vilnius ghetto (on the basis of the General population census carried out in Lithuania in 1942)[1], it was discovered that the Lithuanian Central State Archives were keeping, among other documents, many unconnected lists from the period 1941–1944.
The material on the Jewish labor camp, HKP – the daily labor sheets, tables, information on the number of prisoners, and the official correspondence, help us reconstruct both the structure of similar labor camps, and the threatening atmosphere of 1943-1944. In the wake of the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto, the remaining camps that utilized prisoner workforces became their only hope to survive.
Below is a brief history of this camp.
In late August and during the first half of September 1943, some weeks before the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto (which occurred on 23 September), several Jewish labor camps were established in the city.[2] One of them was housed in two large six-storey buildings on 37 (now 47 and 49) Subačiaus (Subocz) St., known before the war as “Jewish cheap houses”.[3] Several hundred skilled workers and their families were moved there from the ghetto. They were mostly mechanics, tinsmiths, turners, glaziers, and others, who, still in the ghetto, were working in the Wehrmacht’s vehicle repair workshops, also known as the H.K.P. (the German abbreviation for Heereskraftfahrpark /Ost/ 562).
The repair workshops were situated at several locations in town. One example was a military drill ground, near Verkių (Werkowska) Street. The barracks and garages at the location were turned into workshops.[4] Some of the workers, mostly single men, lived on site, and were taken by truck on the week-ends to Subačiaus Street. Another group of prisoners worked in the former garage of a bus park on 2, Savanorių (Legionowa) Street. At both locations, vehicle engines were calibrated so they would run on solid fuel[5]. The base of the military unit K.P. /OST/ 562 and its main repair workshops were in the building of the technical college on 12 (now 16) Olandų and also across the street.
There also were workshops on the ground floors of both residential buildings on Subačiaus St. and nearby, in a small one-storey house to the left of Block 1 (where a bathhouse is now located). In addition, vehicles were brought to the camp and repaired or disassembled near special repair pits to the right of Block 2 (five-storey houses have since been built there). The camp territory was surrounded with barbed wire and guarded. This labor camp (like another Jewish camp in Vilnius, “Kailis”) was supervised by SS-man Richter (The Bare Neck, nicknamed by workers because of his long neck). The entrance was on Subačiaus St., somewhere between the two blocks (where currently a four-storey house stands). Block 1 was to the left of the entrance. Block 2, which also had a bathhouse, was to the right.
Certain information leads us to conclude that the idea of creating a Jewish labor camp, the H.K.P., belonged to Wehrmacht officer, Major Karl Plagge[6], who was chief of the car repair workshops. It is possible that he believed he would be able to save some of the Jews from imminent death, since the Vilnius ghetto was being liquidated. The prisoners would otherwise have been sent to Latvian or Estonian concentration camps. Alternatively, the establishment of the camp may have been necessary to ensure a skilled repair of military vehicles, for which Major Plagge was responsible. In any event, many survivors have very favorable memories of Karl Plagge. He, however, was not omnipotent and was not able to prevent the camp from final destruction.
The first lists that contained the names of workers to be transferred to the camp were prepared by Plagge, in August 1943. Soon, however, deportations from the ghetto began, when many of the skilled mechanics were expelled to Estonia. For this reason, in September the lists for H.K.P. were drawn up on the spot, in the streets of the ghetto. Many people were eager to get inside the camp, even though they were not trained as mechanics. In desperation, workers listed their parents, grandparents and close friends as their family members. Some had previously been hiding in ghetto ‘malinas’ (hiding places), and had no documents at all. Many others bribed the ghetto officials, in order to gain admittance. Their hope was to survive, and people tried to do so at any cost.
These early lists no longer exist, or possibly, have not been discovered in the archives to date. The exact number of camp inmates in its first days is also unknown. The earliest available documents that give the number of inmates are dated early November 1943. The total number, which was 1,218 on November 6, 1943 (see Doc. No. 1), gradually increased to reach 1,257 people by March 26, 1944. That was most probably the result of attempts by those who, having entered the camp without specialist qualifications or relation to a specialist, tried to legalize themselves. In addition, former ghetto prisoners who had survived the ghetto liquidation on September 23, 1943 in hiding, also tried to find a way in, hoping to find shelter and work. Some of them subsequently succeeded in finding more secure refuge outside the camp; there were also some successful escapes. Others may have stayed in H.K.P. illegally, in so far as the camp’s conditions with its roll-calls and meticulous counting of the total number of workers (see Doc. No. 2–9 and others) permitted it. It must be realised that the numbers quoted represented people, still lucky to be alive.
Besides the men, there were many women and children at the camp. Initially, only a few of the women worked on the site, in car repair workshops. However, in the winter of 1944, on the initiative of Major Plagge (see Doc. No. 15–17), nearly all the women were put to work. It is possible that Plagge knew about the train that left the Vilnius ghetto, supposedly to transport workers[7] to Kaunas, due to the “lack of a labor force” in the city. The train did not go to Kaunas, but to Paneriai, where approximately 4000 people were shot. This could be the reason why Plagge, in his official correspondence, insisted that the presence of women and children in the camp would insure the men maintained their level of productivity. He made it clear that he was against the women being transferred to Kaunas.
The HKP women sewed and mended military uniforms on the order of E. Reitz Uniformwerke and Meier Herbert. Their workshops were situated on the upper storey of Block 1 and in a hut to the right of the entrance to the camp, built for the purpose by camp’s construction brigades (Doc. No. 22) and were later equipped with Reitz and Meier firms’ sewing and knitting machines (see Doc. No. 15–17).
A small table (Doc. No. 8) shows 213 girls and boys being counted as impersonal “male (108) and female (105) children”. The same document indicates the number of men (486) and women (539), as well as the total number of prisoners – 1,238 for January 1944, the most stable of the months (see Doc. No. 1 for January 3-31, 1944 - 486+752=1,238, where 752 must be 539+231). A similar document (No. 10) gives the number of able-bodied people and of those unable to work, including the children.
On March 27, 1944, the H.K.P. and Kailis camps underwent a ‘children’s action’. Only a few children managed to hide in ‘malinas’. These became illegal camp dwellers, whom nobody would see[8]. In the same ‘action’, not only children, but also those unable to work, mostly elderly women, were seized. They all perished at Paneriai.[9] The number of camp inmates decreased 246 people (women and children), from 1,257 on March 25 to 1,011 on April 13. (It was in those days following the ‘action’, when the exact number of remaining inmates was unknown, that some Jews seized the opportunity and escaped[10]).
The camp was literally paralysed and could not overcome the shock for a long time. Daily report tables were reassumed only on April 13 (see Doc. No. 1), although others may have been lost. The March report (see Doc. No. 6) for the end of the month, instead of giving the number of Reitz and Meier female workers, says Nicht gearbeitet (“did not work”). The number of inmates decreased again in the middle of May 1944 because 67 men were removed (see Doc. No. 1 for May 15 and 17: 501-449=52, 512-497=15, 52+15=67). Some were taken to the Kazlų Rūda peat-bogs, and others, to Paneriai to continue the cremation of corpses.[11]
The H.K.P. camp survived until the summer of 1944.
On July 1, as the front lines approached Vilnius, Plagge warned the workers that H.K.P. would be evacuated, and responsibility for the camp would pass to the SS. According to other recollections, the chief of some of the workshops, Joseph (Sepp) Gramer (whose signature appears on many pages of Doc. No. 1) warned his workers of the forthcoming ‘evacuation’, which actually meant the annihilation of the camp. Having understood the sense of the term ‘evacuation’, some of the prisoners and their families found a way to escape that same day, once it grew dark. Some others hid in the ‘malinas’ they had prepared beforehand. In addition, a considerable number of inmates entered the hideouts when they saw others doing so. The hideouts had limited capacities and eventually became extremely overcrowded, thus creating danger for those who found shelter there.
Many people were missing for the last roll-calls on Sunday, July 2nd . On the 3rd, the ‘evacuation’ was carried out. Everybody was forced onto trucks and removed to Paneriai, where they were murdered with the prisoners of other Vilnius Jewish labor camps. Those who were discovered in hiding places were shot on the same day on the site, near their living quarters. However, a few managed to escape.
The Germans left the camp on July 4th.
Some of the ‘malinas’ made in the attics, cellars and inside enclosed walls were not discovered, and approximately a hundred people finally broke free, by which time Soviet troops were in the outskirts of the city. They broke the ring of the German defense on July 7, 1944, and surrounded the Nazi garrison on July 9. On the 13th of July, the troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front entered Vilnius.
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The materials published here are either reproduced in facsimile pages or re-printed, depending on their stage of conservation and legibility. All the documents are numbered, and have ‘archaeographic’ legends and conventional abbreviations in Lithuanian. LCVA is given for the Lithuanian Central State Archives, f. for stock, ap. for inventory, b. for file, l. for file sheet, and a.p. for reverse page.
Document No. 1 is an exception, since it presents systematically not one, but tens of separate documents (sheets), such as daily report tables, systematized according to the months and days. The tables gave the numbers of those present at work and of the sick. The first tables also included information on arrested people, those late for roll-call or sent to work elsewhere. Subsequently, the reports became brief (which is why not all the columns are complete). The sheets were gradually reduced to small notes.
Days-off and holidays in Doc. No. 1 are marked with a lighter tone. Some of the Sundays were work days. The table sheets for some of the workdays may have been lost (or not made at all); therefore, a line would not be completed. Sometimes a part of the line is omitted, if there was no entry in the document or the entry was erased or torn off and it is impossible to deduce it. The table, as in other similar cases, retains the German names of the columns; translation into Lithuanian, Russian and English is given on the same page.
If the document is not dated, the date is restored logically when possible and given in brackets or mentioned in the footnotes. Brackets are also used to restore an abbreviated word.
File No. 523 has typed lists of prisoners of, as it says, a Vilnius labor camp, separately men, women, and members of their families (Doc. No. 25–29). The archive inventory identifies all these lists only in time – 1943-1944, giving no camp name or address. The analysis of the names makes us believe that those are H.K.P. camp lists. In fact, we find such names of people who were surely H.K.P. inmates, as Rabbi Kalman Farber, the Esterowicz family (Solomon, Ida and Perella), Kolish, Zhmigrod, Riva and Hirsh Schwartzberg. It can also be asserted that the lists were made not earlier than April 1944, most probably, after the ‘children’s action’[12]. In the family list (Doc. No. 28, incomplete) there is no family listed with anybody aged under 16 (born in 1928 or later) or over 59 (born in 1885 or earlier).
The lists, especially those done by hand, in various handwritings (that is, made by different people, Doc. No. 30–32), abound in errors. First names and surnames are often incomplete, which makes them difficult to identify. Either Polish or German spelling is used in first names and surnames (w or v, cz or sch, etc.). In this publication, evident errors have been corrected or commented in the footnotes.
Nearly all the pages of the documents (from Stock R-1421) have a seal (in Russian or in Yiddish) of the Jewish Museum in Vilnius, which was re-established on November 9, 1944 and began immediately to collect documents on the ghettos. The museum was closed by the Soviet authorities in 1949, and its collections handed to other Lithuanian museums and archives.
For this article, we also used the recollections of Jacob Schwartzberg (born in 1936, now living in Israel), Isaac Reches (born in 1932, living in Vilnius), Simon Malkes (born in 1927, living in Paris), who were child prisoners at the H.K.P. camp and also, of former camp prisoners, Norma Dimitri (in the ghetto and H.K.P.: Nechama Sternshus, now living in Canada), Samuel Esterowitz[13], and Rabbi Kalman Farber.
The Documents No. 15-17 have been translated from German by Kristina Borkauskaite. The other documents have been translated by Jeanne Ran-Tcharny.
[1] The Jewish Museum. Vilnius Ghetto: Lists of Prisoners. Valstybinis Vilniaus Gaono žydų muziejus. Vilnius, vol. 1, 1996, vol. 2, 1998.
[2] Irina Guzenberg. The 1942 General Population Census in Lithuania: Labor Camps of the Vilnius Ghetto. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 45–64.
[3] Baron Moris de Hirsch (1831–1896) founded a philanthropical organisation, the Jewish Colonization Society (ICA) in London in 1891. Its aim was to assist Jewish emigrees from Russia and other East European countries in creating settlements in Argentina. After the death of Baron de Hirsch, the activities of the ICA were expanded /?/ to help Jewish colonization efforts in Palestine, as well as promoting agriculture and crafts among the Jews of Russia. In 1898, the ICA donated funds for “constructing inexpensive apartments for Vilna’s poor Jews”. The Inexpensive Apartments Society was set up in Vilna. The two buildings (architect Edward Goldberg) were completed in 1902. They contained 216 apartments, where poor Jewish families, Jewish students, and Chalutzim youth lived. The Chalutzim prepared themselves to work the land of Israel. Vegetable gardens were planted around the houses.
Later, the Inexpensive Apartments Society handed the property over to the Jewish Community. In the autumn of 1940, Soviet authorities nationalized the premises along with the adjacent land plot.
In August 1941, the residents of the ‘cheap houses’, like many other Vilnius Jews, died in the first murder actions in Paneriai. Then, a kind of ‘Russian ghetto’ was created, and the buildings were used to imprison the wives and children of Soviet military personnel. Some of the women were later murdered in Paneriai, and their children taken to orphanages. Other women were deported to German work camps. Thus, by autumn 1943, the two buildings were once again empty. G. Agranovsky, I. Guzenberg. A Concise Guide to Jewish Memorial Sites in Vilnius. Vilnius, LITUANUS, 1992. A handwritten supplement.
[4] In earlier times, the site was known as the Military field. Russian, and then French troops were stationed there during the war of 1812. Later in the 19th century, the grounds were used as a target range, and for other Russian military exercises. The army had summer camps for its regiments nearby. In the1920s and 30s, the land belonged the Polish Army. Known as the Plac broni, it consisted of barracks and an armoured cars park. When the Germans turned the former barracks into workshops, they called the workshops Panzerkazerne. The Jewish workers shortened the name to Panzerka. After the war, the territory was known as the Northern Town, and a Soviet military unit was stationed there.
[5] Because of the vast length of the front line and the problem of logistical support for the army, the Germans began to feel the fuel shortage as early as 1943. In addition, because of the heavy frosts, not every type of German petrol would work in their engines. For this reason, gas generators were fixed on the vehicles. The generators ran on wood; the gas they produced activated the engines.
[6] Karl Plagge (Darmstadt, July 10, 1897 – Darmstadt, June 19, 1957), certified engineer, wife Anke-Dorotea, no children. Army service: 1940–1941 – Rear Transport Park, Darmstadt; from July 1, 1941 – a captain at the car Park 562, Vilnius; from July 15, 1943, – a major; from July 16, 1944 – service at the 35th Vehicle Repair Regiment. Deutsche Dienststelle für die Benachrichtigung der nächsten Angehörigen von Gefallenen der ehemaligen deutschen Wehrmacht V2-677/160, 22.05.2000 (Letter from the Information Service for the closest relatives of deceased former Wehrmacht soldiers) and Darmstadt, Stadtarchiv, ST533W-T490/00, 10 Juli 2000 (letter from the State Archives of Darmstadt).
[7] Those were mainly Jews from the ghettos of Švenčionys and Northwestern Belarus.
[8] During the ‘children’s action’, Hirsh Schwartzberg seized his eight year old son Jacob and took him to the roof, where he hid the child near a chimney, under a blanket. That same day, his parents constructed a hiding place in their room. Trying not to make noise, they removed several bricks from the thick wall under the window, so that the child could be concealed in the niche. At night, when his parents allowed him to exercise along the corridor, he sometimes saw another boy, whose name he did not remember.
The four year old Yosif Reches was hidden by his parents in the chimney flue behind a kitchen shelf.
[9] There is conflicting information on this subject. Some material indicates that the children were taken to Poland. Other sources indicate that blood and skin might have been used in German hospitals in Vilnius. However, there is a burial site and a memorial for Jewish children in the Šeškinė Jewish cemetery in Vilnius. Complete information, including the names of children and when they were buried, has yet to be obtained.
[10] Among those who escaped during those days was Miriam Lisauskiene (a. k. a. Mira Rolnik).
[11] This was accomplished after the escape of corpse-burners from Paneriai on April 15, 1944.
[12] As it has been mentioned, Mira Rolnik escaped from the camp in the wake of the “children’s action”. Her name is absent from the list of women (Doc. No. 27). However, we find her name in the lists of sick women (Doc. No. 31, February 7 and 8 and March 21 and 22, 1944). As Norma Dimitry related, among the victims of the “children’s action” were her mother and two aunts. They were taken on a truck to Paneriai. Their names are on the lists of prisoners of the Vilnius ghetto, but do not appear on the list of women (Doc. No. 27) or the “Family List” (Doc. No. 28), which could not have been made prior to late April of 1944.
[13] Samuel Esterowitz. A Memoir. The Jewish Museum. Vilnius, 1994, p.p. 160–175 (in Russian). |
