For the parents, every new Nazi decree or personnel shuffle rekindled hope. The children, instinctively, knew better. At the end of July, Vilna got a new administration—district commissioner Hans Hingst and his deputy for Jewish affairs Franz Murer. Murer, a barber in his former life, had graduated from Hitler Youth to become a die-hard Nazi. Soon they were calling him Mem—the Angel of Death. The Angel wasted no time. On August 6 he told the Judenrat that they had twenty-four hours to deliver 5 million rubles into his hands—with the usual or else. But Murer was a small-time chiseler compared with his boss. Hingst had big plans that required time and finesse to bring to fruition. On the last day of August, he judged that conditions were ripe for what became known as the Great Provocation. In the afternoon, two armed Lithuanians entered a building on Glezer Street in the old Jewish section; outside, the street was crowded with German soldiers queuing up for a movie. The Lithuanian intruders fired off a couple of rounds and then dashed into the street, hollering to the soldiers that there were Jews inside the apartment building shooting at them. This was Hingst’s pretext for a mass Aktion. On Monday, September 1, “The city seethed all day,” wrote Kruk. Rumors swirled that in the ancient Jewish quarter, the residents of every building were being “driven out.” Not just the men—everyone. “Lines of people march on both sides of the street,” wrote Kruk, “winding behind one another—all with yellow patches. . . . Those who saw it describe dreadful scenes. The wailing reached the sky. The young were leading the old. They were dragging sick people and children. There were dozens of well-known and distinguished Vilna Jews in the groups. Those who saw it wept with them.” In the course of two days Hingst evicted some 3,700 Jews from the congested heart of Jewish Vilna and crammed them into Lukiszki Prison. From there, they were dispatched in groups to Ponar—men on foot, women in trucks. The Einsatzgruppen report broke down the numbers by gender and age—864 men, 2,019 women, 817 Jewish children. By Friday, September 5, wild new rumors congealed around a single word. Ghetto! The purpose of the Great Provocation became clear: the old Jewish quarter had been emptied so that Jews from other parts of the city could be confined there. Vilna’s 40,000 remaining Jews had a single day to relocate. The Germans had deliberately fixed on Shabbat as the moving day so as to inflict maximum pain.
Kruk, September 5, 1941:
Better stop thinking. But how?
It is 11:30 at night. Everyone is awake. My house borders the district of the Fourth Precinct. I listen to the nocturnal silence. Maybe I’ll hear something. Neighbors go from door to door and don’t know what to do with themselves.
Maybe pack? Pack what?
In the street, I hear shots.
My friends, where are you? What’s happening to you now? Will I ever see you again?
The hours drag on like years!
Doba, like every other Jew still alive in Vilna, had a few hours to sort and bundle up the fragments of her life. On the morning of Saturday, September 6, she dressed herself and the boys in as many layers as she could zip and button around them so there would be less to drag with them through the streets. A column of Lithuanian police and civilian guards stormed their building, forcing open doors, shouting at the residents to be quick, beating and herding them. The halls and stairwells filled with screams and sobs and the shuffle of shoes on stone. Doba, Shimonkeh, and Velveleh staggered under their burdens—Doba knew that every shirt, every dish, every piece of silverware meant another loaf of bread so she tried to haul away as much as possible. The boys blinked and squinted when they emerged into the sunlight they had barely seen since June. The streets were “a picture of the Middle Ages,” wrote one of the herded, “a gray black mass of people . . . harnessed to large bundles.” Lithuanian guards stood by to hustle and club them; bystanders heckled and jeered and robbed the unwary. “A bundle was suddenly stolen from a neighbor,” wrote fourteen-year-old Yitzhak Rudashevski, who went to the ghetto that day with the rest of them. “The woman stands in despair among her bundles and does not know how to cope with them, weeps and wrings her hands. Suddenly everything around me begins to weep. Everything weeps.”
The Germans had ordered the gentile populace not to assist the Jews in any way—but a few kind souls endangered their own lives by lifting a pack onto the back of a tottering old woman or hiding the valuables of a neighbor. Doba and her sons took their places in the black parade. “The Lithuanians drive us on, do not let us rest,” wrote Rudashevski. “I think of nothing: not what I am losing, not what I have just lost, not what is in store for me. I do not see the streets before me, the people passing by. I only feel that I am terribly weary, I feel that an insult, a hurt is burning inside me. Here is the ghetto gate. I feel that I have been robbed, my freedom is being robbed from me, my home, and the familiar Vilna streets I love so much. I have been cut off from all that is dear and precious to me.” Doba and the boys marched without knowing where they were going; they had no idea that ahead of them the stream was being forced into three channels: one drained into the tiny crabbed precinct of the old Jewish quarter, abutting the Great Synagogue; one into the half dozen dismal blocks anchored by the Judenrat headquarters on Strashuno Street; the overflow filled Lukiszki Prison. Doba and her two boys ended up in the Strashuno Street ghetto—the Large Ghetto, as it became known. They were comparatively lucky. Anyone who could not be crammed into the Large Ghetto spent Saturday night penned outside on Lidski Lane; on Sunday they were all carted off to Lukiszki Prison and from there to Ponar.
Those who got in first, or had the muscle or gumption, seized the better flats and barred the doors. Doba was in no shape to hustle or grab. She and the boys may have spent the first night sleeping in a courtyard or in the gutter—many did. The black parade continued long after dark; the angry rustle of voices and the crack of rubber and wood on bone never stopped. Doba and her sons trudged up and down a thousand filthy steps, knocked on a hundred doors, shoved their way into other shoving bodies. At some point, after God knows what epic ordeal, they ended up at Strashuno 15, a few doors down from the Judenrat on the main street of the Large Ghetto. It was a building of three floors, maybe three apartments to a floor. Eventually, Doba, Shimonkeh, Velveleh, Doba’s brother-in-law Yitzchak Senitski, and 437 other Jews lived in that one small building.
“What can I say,” Doba had written Sonia in happier times, “Shimonkeh is the greatest joy of my life.” In the ghetto, the dregs of that joy turned, like poison gas, into torment.