The Partisan Escape from the Ghetto

The Partisan Escape from the Ghetto was a clandestine rescue operation conducted in the Kovno Ghetto during the Holocaust, by which Jewish partisans smuggled ghetto residents to safety through a hidden passage. The escape is remembered and narrated by Yehoshua, a young boy who served as a runner for the Kovno Ghetto Council, and whose testimony preserves the event's harrowing details. The operation stands as one of the few successful acts of organized resistance within the ghetto, a fragile counterpoint to the systematic murder that surrounded it, and it reveals the agonizing moral calculations the council was forced to make about who deserved the chance to live.

The Secret Meeting with the Partisans

The escape began with a clandestine visit from a delegation of Jewish partisans, who arrived at the ghetto under cover of night. The meeting took place in a cabin used to store paint supplies, sand bins, and carpentry tools, located not even one block from the ghetto's perimeter. Yehoshua had somehow learned of the meeting, and Josef Barbanel, the council's chief aide and secret historian, thought it safer for the boy to be present, using the solemnity of the occasion to seal his lips. They sat and waited in the stillness of early morning, and after Yehoshua had nodded off several times, the signal came: soft taps, once, and then again. A desk was moved, and from a trapdoor underneath, three partisans rose into the room, bringing with them the cold and darkness they had come from. Yehoshua, who had seen a baby born some weeks before, noted the resemblance: first the head, then the shoulders, then the rifle.

The three partisans were two men and a woman, all children in Yehoshua's eyes, their faces and hands blackened with dirt. Their rifles were like the ones the guards on the bridge carried, which thrilled Yehoshua because he knew each rifle had to have been taken from a German. At the same time, he was frightened. These were people who looked for help from no one, who prayed to no one, and every gesture was disdainful. Their eyes were cold and impatient, even the woman's, though when she caught sight of Yehoshua, he read in her face the compassion of an older sister, a momentary betrayal of her hardened mien, perhaps the unwitting disclosure of worry for a child in this place, under the direction of old men. The leader, a young man named Benno, wore round-rimmed glasses that gave him, incongruously, a yeshiva bocher's appearance; the other had a broad Slavic face and wide shoulders, the sort of oaf Yehoshua would have stayed away from in the old days at school. Only Dr. Koenig, whose prewar practice had taken him everywhere in the district, knew them, and possibly he had delivered at least one of them, Benno, on whose eyeglasses the candles shone when he averted his head and allowed the doctor to grasp his shoulders in greeting.

The Partisans' Warning and the Plan

Benno sat on a table and, holding his rifle loosely across his knees, addressed the council members in a hushed, fluent Yiddish that sounded to Yehoshua like a brook running over rocks. He delivered a grim warning: the Russian army was within a hundred twenty miles, and as the front moved west, the ghetto would be dismantled and its inhabitants with it. "You will dig the graves you will lie in," he said. "It is just a matter of time." Dr. Koenig countered that the Germans were already trying to destroy evidence of their murders, frightened of criminal prosecution after the war. Benno dismissed this as self-delusion: if the Germans didn't slaughter the ghetto's inhabitants on the spot, they would move them somewhere else and slaughter them there. The partisans were proposing to take people out, as many as wanted to come, moving thirty or forty a night. Benno's group consisted of a hundred and fifty armed Jewish men and women and another two hundred people whom they took care of, and three partisan units, one Jewish and two Russian, held militarily secure areas behind German lines.

The third council member present was Rabbi Pomeranz, a very thin, slight, middle-aged man who wore an old battered homburg and whose beard had turned white. He sat in a chair against the wall, holding a siddur closed on his lap with his finger keeping the place, silently davening while attending to the matters at hand, his head nodding and his lips moving as he uttered the prayers he knew without the book, his eyes on the partisan who spoke. The rabbi asked whether the partisans knew the German policy regarding escape, that people were executed who were caught trying. Before descending through the trapdoor, Benno addressed the rabbi directly: "Since your prayers are so effective and have already done so much good, you, I expect, will choose to remain and pray to the Lord your God to save your people." When he had gone and the desk was back in place, the rabbi stood and set his battered homburg firmly on his head as he prepared to go out. "That's not why I pray to the Lord, blessed be His name," he said to no one in particular. "I pray to bring Him into being."

The Underground Railroad and the Council's Triage

Once the council met in full, it decided it had no other choice than to inform people there was now a means of escape from the ghetto. But the news could be disseminated only in the most secure manner, not only because of the obvious danger of the Germans themselves, but because of the spies the Germans installed among them, pretend Jews, or simple betrayers, as some of the ghetto police had become. The procedure was painstaking, one by one, beginning with the people the council members knew personally. Yehoshua received a new assignment: the star runner in his garrison cap, finding the selected people at the hours they were available and summoning them, in secrecy, to the council offices. In due course, the underground railroad was put into place. The partisans had very easily infiltrated the city, and as Benno had said, they really knew what they were doing. It was surprisingly effective. Yehoshua was not sure how it was done, what the actual means of escape was, and suspected it changed from night to night. He thought as many as two hundred fifty people got out before it all ended.

The council had given priority to those most fit to endure the difficulties of living in the open. When people left, their registration and work cards were bestowed upon people of the same age and gender who didn't have them, in the hope of keeping the Germans from realizing that the ghetto's numbers were decreasing. This triage was characteristic of the council's painful pragmatism: perhaps if the procedure had not been so painstaking, more people could have been freed, but the risk of betrayal was too great. The escape thus became a moral calculus in which the fittest were saved first, and the old, the sick, and the young were left behind to face the ghetto's destruction.

The Archive and the Testimony

The escape is inseparable from the larger project of archival resistance that Josef Barbanel conducted within the ghetto. Whenever Barbanel received reports, he either wrote down verbatim what he was told or asked the person reporting to write a statement. He kept a diary in which he reported everything that happened, along with the relevant documentation, the latest regulations, the execution orders, the deaths, minutes of the council meetings, orders signed by the infamous Commandant Schmitz, proscriptions, dicta, identity papers for the work details. He used whatever paper he had on hand, including unused student exercise books. Yehoshua could close his eyes and see Barbanel's handwriting, a neat Yiddish like stitches sewn into the page, the characters very small, the words flying off his pen line after line in his passion to say what happened each day, each moment, of their lives as captives. His doing this was illegal, as the Germans forbade unauthorized writings or photographs, but as the chief aide to Dr. Koenig, Barbanel had always to be writing something, and it was relatively easy for him to enfold this within his formal duties. When Yehoshua asked him one day if he was by profession a historian, Barbanel looked surprised for a moment and then smiled and shook his head. "You are one smart kid, Yehoshua," he said. "Yes, I'm a historian, by necessity. But you wouldn't tell anyone, would you." This was a statement, not a question, and Yehoshua swore he wouldn't and they shook hands on it.

Barbanel's diary, by the time Yehoshua was aware of it, must have run into thousands of pages, volumes, a whole trunk full of material. Since neither Barbanel nor Greta Margolin was to survive the destruction of the ghetto, those papers remained hidden in the earth of Eastern Europe, in its rubble, in the wreckage and ruination and dust of its Christian tradition. The diary was eventually recovered, decades later, when a customs inspector at JFK Airport pried open a white-painted chest with a hammer and chisel, revealing packages wrapped in oilskin, sheaves of paper bound in twine, booklets, manuals, folders, rolled-up blueprints, diagrams, stapled documents, and envelopes of various sizes, each labeled in a small, neat Yiddish script. Among them was a diary in one increasingly familiar hand covering a period of three years, 1941 to the date in 1944 when the ghetto was dismantled and the survivors were marched to the railroad station, along with reams of documentation, rules and regulations issued by the Germans, and innumerable orders with the signature of Commandant Schmitz. The recovery of this archive, and the testimony of Yehoshua that it contains, ensures that the partisan escape and the lives it saved are not erased from history, but preserved as a record of both the horror and the resistance that defined the Kovno Ghetto.