By Dr. Samuel Kassow
When the nightmare of German occupation ended, Jews emerged from the death marches, concentration camps, hideouts, and forests and faced the question, what now? Their families were gone, strangers were living in what had been their homes, and former neighbors greeted them with, “What, you’re still alive?” The Jewish Vilna that these survivors—Mira Verbin, Avrom Sutzkever, Arie Liebke Distal, and Henny Durmashkin Gurko—remembered from before the war was gone forever.
The survivors hit the road and crossed borders in the dead of night. Some tried to run the British blockade of Palestine. Others found temporary refuge in the displaced persons (DP) camps of Germany, Austria, and Italy. Many of the survivors just lived from day to day while coping with the memories of murdered family members and the realities of shattered lives. Others set themselves a goal, a mission that would help them understand why they had suffered and why they had to look ahead and build a better future. This episode features the testimony of Vilna survivors who found different ways to give their lives meaning and purpose.
In the Vilna ghetto and in the Nazi camps, Henny Durmashkin Gurko never stopped singing. As she had grown up in one of Vilna’s leading musical families, Yiddish and Hebrew music was her passion and helped remind her in her darkest moments who she was and why she had to survive. Just after her liberation from the Dachau camp complex by the U.S. Army, Gurko, along with many other survivors, was sent to the St. Ottilien monastery in Bavaria for rest and recuperation. There, together with other survivors, she helped organize an extraordinary musical ensemble—the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra—which toured the DP camps, performed in front of the officials of the Nuremberg Tribunal, and visited various German cities. Gurko recalled:
We were brought to St. Ottilien, which was a hospital in Bavaria. And, uh, there were nuns. Uh, it was a beautiful place. And they brought us to restore our health there, our strength back, and they took care of us. In St. Ottilien we started the orchestra. All the musicians came. Only eight people. We didn’t have any instruments. We got instruments.
And we were going from DP camp to DP camp, traveling and entertaining. And there were a few more musicians that survived. And, uh, they joined the orchestra. And when David Ben-Gurion came to Germany and spoke, we, uh, were there with our music. I sang a lot of ghetto songs, Yiddish songs, and Hebrew songs.
Then, we also appeared at the International Tribunal, uh, in, uh, at Nuremberg. In Nuremberg, when the Nazis were on trial. We played for the media from all over the world, and we wore concentration camp uniforms and the Stars of David while we were onstage.
The first concert, as Abby Anderton writes in Displaced Music, her important study of the orchestra, took place on the lawn of the monastery on a warm afternoon in May 1945, just a few weeks after liberation. The performers, mostly survivors from the Kovno and Vilna ghettos, were all dressed in concentration camp uniforms. Before the concert, Zalman Grinberg, the monastery’s head doctor, made a short speech in which he asked the audience to remember “what a triumphant record of crime and murder has been achieved by the nation of Hegel and Kant, Schiller and Goethe, Beethoven and Schopenhauer.”
Audiences showed a special appreciation for Gurko’s Yiddish songs, many of which had originated in the Vilna ghetto. Songs like “Yisrolik,” about a young orphan who tried to act tough but who shed tears in secret for his dead parents, spoke to the survivors’ own memories of loss and pain. Another popular song was “Vu ahin zol ikh geyn?” (“Where should I go now?”), which expressed the yearning of the DPs for a place to call home.
In September 1946, the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra merged with another survivor ensemble to create the Representative Concert Orchestra of the Surviving Remnant. In the last six months of 1947 alone, the orchestra gave 44 concerts in different DP camps before 27,000 viewers.
The May 1948 arrival of the young Leonard Bernstein was a major milestone in the history of the orchestra. Bernstein had been invited to Germany to conduct the Bavarian State Opera but also insisted on working with the Orchestra of the Surviving Remnant. During the two concerts that he conducted with the group, Bernstein accompanied Gurko as she sang songs from the ghettos and from Jewish Palestine. As Anderton points out, the German musicians who attended one of those concerts threw roses on the stage at the end. Not surprisingly, the Jewish musicians made no effort to break the ice and befriend the Germans.
The story of Henny Durmashkin Gurko and the Orchestra of the Surviving Remnant underscores just how memories of cultural resistance in the ghettos gave survivors the psychological wherewithal to find some meaning in their lives after the liberation. By the same token, the great Vilna poet Avrom Sutzkever never forgot for a moment that he, too, had a sacred mission: to keep Yiddish culture alive. Yiddish had been the language of most of the murdered Jews. Just as the survivors had to rebuild their lives, so, too, did Yiddish writers and poets have a sacred obligation to continue to write in the language of the martyrs and to fight for its future.
In the Vilna ghetto, Sutzkever wrote extraordinary poetry, in every conceivable circumstance. After the war, he wrote in the introduction to a collection of his wartime verse that “when the very sun became like ashes—I believed with perfect faith: as long as poetry does not abandon me, lead will not destroy me; as long as I live my life as a poet in the valley of the shadow of death, my sufferings will merit tikkun [repair] and redemption.” What Sutzkever wrote was the literal truth. He hid from death in a coffin—and wrote a poem. He dug his own grave, escaping execution by a last-minute miracle—and wrote a poem. The Germans shot his mother. And Sutzkever wrote a poem.
But he did much more. Sutzkever became a mainstay of the ghetto’s cultural life. He gave poetry readings, worked with youngsters in their clubs, and encouraged the artistic genius of the young Samuel Bak. He was a key figure in the Paper Brigade, which was based in the prewar headquarters of YIVO (the Yiddish Scientific Institute). Ordered by the Germans to sort valuable documents and books for shipment to Germany, Sutzkever and other brigade members smuggled valuable books, archival materials, and guns into the ghetto. He was also a member of the FPO (Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye, or United Partisan Organization) and joined the trek to the Narocz Forest in September 1943. Although angered and disillusioned by the antisemitism he encountered there, he finally managed to find a place in a partisan unit.
Ilya Ehrenburg, one of the most popular Soviet writers and a Jew who had been deeply shaken by the tragedy of his people, read some Sutzkever poems that had been transmitted to Moscow. Thanks to him and to the intervention of the Lithuanian Communist leader Justas Paleckis, the Soviets flew Sutzkever and his wife out of the partisan zone in Belarus to Moscow in March 1944. Tens of thousands of Jews in the war-torn Soviet Union, traumatized not only by the Holocaust but also by the growing antisemitism in their own country, eagerly read all they could about the sensational young man who had emerged from the ghetto and the forest. In a rare acknowledgment of Jewish suffering and valor, Pravda published Ilya Ehrenburg’s article about Sutzkever in April 1944.
After the liberation of Vilna in July 1944, Sutzkever returned to his native city and was shattered by the Communist authorities’ refusal to allow him and others to build a Jewish museum, start Jewish schools, or establish a Yiddish newspaper. He recoiled in horror as the Soviets prepared to destroy Jewish books that had survived the war and that he himself had helped rescue. At great risk, he and his close friend and fellow poet Shmerke Kaczerginski smuggled many valuable manuscripts to YIVO in New York City.
In February 1946, the Soviet prosecution team asked him to testify at the Nuremberg trials. As we see in this episode, Sutzkever eagerly agreed. But the trip to Germany was an emotional ordeal. Under severe strain, he even thought about smuggling a pistol into the courtroom and shooting Hermann Goering. Sutzkever finally took the stand and, under questioning by the Soviet prosecutor, spoke about the Vilna ghetto and about what had happened to his own child:
In the evening, when the Germans had left, I went to the hospital and found my wife in tears. It seemed that when she had her baby, the Jewish doctors of the hospital had already received the order that Jewish women must not give birth; and they had hidden the baby, together with other newborn children, in one of the rooms. But when [a group] with Murer came to the hospital, they heard the cry of the babies. They broke down the door and entered the room.
When my wife heard that the door had been broken, she immediately got up and ran to see what was happening to the child. She saw one German holding the baby and smearing something under its nose. Afterward, he threw it on the bed and laughed. When my wife picked up the child, there was something black under his nose. When I arrived at the hospital, I saw that my baby was dead. He was still warm.
More than anything, Sutzkever had wanted to testify in Yiddish. He had hoped to look the Nazi defendants in the eye as he spoke on behalf of the Jews they had killed. On February 17, 1946, he wrote in his diary:
I feel the terrible responsibility of my upcoming journey. I pray that the souls of the martyrs find expression in my words. I want to speak Yiddish. Absolutely Yiddish. . . . I want to speak the language of the people the accused attempted to exterminate along with their language. Let them hear our mame-loshn [mother tongue]. Let them hear our language, and may Alfred Rosenberg explode in astonishment. May my language triumph at Nuremberg as a symbol of its unshakability!
But in the end, the Soviet prosecutors told Sutzkever that because of “technical reasons,” he would have to testify in Russian.
Two months later, in April 1946, Sutzkever left Vilna forever. The Soviets now allowed former Polish citizens to leave for Poland, and from there Sutzkever made his way to Mandatory Palestine by late 1947. In Palestine, he continued to defy the odds. In a new country so intent on reviving Hebrew that it discouraged Yiddish and other Diaspora languages, Sutzkever started what would become the most important Yiddish literary journal in the postwar world, Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain). The Germans had murdered most of the world’s Yiddish speakers; Sutzkever was determined to salvage what he could from the ashes. The journal lasted for almost 50 years.
Even as Henny Durmashkin Gurko toured the DP camps and Avrom Sutzkever defiantly continued to write Yiddish poetry despite all that had happened, other Vilna survivors dedicated themselves to meting out vengeance to the Germans who had killed their families and their people. During the war, vengeance had been the fervent wish of many Jews as they faced death. After the war, Abba Kovner, the charismatic leader of the FPO and the commander of a Jewish partisan detachment in the Rudniki Forest, organized a secret group of survivors to plan revenge in postwar Germany. Called Nakam—the Hebrew word for vengeance—the group included about 50 people, including Mira Verbin and Arie Liebke Distal, who testify in this episode. For people like Mira Verbin, who had lost everyone, revenge was the only thing that now mattered:
I was very extreme. I did not care who would die, a child or an adult, if that German was guilty or not. I did not care. I was ready to erase them from the face of the earth.
[Our people] achieved beyond their ability. They were not military people. They were people from nice homes who went to school, to youth groups, who had wanted an easy life. They went ahead and got it done. No one else did it. It was a big deal.
Some people didn’t believe in us and thought we were a group of dangerous adventurers. But I believed in it, and after the Holocaust, just belonging to this group made me happy. I do not regret it for a moment.
The group had a plan A and a plan B. Plan A involved the mass killing of Germans by throwing a powerful poison into the water supply of a major German city. That plan went awry when Abba Kovner, who was carrying the lethal package, threw the poison overboard just before the British arrested him on a troopship where he was traveling on false papers. That left plan B: poisoning the bread rations of SS prisoners who were being held in an American camp. As Distal recalls:
They told me the poison would be in liquid form and that it would have to be mixed. It would be the same color as the underside of the loaves. It wouldn’t have a taste or a smell. We had a team of three people. The plan was that I would handle the loaves, someone else would mix the poison, and another person would apply the mixture to the bottoms of the loaves. I would put the loaves back exactly the way they had been.
There were two kinds of loaves: round and square. The round loaves were sent to the general public. We realized that some people from the general public might also get poisoned, but that was that. The square loaves went to the prisoners, and the bread was divided in four, the daily ration was a quarter loaf. There were 5,000 SS prisoners in the camp.
About a week before the big day, I smuggled the bottles of poison into the bakery. I had experience from the ghetto, smuggling stuff on my body, so I put them near my belly, and I had a big jacket. I put them in my locker with my clothes. We didn’t turn on any lights. We mixed the poison and put it in pots. We each had a brush, and we started to apply it to the loaves. We got into a rhythm, and I rearranged the loaves back into stacks.
The poison sickened hundreds of SS men, but none died. Most of the Nakam group made their way to Israel. For years they kept their secret, and it was only in recent years that the Israeli historian Dina Porat interviewed the surviving members of the group and wrote a book about their plans. Porat was thankful that in the end Kovner’s plans failed and that most of the survivors chose to get their revenge by starting families, building new lives, and creating a Jewish state.
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Henny Durmashkin Gurko: We saw a group of musicians sitting in the middle of the camp. We were all surrounded with barbed wires. And I was asked to sing. And I was very cold. It was November. It was in the woods. I had a very light, uh, sh—a cotton shirt with short sleeves. I had no jacket. And I was just trembling with the cold. And they asked me to sing. And I just was trying to get out of it. And they said, “Well, there is an order from the Nazis, and you must go out there.”
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Eleanor Reissa: You’re listening to “Remembering Vilna: The Jerusalem of Lithuania.” I’m Eleanor Reissa. Chapter nine: “Judgment and Revenge.”
After the Vilna ghetto was liquidated, Henny Durmashkin Gurko was sent to a series of concentration camps, finally ending up in Landsberg, a subcamp of Dachau in Germany.
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Henny Durmashkin Gurko: I walked out into the men’s camp, where they were all sitting, a few musicians. There were benches all around where SS were sitting and expecting the concert to take place. I walked over on this big, gigantic, uh, lot, and walked over to the, uh, violin player. And he asked me what will I sing. And I said, “I will sing Schubert’s ‘Leise flehen meine Lieder.’” And that’s what I sang.
And from then on, we, like, organized and sang gradually for the camp, and started singing all over the camps. Of course, I started to sing all the Yiddish ghetto songs. The Nazis loved listening to—although they didn’t understand.
[Sings in Yiddish.]
It was pathetic to look at the people when I sang those songs. The men were crying. And, um, so it was a small group. Uh, w-we—they were, like, eight people, eight musicians.
And from then on, we were performing on a steady basis. And we were going from camp to camp, performing for the inmates. The inmates, and the Nazis.
We saw, at one point, we saw American planes flying over Dachau. And we were just praying that they should throw a bomb for a certain confusion that we could run somewhere to run, but it didn’t happen.
We had to go out of Dachau and walk. And we were walking day and night. We thought they’re bringing us to kill, because that’s the way it felt. I remember at one point we passed homes, German homes, seeing them sit outdoors, and some of them were eating out on tables. Like they had normal lives and we were just, like, walking without food, without water, with not proper clothes. It was freezing.
We were walking five to a row and we got so tired. At one point I was falling asleep while walking, exhausted. And once I walked off the road because I, I dozed off and I went on the grass, and one of my friends grabbed me. I should go in among them because they would shoot me. They would think I wanna run away.
We walked about three, four days. Once, a German passed by us. Just came across and he said, “Kopf hoch, freiheit kommt,” you know, “Hold your heads up high, freedom is coming.” We walked like this day and night and, uh, we came to a camp and, uh, they told us to go in that camp. It was a camp of, um, Polish people.
And the next day, which was May 1, 1945, the Americans came, and we were more dead than alive. I couldn’t move, me that I was so full of life, always. And, and try to hold on to life with all my might, with the last strength. I had just broke down and I was laying on a table they put me. And this American came in, an American soldier, and he gave us something to eat. And I said, and I said, “Why did you let us wait so long?” That’s all I remember. And I passed out.
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Eleanor Reissa: Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945. The next day, the Allies divided control of the country. Some of the Jews who had survived the war began to make their way toward the American sector of Germany, looking for ways to get out of Europe. One of them was Mira Verbin, from Vilna. Mira had spent months with the partisans in the forest before Vilna was liberated. She was 26. Her parents and sister had been killed.
Mira left Soviet-occupied Vilna, planning to go to Palestine. She bribed her way across borders, traveling through Grodno, Białystok, Lublin, and eventually to Bucharest, Romania. There, her plans changed.
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Mira Verbin: There was a group forming. Their goal was revenge on the Germans. They asked if I was willing to join. It would mean putting off aliyah to Palestine, more wandering around, more uncertainty. It wasn’t clear how it would end.
They talked about revenge but they didn’t say exactly what, and I did not ask. I really believed in it. And I wasn’t ready to leave Europe. I kept hoping maybe—maybe, maybe—I would find someone from my family.
The plan was to go to Germany and hide the fact that we were Jewish. We would have to form relationships with Germans, to sit in coffee houses with them and chat.
Our group arrived in Nuremberg—in total we were seven people. Nuremberg was completely destroyed. It was a pleasure to see. I went to the German League For Consumption Victims. It was run by nuns. My cover story was that I was Volksdeutsche [of German origin], and I was looking for my family, and I was sick and needed to rest. I received a permit to live in Nuremberg.
I got an apartment with a widow whose son served in the German Army. The widow said she knew nothing about her son’s service, but [then] I saw a large picture of him in his uniform.
Another friend arrived at this point. He had come out of the concentration camps very sick and was hospitalized. Then he found out we were alive. So at the last minute he joined us—it was Liebke.
Arie Liebke Distal: In Nuremberg I lived at Orfstrasse 13. I rented a room from a German woman and her brother. I presented myself as a Polish refugee.
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Eleanor Reissa: Arie Liebke Distal was also from Vilna. He and Mira had both been in the Vilna ghetto underground. He and his brother had escaped from a concentration camp and were hidden by a farmer until the war ended. They were trying to get to Palestine when they learned about the revenge cell, called Nakam. Arie’s brother continued his preparation to move to Palestine, and they parted ways. Arie joined Nakam.
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Arie Liebke Distal: There was a notion that we couldn’t let the world treat the Jewish people as if our lives were worthless, with no consequences for murder. We thought of ourselves as acting on behalf of the Jewish people, for those who were murdered. We aimed to implement Plan A, and then Plan B. There was also Plan C.
Mira Verbin: Plan A was to reach the water system’s “nerve center” and poison the water in Nuremberg.
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Eleanor Reissa: At the same time, in another part of the city, the Allied countries were setting up a war crimes tribunal. The Nuremberg trials began in November 1945.
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Arie Liebke Distal: We had a plan—I think this was plan C—to go inside the court in Nuremberg and shoot the criminals as a Jewish protest, taking justice into our own hands. We couldn’t get a permit to enter. So then Plan B emerged as an alternative.
Mira Verbin: I was one of the contact people, and I was traveling all over Germany, from town to town. I was searching for encampments of German military leadership. I told people I was looking for a brother, a sister, did they have any information?
There were camps everywhere. I would get close, mark in my mind the location. I would ask in local shops how many people were in each camp, why they were there, who they were. My memory was much better then. Then I would pass the information to our commander, Julek.
Arie Liebke Distal: One day, my commander, Julek, came and told me about a bakery in Nuremberg that baked bread for the SS camp. Our headquarters assigned me to start as a worker in the bakery.
I went to the employment office of Nuremberg and presented myself as a Jew coming from a family of bakers. I said that I would like to keep the family tradition and that I wanted to work in that bakery in particular. The man looked at me in amazement. I, I knew what he was thinking—what a stupid Jew that still wants to work in a bakery. But at that point we were in a period of recognition of Jews, and he didn’t have the nerve to refuse. I was hired, and I started the next day. A bakery! They gave me a white shirt, the whole thing.
Mira Verbin: Liebke got the job at the bakery. He was very chummy with everyone, he was a hard worker, and moved up in his position. They trusted him.
Arie Liebke Distal: I would look at a German worker and wonder if they had been in the SS, how many Jews had they killed, and where. I felt their cold looks and their hatred.
There were also young women who, it seems, took an interest in me and wanted to start with me. I felt hatred toward them, too, but I had a dilemma, because I had to gain their trust.
Of course, I was in touch with my commander the whole time, letting him know what I saw at the bakery. At first we thought we would inject the poison into the flour sacks, but the idea was rejected because the poison wouldn’t be concentrated enough. The second idea was to mix the poison with the dough, but that idea was rejected as well, because we thought that the heat of the oven would neutralize the poison.
The next idea was to smear the poison on the bottom of each individual loaf. That idea was accepted as the best solution.
In the storehouse, I learned their technique of piling the bread. They had a system so it wouldn’t fall or get squashed. About a month went by, more. I went with those goyish girls to the movies, to have fun, to all kinds of places.
I kept thinking tomorrow, or in a week, or in two weeks they would bring me the stuff and I would do it and get out of there, but it didn’t happen like that. Things got complicated with the poison.
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Eleanor Reissa: Abba Kovner was one of the leaders of the revenge cell. He had gone to Palestine to get the poison. He was on a ship on his way back to Europe when he suspected he was about to be arrested.
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Arie Liebke Distal: He threw the poison into the sea. The poison disappeared. We had to start all over again. In the meantime, Plan A was tabled, because so many Jewish refugees were coming to Germany from Poland and Russia, and they were in so many places, they weren’t isolated from the general population.
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Eleanor Reissa: Plan A was eventually dropped. The revenge cell was in a holding pattern.
Meanwhile, after her liberation, Henny was transferred to a sanatorium in Germany.
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Henny Durmashkin Gurko: We were brought to St. Ottilien, which was a hospital in Bavaria. And, uh, there were nuns. Uh, b- it was a beautiful place. And they brought us to restore our health there, our strength back, and they took care of us. In St. Ottilien, we started the orchestra. All the musicians came. Only eight people. We didn’t have any instruments. We got instruments.
And we were going from DP camp to DP camp, traveling and entertaining. And there were a few more musicians that survived. And, uh, they joined the orchestra. And when David Ben-Gurion came to Germany and spoke, we, uh, were there with our music. I sang a lot of ghetto songs, Yiddish songs, and Hebrew songs.
[Sings Hebrew song “Emek ben ha-Slayim.”]
Then, we also appeared at the International Tribunal, uh, in, uh, at Nuremberg, when the Nazis were on trial. We played for the media from all over the world, and we wore concentration camp uniforms and the Stars of David while we were onstage.
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Unknown Voice at Nuremberg: Will you, um, repeat after me… “I,” and mention your name.
Avrom Sutzkever: Ya, Sutzkever, Avrom Gertzovich.
Unknown Voice at Nuremberg: “Citizen of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics.”
Avrom Sutzkever: [Repeats in Russian.]
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Eleanor Reissa: Avrom Sutzkever was a Yiddish poet from Vilna. In the ghetto, he had provided Samuel Bak with a sketchbook. He later retrieved Herman Kruk’s ghetto diary from its hiding place. Now, he was in Nuremberg to testify before the international tribunal. He had hoped to speak in Yiddish, but the Soviet authorities did not permit it.
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Unknown Voice at Nuremberg: You may sit down if you wish.
———
Eleanor Reissa: Sutzkever remained standing for his entire 38-minute testimony, which included an account of what the Nazis had done to his newborn child.
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Avrom Sutzkever: In the evening, when the Germans had left, I went to the hospital and found my wife in tears. It seems that when she had her baby, the Jewish doctors of the hospital had already received the order that Jewish women must not give birth; and they had hidden the baby, together with other newborn children, in one of the rooms. But when [a group] with Murer came to the hospital, they heard the cry of the babies. They broke down the door and entered the room.
When my wife heard that the door had been broken, she immediately got up and ran to see what was happening to the child. She saw one German holding the baby and smearing something under its nose. Afterward, he threw it on the bed and laughed. When my wife picked up the child, there was something black under his nose. When I arrived at the hospital, I saw that my baby was dead. He was still warm.
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Unknown Voice at Nuremberg: Does any other, uh, chief prosecutor want to ask any questions?
A Chief Prosecutor: No questions.
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Arie Liebke Distal: There was no justice and there was no judge. At Nuremberg they were focused on crimes against nations, citizens of countries. They weren’t talking about a genocidal campaign against the Jewish people that was planned from A to Z.
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Eleanor Reissa: The legal process continued, and the revenge cell was waiting to implement plan B.
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Mira Verbin: We were worried we wouldn’t get the material. The tension was terrible. Finally, it came. We raised a glass to the guy who brought it.
Arie Liebke Distal: It was already February, beginning of March. I was on pins and needles, waiting for the day. Finally they decided to do the plan on April 13, a Saturday night.
They told me the poison would be in liquid form and that it would have to be mixed. It would be the same color as the underside of the loaves. It wouldn’t have a taste or a smell.
We had a team of three people. The plan was that I would handle the loaves, someone else would mix the poison, and another person would apply the mixture to the bottoms of the loaves. I would put the loaves back exactly the way they had been.
There were two kinds of loaves—round and square. The round loaves were sent to the general public. We realized that some people from the general public might also get poisoned, but that was that.
The square loaves went to the prisoners, and the bread was divided in four, the daily ration was a quarter loaf. There were 5,000 SS prisoners in the camp.
About a week before the big day, I smuggled the bottles of poison into the bakery. I had experience from the ghetto, smuggling stuff on my body, so I put them near my belly, and I had a big jacket. I put them in my locker with my clothes.
Mira Verbin: The action was planned for that night. The rest of us had to leave Nuremberg in a hurry that morning. We did a pogrom in the room I lived in. We broke everything, tore the curtains, emptied the feathers from the pillowcases. I locked my room and threw the keys into the river. We left Germany. It was right before Passover. I wanted only one thing: that Liebke would succeed.
Arie Liebke Distal: That morning, I left cash for the rent at my apartment. I brought my two friends, Jaszek and Manek, to work with me, and hid them in tall baskets in the storeroom.
I worked that day. At the end of the day, I waited for everyone to leave the bakery and hid myself until it got dark. My friends came out to meet me, but there was some clerk moving around. We hid until the clerk went home.
We mixed the poison and put it in pots. We each had a brush, and we started to apply it to the loaves. We got into a rhythm, and I rearranged the loaves back into stacks.
Suddenly the guards sensed us. We put everything aside and hid in a hole under the floor. They left without noticing us. We went back and kept going. We had put poison on 2,000 loaves and started to work on the third when we heard the guards coming again. This time they were very close by. I ran to the hole in the floor. My two friends jumped out the window and ran. The guards saw them running but didn’t catch them.
I was all alone in the hole, and I waited to see what would happen. They called the police. The police came, they searched and checked. We had hidden the bottles and all the material. The police searched but didn’t find anything. They assumed that people must have broken into the bakery to steal white bread, which was expensive. They left and I hid until morning, when I went out through the train entrance. We left for the Czechoslovakian border.
We decided to cross the border at night. We came to the border, and the German border patrol arrested us. They brought us into the police station. It was Sunday evening. They asked us what we were doing. It was erev Pesach. We explained that we were headed to celebrate Pesach with relatives in Prague: “Why won’t you let us pass? Let us go!” We were afraid that they would call the Americans. But they didn’t call them, because it was Sunday night. Instead they said, “Why do you need to go at night? Come to the checkpoint tomorrow and there won’t be any problems.” The next day, no one questioned us.
We took a taxi to Prague. We saw a small article in the Czech newspaper—a very small article—that German prisoners were poisoned in Nuremberg. We sent a comrade to Nuremberg to find out what had happened. She heard that after there started to be symptoms from the poison at the camp, the Americans mobilized all their vehicles to bring the sick prisoners to hospitals to have their stomachs pumped.
Mira Verbin: We were in France, waiting for news. We learned that there was a poisoning in one of the camps. There were some deaths, and many people were in hospitals in difficult condition. The military and the police were investigating. There were some minor and some major headlines. We were frustrated by the uncertainty of the numbers.
I personally thought whatever we achieved was a success. There were many dangers. Both the Americans and the French had their own secret police and were afraid of traitors and revenge.
Arie Liebke Distal: They wanted to conceal it… They didn’t want to publicize it at all. But after a few days there was an article in a German newspaper that German prisoners were poisoned, the poison came from this bakery. They wrote that they found bottles with poison. They didn’t write who had done it, that 200 people died and the rest were treated and survived. According to our calculations, more people should have been poisoned. We did not take into consideration that the Americans would take the prisoners to medical facilities. It was written in the paper that they put their whole operation toward saving these people.
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Eleanor Reissa: There is no evidence that anyone died from Nakam’s poisoning operation in Nuremberg. Approximately 2,000 people were made ill, some seriously.
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Arie Liebke Distal: In the end, our action was more of a symbolic act. We showed that there was an organized group of Jews that wanted to sentence the Germans to what they had sentenced us to, by the same means. They poisoned people, we wanted to poison them.
Mira Verbin: I was very extreme. I did not care who would die, a child or an adult, if that German was guilty or not. I did not care. I was ready to erase them from the face of the earth.
[Our people] achieved beyond their ability. They were not military people. They were people from nice homes who went to school, to youth groups, who had wanted an easy life. They went ahead and got it done. No one else did it. It was a big deal.
Some people did not believe in us and thought we were a group of dangerous adventurers. But I believed in it, and after the Holocaust, just belonging to this group made me happy. I do not regret it for a moment.
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Eleanor Reissa: Twelve of the 22 German and Austrian Nazis who were tried at Nuremberg were executed. Seven received prison sentences, three were acquitted. Franz Murer and Martin Weiss, the top Nazi officials in Vilna, both died free men.
In this episode, you heard the voices of Henny Durmashkin Gurko; Mira Verbin, voiced by Rachel Botchan; Arie Liebke Distal, voiced by Eddy Portnoy; as well as an archival recording from the Nuremberg trials, courtesy of the Robert H. Jackson Center, with an English translation of Avrom Sutzkever’s testimony by Justin Cammy voiced by Claybourne Elder.
Next up: chapter 10: “Aftermath.”
This special series about Jewish life in Vilna is written and produced by Nahanni Rous and Eric Marcus. Stephen Naron is the executive producer. Our composer is Ljova Zhurbin. Our theme music is an arrangement of “Vilna, Vilna,” the 1935 song by A. L. Wolfson and Alexander Olshanetsky. The cellist is Clara Lee Rous. Our audio mixer is Anne Pope.
This podcast is a collaboration between the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University and YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research. I’m Eleanor Reissa. You’ve been listening to “Remembering Vilna: The Jerusalem of Lithuania.”
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