history · 01 September 1943 · 81 years ago
German and Estonian police surrounded the Vilna ghetto in Lithuania and began deporting Jews to forced labor camps in Estonia. The underground United Partisan Organization (FPO) issued a manifesto urging the ghetto residents to resist. After an abortive clash between the FPO and German forces, the Judenrat Chairman Jacob Gens reached an agreement with the Germans to fill the required deportee quota, 5,000 Jews,in exchange for the withdraw of German forces from the ghetto. A small number of Jews were able to escape the ghetto during the failed clash; some of them joined nearby resistance groups.
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