The Second World War began with Germany’s attack on Poland in September 1939. Overnight, it transformed Vilnius into the main temporary destination for refugees from occupied Poland.
Among the more than 10,000 Jews who were stranded here there was the librarian and political activist Herman Kruk from Warsaw. His exceptional diary records and press reports sketch a mosaic of the heterogenous society of refugees there since the beginning of the war. The film follows Kruk’s traces in Vilnius as he turns from careful observer of the refugee society in Lithunian Vilnius to a sceptic under Soviet occupation and finally a witness and victim of Nazi persecution. Uncertain of what would become, his records narrate how Jewish refugees temporarily made Vilnius their own – a city that had been celebrated for centuries as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.”
Excerpts from:
Herman Kruk’s reportages for the Lithuanian-Yiddish journal Folks-gezunt in 1940 as well as Kruks poem “For Future Generations,” partly reprinted in English translation in: Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and Camps, 1939-1944, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New Haven and London 2002.
Translation:
Miriam Schulz
Voice:
Tal Hever-Chybowski
Script:
Kristof Gerega (Schuldenberg Films)
Miriam Schulz
Direction:
Kristof Gerega (Schuldenberg Films)
Camera:
Anton Yaremchuck
Cut:
Kristof Gerega
Production:
Schuldenberg Films
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On 8 February, 1940, Pese R. entered the office of the "Committee to Collect Material about the Destruction of Polish Jewry, 1939" in Vilnius, Lithuania in order to give an interview. She was one of many Polish Jewish refugees who had found shelter in Vilnius.
On 21 December, 1939, Chaim-Leyb D. was interviewed by the "Committee to Collect Material about the Destruction of Polish Jewry, 1939" in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Herman Kruk was a refugee from Warsaw who wrote reports on the refugee situation in Vilnius for the Yiddish magazine Folks-gezunt (Public Health) of…
On the night of September 5 to September 6, 1939, only a few days after the German attack on Poland, a group of Jewish…
On 24 June 1941, Kruk writes about his discouragement regarding his futile attempts to leave Vilnius for the USA shortly after the German attack…
On November 27, 1939, Motel Grajer, a Yeshivah student from Markuszów, Poland, who had escaped the Germans to Vilnius, gave an interview to the…
Internal Communication between the Vilnius Delegation of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the New York Headquarters.
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