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July 9: Heroine of the Vilna Ghetto

lawrencebush
July 9, 2011

Vitka Kempner and Itzik Matzkevitch returned to the Vilna Ghetto on this date in 1942, after blowing up a Nazi military train five miles to the southeast. Kempner, born in 1920, formed a resistance cell in the ghetto with poet Abba Kovner, whom she later married. Their United Partisans Organization smuggled weapons through the sewer system; Kempner’s act of sabotage was their first act of resistance. They would later also sabotage the power plant and waterworks of Vilna. Kempner moved regularly between the ghetto and the outside world through the sewers, leading hundreds of Jews to the forests of Rodninkai, where they formed a partisan brigade known as the Avengers. This brigade helped liberate Vilna as the Soviets advanced on the city in 1944, but even after the war, they sought revenge: In 1945, Vitka led the infiltration of the bakery at a POW camp in Nuremberg and poisoned hundreds of loaves of bread with arsenic. The following year, after helping hundreds of survivors find their way to Palestine,Vitka and Kovner settled at Kibbutz Ein Horesh, where they raised two children. She became a clinical psychologist in her 40s and still lives in Israel today.

“Kempner painfully recalls the situation in which the youngsters, who assumed they had won the ghetto population over to rebellion, were in fact rejected by the Jews and regarded as the ones who jeopardized the ghetto’s existence. Kempner explained their decision to stay in the ghetto despite their exclusion: ‘We never thought in terms of rescue and living, but about a response adequate for Jews at that time.’ ” —Neima Barzel, Jewish Women’s Archive

Hirsh Glik‘s Yiddish song Shtil di nakht iz oysgeshternt (The silent night is full of stars) describes Kempner’s act of resistance. Listen to Rosalie Gerut sing a version of the song below: