Jacob Gens

Early life

Gens was born on 1 April 1903 in Ilgviečiai near Šiauliai in what is now Lithuania. His father was a merchant and Gens was the oldest of four sons in the family. Gens attended a Russian-language primary school and then a secondary school in Šiauliai. He was fluent in Lithuanian, Russian, German, and Yiddish and knew some Hebrew, Polish, and English. In 1919, Gens enlisted in the newly formed Lithuanian Army. He was sent to officers' school and completed the schooling as a junior lieutenant. His participation in the Polish–Lithuanian War plus the completion of his secondary schooling earned Gens a promotion to senior lieutenant.

Gens was transferred into the army reserves in 1924 and moved to Ukmergė to teach physical education and the Lithuanian language at a Jewish school. In 1924 Gens married Elvyra Budreikaitė, a non-Jewish Lithuanian. The couple had a daughter, Ada, in 1926, and moved to Kaunas in 1927. Gens studied at Kaunas University and worked as an accountant. He graduated in 1935 with a degree in law and economics. He was called back to the regular army in the late 1930s and promoted to captain. Gens worked for Shell Oil Corporation for two years from 1935, then took a job with Lietūkis, a Lithuanian co-operative.

Gens was a Zionist, and was a follower of the Revisionist Zionism school. He also belonged to Brith ha-Hayal, an organization for military reservists.

Administrator of Jewish hospital

After the formation of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, Gens was fired from his job. He was unable to secure a work permit nor was he allowed to continue to live in Kaunas. Gens went to live with his brother Solomon in Vilnius, and although he was on a list to be sent to Soviet labor camps, he managed to secure an "unregistered" job at the Vilnius health department through an old military colleague, Colonel Juozas Ūsas. Gens was not on the official payroll, which spared him from deportation from the city. During June 1941, when thousands of the Lithuanian elites were exiled to Siberia, Gens managed to remain in hiding and was not deported.

The Germans entered Vilnius on 24 June 1941. After their arrival, Gens remained in charge of the Jewish hospital. The occupying authorities ordered the creation of the Judenrat, or Jewish Council, with community-selected members. In early September 1941, the Germans murdered most of the Judenrat, which left the Jewish community leaderless before and during the relocation of the Jews into two ghettos in Vilnius in September 1941. During this period, the hospital was a relatively safe haven for Jews and it sheltered a number of prominent Jews from Vilnius. When the ghettos were formed, the Jewish hospital was included within the confines of the larger ghetto, an unusual set up for a Nazi-period ghetto. Most ghettos were organized to exclude any Jewish hospitals, forcing the inhabitants to either do without a hospital or set up a makeshift one.

Chief of the Vilna Ghetto police

In September 1941, Gens was named the commander of the Jewish policemen for the Vilna Ghetto by the head of the new Judenrat, Anatol Friend. The police force was about 200 men at the start, and Gens appointed Salk Dessler as his deputy commandant. Officially, the duties of Gens and his policemen were to carry out German and Judenrat's orders and provide law enforcement functions for the inhabitants of the ghetto. Included in the first duty, and considered by the occupiers as the single most important task, was the uncovering of any anti-German activity on the part of the inhabitants of the ghetto. Gens went to Major Narušis, an acquaintance from the Lithuanian Army and in late 1941 an official in the Vilnius city administration in charge of assigning housing, and asked the major to intercede with the Germans and allow the ghetto boundaries to be expanded to include some adjacent vacant housing. Narušis was able to persuade them and this action relieved some of the crowding in the ghetto.

The smaller ghetto was liquidated in mid-October 1941, leaving just the larger ghetto. From late October to December 1941, the ghetto was subject to "aktions", a selection of people for deportation. Gens was afraid that the actions of the Germans would result in a widespread massacre. He persuaded the Gestapo man in charge of the roundup to let the Jewish police do the actual rounding up of deportees during the late fall 1941 deportations. Gens, backed by the Jewish police force, was responsible for deciding who was to be sent to resettlement (and execution in Ponary). In October this brought him into conflict with the ghetto's rabbis, who argued Gens was acting against Jewish law. Gens disagreed, arguing that it was lawful to sacrifice some people to save others. During the deportations Gens tried to secure more work permits from the Germans but they refused. All those removed from the ghetto were taken to Ponary where they were killed. The last deportation took place on 21 December 1941. At the end of this period, there were between 12,500 and 17,200 residents in the ghetto. Of those 17,200, about 3,000 were "illegal" residents without a work permit. Whichever figure is correct, this was just a fraction of the original approximately 60,000 Jewish residents of Vilnius when the occupation began.

In June 1942, Gens took the responsibility for carrying out the death sentence imposed on five men from the ghetto who had been convicted of murder. A sixth man, convicted of committing a murder in another ghetto, was also hung at the same time.

Views and policies

On 10 July 1942, the Judenrat of the Vilna Ghetto was dissolved by the Gestapo for incompetence and ineffectiveness. The Germans appointed Gens as the head of the ghetto while still retaining his position as chief of the Jewish police force, giving him the title of "chief of the ghetto and police in Vilna". The Judenrat employed over 1500 people in September 1942, including a number of intellectuals who were appointed to jobs to ensure their survival. This suggestion was made by community leaders and approved by Gens.

Inhabitants of the ghetto referred to Gens derisively as "King Jacob the First". The historian Lucy Dawidowicz describes Gens as one of a group of "strong, even dictatorial" leaders who were "the policy and decision makers in their ghettos, the strategical thinkers on the ghetto's possibilities for survival". Gens thought that labor would provide a way for the survival of the inhabitants. Along with a number of other ghetto leaders, he hoped to preserve some of the ghetto inhabitants and outlast the Nazi occupation. This belief has made Gens a controversial figure both at the time and to this day. Gens sought to save at least some of the population by working for the Germans and to do that he relied on the police force to provide the needed support to lead the ghetto. As part of his efforts to secure support, Gens held a "political club" of sorts in his home, bringing together some of the community leaders for a colloquia to discuss Jewish history, recent events, and the fate of the Jews.

In the fall of 1942, the Germans consolidated a number of small ghettos in the Vilnius region with Gens' help. These included the ghettos at Oszmiana, Švenčionys, Soly, and Michaliszki. During one of these consolidations, on 25 October, Gens gave up some 400 old people in return for saving the remaining 600 Jewish residents of Oszmiana. By April 1943, most of these small ghettos were gone, with their inhabitants either moved to labor camps, shot, or moved to the Vilna Ghetto. Gens justified the participation of the Vilna ghetto police in these roundups by claiming that their participation saved at least some of the ghetto residents, when otherwise the Germans would have shot them all.

Relations with Jewish resistance

Gens' relations with the various resistance groups that formed in the ghetto were strained. He allowed some resistance members to escape the ghetto, but he also opposed the plans for resistance because he felt they would threaten the entire ghetto's existence. Gens promised to provide aid to the resistance groups and may have promised to join them in a revolt if the time was right. But on 26 June 1943, Gens ordered the arrest of Josef Glazman, who had previously worked for Gens but now was a leader of the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (FPO), a resistance group in the ghetto. Glazman was arrested but, while being escorted towards a labor camp, was freed by a group of FPO members. Gens then negotiated with the FPO and secured Glazman's rearrest in return for assurances of Glazman's safety.

In July 1943, the Gestapo demanded that Gens hand over Yitzhak Wittenberg, a leader of the FPO. Although Wittenberg was arrested, he was freed by FPO members. Gens' reaction to this was to spread word that unless Wittenberg turned himself in, the Germans would destroy the ghetto. On 16 July, Wittenberg turned himself in. What happened next is unclear. Some sources state that Wittenberg committed suicide while in custody, possibly with a cyanide pill provided by Gens. Other sources state that Wittenberg was poisoned by Gens before being turned over to the Gestapo. Still other sources claim that Wittenberg was tortured to death by the Gestapo or that he was given a cyanide pill by Gens' second-in-command.

Sanitary and cultural efforts

While Gens was in control of the ghetto, he continued to oversee the sanitary and health efforts in the ghetto, running that part of the ghetto administration like a military operation. Although conditions were very crowded and often unsanitary, the ghetto never suffered a major epidemic and there were fewer deaths due to disease than in other ghettos. Gens also started a theater in the ghetto, which was the site of poetry readings as well as the production of new and old plays. Gens continued the policy of supporting the ghetto library and in March 1943 he ordered that all ghetto residents should turn their privately owned books over to the library, except for textbooks and prayer books. He also set up a publishing house for the ghetto. Although nothing was ever published, the authors were paid for their manuscripts. An archive of historical documents relating to the ghetto was also set up.

Personal privileges and family

Gens' wife and daughter at first went to Kaunas but, after the formation of the ghetto, they returned to Vilnius and lived near the ghetto's perimeter. His wife used her maiden name rather than Gens'. According to Leonard Tushnet, there were rumors that the couple had divorced, but these were just rumors. Gens did not refute the rumors, however, as he thought they would help protect his family. Other sources state that the two were divorced in order to protect Elvyra and Ada. Elvyra Gens was opposed to her husband taking a leading role in the government of the ghetto and urged him to "pass" as an Lithuanian. Gens' mother and brother Solomon were both imprisoned in the Vilna Ghetto. Another brother, Ephraim, was head of the ghetto police in the Šiauliai Ghetto, and was the only Gens brother to survive the Holocaust.

The Germans allowed Gens some privileges not accorded to other Vilnius Jews. One was that he was not required to wear the yellow badge of the Star of David on the front and back of his clothes; instead he wore a white and blue armband with the Star of David. He was also allowed to enter and leave the ghetto at any time and his daughter was not required to live in the ghetto, even though other half-Jews were confined within the ghetto. Gens, as well as the Jewish policemen, was allowed to carry a pistol by the Germans.

Death and legacy

On 13 September, the Germans ordered him to report to the Gestapo headquarters (present-day Museum of Genocide Victims) on the following day. He was urged to flee but chose to go, telling others that if he fled "thousands of Jews will pay for it with their lives". Gens was shot by Obersturmfuhrer Rolf Neugebauer, head of the Vilnius Gestapo, on 14 September 1943. The Gestapo said that he was killed for being in contact with the FPO as well as funneling money to them. The ghetto was liquidated between 22 and 24 September 1943, with 3,600 residents going to various labor camps (including 2000 who were sent to labor camps in Vilnius), 5,000 women and children going to Majdanek where they were gassed to death, and a few hundred elderly and sick were sent to Ponary and shot.

Gens' wife and daughter were living near the ghetto on the day he was shot. They were informed by a Jewish policeman that Gens had been shot and that the Gestapo was looking for them. They fled and managed to stay in hiding until the Soviet troops arrived. In 1945, the two managed to obtain papers for repatriation to Poland. From there they moved to West Germany as Jewish aliyah. His daughter got a job as a secretary at the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. The two emigrated to Australia in 1948 and to the United States in 1953.

Vadim Altskan, of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, states that "...Holocaust historiography treated people such as ...Jacob Gens ...as instruments of destruction in the hands of the Nazi killing machine. ... Applied retrospectively, these charges for the most part are judgmental and add very little to our understanding of the events. Neither Jewish functionaries nor "ordinary" Jews had any practical or psychological experience in dealing with the grim reality of the Nazi occupation, because never before in their long history of persecution had the Jews experienced an assault of such magnitude and careful design."

Gens is one of the main characters in the play Ghetto by the Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol. In the play, Gens is depicted as a lackey of the SS and as the antithesis of the, as one reviewer describes it, "humane exercise of power".