September 14th, 1943
“When I did my research about life in the Vilna ghetto, way back in the beginning of the Nineteen Eighties, I met and interviewed some survivors of the Vilna Ghetto.
Among other riddles that came up in the research figured Jacob Gens’s death. Following the Israeli premiere of my play “GHETTO” in May 1984, I received a letter from Dr. Abrasha Weinrib from Sydney, Australia. Weinrib was a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto. He had worked as a young physician in the hospital of the ghetto, and following Gens’s orders he opened a clandestine typhus ward in the basement of the hospital.
After a short exchange of letters Dr. Weinrib landed in Israel for a short visit. I met him in my Tel Aviv apartment in the winter of 1984. He told me that Jacob Gens used to come to the secret typhus ward to download worries that made him anxious and troubled over moral problems that had to do with his responsibility for the survival of the population of the ghetto.
On September 14th 1943 Gens showed up in the hospital and told Dr. Weinrib that he was summoned to come to the headquarters of the Gestapo in Vilnius for an investigation about his connections with the F.P.O. (The United Partisans Organization).
He told Weinrib that he would most probably not come out alive from this interrogation, and he asked Dr. Weinrib to tell his spouse Elvyra and his daughter Ada that he loved them. Weinrib told me that he wondered why Gens didn’t run away from the ghetto to find refuge among his Lithuanian friends who served with him as officers in the Lithuanian Army in the 1920s. According to Weinrib Gens answered: “If I defect from the Ghetto, the Nazis will liquidate the Ghetto and murder the rest of the survivors.” Weinrib told me that Gens went to the confrontation with the German officers who controlled the ghetto. According to the testimony of Jewish workers who were employed in household and cleaning jobs in the Gestapo office, they heard a loud exchange of arguing and shouting going on between Gens and the German officers. Then a shot rang out, and they were told to carry out Gens’s body from the office and bury the mortal remains somewhere in the yard of the Gestapo building.
This is the version about Gens’s death that I heard from the late Dr. Weinrib some forty years ago. “
-Joshua Sobol
Dear Papa,
Mama and I received your message from Dr. Weinrib. We hoped that somehow you would escape your fate and join us again like before the war, but deep inside I knew you would do what was best for the ghetto – and for us. Your final message and sacrifice allowed Mama and me to escape Vilnius and survive the war with the help of the Venclauskas family.
Many of the Vilna Ghetto inhabitants were sent to concentration camps, including your brother Solomon, and some survived as you had hoped. I’m sure you know that you lived in our hearts forever, and not a day goes by that I don’t think about you and our time together in the Vilna Ghetto.
Forever & Always.
Love,
Adute