Building a Life in Interwar Lithuania

From 1923 to 1925, Jacob taught Lithuanian language and physical education at a Hebrew high school in Ukmergė. In 1924, he married Elvyra Budreikaitė in Klaipėda. Because Jacob was Jewish and Elvyra was Catholic—and neither wished to convert—the couple chose a civil marriage. At the time, the Lithuanian Army did not recognize the marriage as valid, which meant Elvyra and any future children would not be entitled to the protections and benefits reserved for military families. Jacob received an honorable discharge and continued teaching.

Between 1925 and 1927, the Gens family lived in Jurbarkas, where Jacob taught at another Hebrew high school. In 1926, Jacob and Elvyra welcomed their daughter, Ada. They again used civil documentation, traveling to the nearby town of Smalininkai for her birth certificate.

By the end of 1927, the family settled in Kaunas, Lithuania’s interwar capital. Their home reflected the country’s complexity and promise: Jewish and Catholic holidays were observed side by side, often shared with Jacob’s parents and brothers.

In Kaunas, Jacob completed university degrees in Law and Economics while working as an accountant for the Ministry of Justice at a hard labor prison. He later worked for the Lithuanian cooperative Lietūkis, selling oil and gas products across the country. As he traveled, Jacob warned fellow citizens about the dangers of Soviet communism—an especially urgent message as the Soviet Union threatened European sovereignty, including during its attack on Finland in 1939–1940. With war looming, Lithuania recalled reserve officers, and on November 26, 1938, Jacob was promoted to Captain in the Lithuanian Army.

Soviet Occupation and the Road to Vilnius

When the Soviets invaded Lithuania in 1940, Jacob’s position, property, and stability were stripped away. He was fired from his job, his bank accounts were frozen, and his work permit revoked—punishments widely applied to former military officers and others deemed threats to Soviet power. For Jacob, the danger was heightened: he was not only a reserve officer, but a known critic of Russian aggression.

Desperate to provide for his family—and fearing deportation to Siberia—Jacob left Kaunas for Vilnius, where his brother Salomon lived with his wife and their mother, Chaja. In Vilnius, Jacob realized the danger had followed him. Then, by chance, he encountered a trusted friend from his military years: Dr. Juozas Ūsas, who oversaw Vilnius’s hospital system and had previously worked with Jacob at the Kaunas prison. Despite the risk, Dr. Ūsas hired Jacob as an accountant and paid him as a day laborer to keep his name off official payroll records. That quiet act of courage likely spared Jacob from arrest, deportation, or worse.

German Occupation and the Ghetto

In June 1941, the German invasion forced the Soviets to flee Lithuania. Restrictions against Jews followed almost immediately. Unable to protect Jacob through concealment any longer, Dr. Ūsas relocated him to the Jewish Hospital on Ligoninės Street in Vilnius and appointed him administrator.

Across Lithuania, Jews were being violently seized from their homes and marched to killing sites. Germans were often aided by local collaborators—known among Jews as hapūnės (“snatchers” in Yiddish). In Vilnius, Jacob and Salomon narrowly escaped. When the hapūnės came to their apartment and ordered the brothers to go with them, Elvyra pleaded with the Lithuanian soldiers—falling to her knees, grasping their hands, and insisting that Jacob had fought for Lithuania’s freedom and that their mother could not survive without them. Astonishingly, the soldiers relented. Many families were not granted such mercy.

While Jews were still permitted to work in Vilnius, Jacob continued running the Jewish Hospital. Prominent members of the city’s Jewish community hid there and witnessed firsthand his ability to manage under extreme pressure—and his fearless, disciplined manner in dealings with German authorities. When the Vilna Ghetto was formed in September 1941, some of the former hospital “refugees” became members of the ghetto’s Council of Elders (Judenrat). They asked Jacob to accept the position of Chief of Police.

The Judenrat believed he had the skills the ghetto required: experience in administration, military discipline, a commanding presence, and fluent German. He could also speak confidently with Lithuanian officials working in civil administration—several of whom were his former military colleagues. Those relationships would prove consequential in the ghetto’s struggle to survive.

Refusing to Hide

Jacob and his family had an opportunity to hide throughout the war at the estate of Colonel Vladas Skorupskis. Jacob refused. Elvyra begged him not to take an official position in the ghetto, warning that it would make him known to the Germans and seal his fate. Jacob apologized, but said hiding was not in his nature. He accepted the appointment. Elvyra and Ada chose to remain in Vilnius, living only blocks from the ghetto so they could support him as much as possible.

Inside the newly formed ghetto, families arrived carrying their possessions through the streets—regardless of age or illness—only to find apartments still set as if life had been interrupted mid-meal: food on tables, belongings scattered, evidence that previous residents had been driven out without warning. German killing units resented the very existence of ghettos; many preferred immediate mass murder. Yet German civil administration and the Wehrmacht demanded Jewish labor, and this temporary “need” created a brutal space in which survival strategies emerged.

Administration Under Terror

Jacob moved quickly to impose order and prevent catastrophe. He understood that overcrowding and hunger could ignite epidemics—and that the Germans, terrified of disease, might respond by liquidating the hospital or the entire ghetto. Under his direction, an effective sanitation system and medical infrastructure were established, and no major disease outbreaks occurred. When the nearby ghetto in Švenčionys suffered a typhus epidemic, Jacob sent doctors to contain it and prevent wider loss of life.

Still, the psychological and physical reality was relentless: starvation, exhaustion, constant fear, and the trauma of knowing that many families and communities had already been murdered. The ghetto population was treated as less than human, and people struggled not only to live, but to remain themselves.

As Chief of Police, Jacob was forced into the most impossible duty of all: participating in German demands for “selections” for liquidation. He negotiated, bargained, and bribed to reduce quotas, striving to hand over as few people as possible. When quotas arrived—often in the thousands—Jacob and his police were ordered to produce names. They tended to select the elderly, the gravely ill, and those they believed would not survive the war, reasoning that if the Germans conducted selections themselves, they would choose indiscriminately and kill far more.

This bargain with terror created a period of relative stability in the ghetto—later known as the “quiet period”—from December 1941 until March 1943. It was not peace, but it was time, and time meant life.

Work, Culture, and the Fight to Remain Human

Jacob believed that making the ghetto indispensable as a labor force could postpone liquidation. He pushed for continuous job creation and negotiated for additional work permits—protecting not only laborers, but often their families. Yet this approach left the elderly and many intellectuals vulnerable, since their skills were not valuable to German industry.

To preserve dignity and morale, Jacob also championed cultural life. In early 1942, he helped establish a ghetto theater—providing work for artists, actors, and musicians, and offering the community moments that resembled life before catastrophe. Alongside theater were concerts, lectures, schools, libraries, cafes, and sports—fragile acts of humanity built under the shadow of death.

As one ghetto witness later described, performances could feel like a transfusion—briefly dissolving “black bitterness,” allowing people to laugh and breathe and remember that they were human.

Partisans and the Final Days

Underground resistance groups also formed in the Vilna Ghetto, most prominently the United Partisan Organization (F.P.O.). Some members planned escape to the forests to join Soviet partisans; others wanted an uprising within the ghetto itself. Jacob supported the partisans when he could—providing resources, weapons, and opportunities to escape—knowing that discovery could mean liquidation for everyone.

In one incident, Germans caught partisans attempting to flee to the forests and killed several. They found Vilna Ghetto identification cards on one of the bodies—cards belonging to multiple members. Despite Jacob’s pleas to the partisans not to carry ghetto documentation on their missions, the consequences were immediate and horrific: the Germans killed the listed individuals and their families as punishment.

On September 13, 1943, Jacob was ordered to report to Gestapo headquarters the next day, under investigation for ties to the F.P.O. He was urged to flee and warned he would be executed. Jacob refused, saying that if he ran, the Germans would kill the thousands of Jews still in the Vilna Ghetto.

On September 14, 1943, before reporting to the Gestapo, Jacob visited the ghetto hospital and spoke with Dr. Weinreb. He said he did not expect to return and asked that his wife Elvyra and daughter Ada be told that he loved them.

Jacob Gens was executed on September 14, 1943, by Obersturmführer Rolf Neugebauer. Eight days later, the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto began.