Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,soc.history,talk.politics.misc
Subject: LEST WE FORGET: Liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Old Frog's Almanac, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: Belzec,Estonia,Latvia,Lida,Ponar,Sobibor,Treblinka,Vilna

"The liquidation of the Vilna ghetto took place on September 23-24, 1943.
In the ghetto at that time were about 11,000 to 12,000 inhabitants left
from the 57,000 Jews who had been in Vilna at the beginning of the German
occupation. Most of these Jews were shot in Ponar, near Vilna, in the
months of July through November, 1941. During the final liquidation, all
the Jews were taken outside the ghetto to Rossa Square; there the men were
separated from the women and children. The men and the women who were able
to work were selected and sent to concentration camps -- men to Estonia and
women to Latvia. About 4,300 to 5,000 elderly women and children were sent
to Sobibor in the last days of September 1943." <1>

"There were no survivors from this transport, so no direct testimony exists
about their arrival in Sobibor. Leon Feldhendler, who escaped from Sobibor,
mentions in his testimony `transports which arrived from Minsk and Vilna.'
The assumption that the last Vilna Jews who were deported from Ostland to
the General Government, i.e., those from Lida and Minsk, reached Sobibor.
They definitely did not reach any other death camp. The list of transports
that arrived in Auschwitz and Majdanek exist, and this transport is not
mentioned in either. As Belzec and Treblinka were no longer in operation at
that time, this leaves Sobibor as the only camp where the transport from
Vilna could have been brought and annihilated without a trace. The number
of Jews from Ostland who were annihilated in Sobibor in the second half of
September 1943 was about 13,700."

<1> Yitzhak Arad, "Ghetto in Flames", New York, 1982, pp. 431-432

Excerpted from....----------------------------------------------
BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA - the Operation Reinhard Death Camps
Indiana University Press - Yitzhak Arad, 1987. ISBN 0-253-3429-7
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