This lecture explores the complex and ambivalent attitudes of Vilna Ghetto inmates toward the Judenrat and the Jewish police, focusing on the harrowing moral dilemmas of leadership under Nazi terror. Following the establishment of the ghetto on September 6, 1941, Jacob Gens ultimately emerged as its leader, implementing the controversial strategy of “rescue through work”—the belief that keeping Jews economically valuable to the Germans would preserve their lives.
Life within the ghetto hierarchy was marked by privilege and deep social friction. Leadership roles, work certificates, and larger food rations often went to individuals favored by nepotism, while refugees from outside Vilna unexpectedly claimed many prominent positions. The Jewish police, commanded by Salek Dessler, enforced order and carried out deportations to prevent direct German and Lithuanian intervention. While figures like Dessler and gate security chief Moshe Levas were widely reviled as brutal collaborators, others—such as deputy police commander Joseph Glazman—accepted their roles to protect the community. Notably, several underground members served secretly as policemen and policewomen to gather intelligence and warn of impending Aktions, creating a web of dangerous overlaps between the resistance and the administration.
Attitudes toward Jacob Gens himself remained deeply ambivalent. While underground members viewed him with hostility—particularly after the July 1943 Wittenberg affair, where Gens pressured FPO commander Yitzhak Wittenberg to surrender to prevent total ghetto liquidation—the general public often supported him, seeing him as a strong leader striving to save as many lives as possible. Gens ultimately viewed his role as a tragic mission, stating that he belonged in the ghetto despite pleas from his non-Jewish wife to escape.
As historian Isaiah Trunk noted, the Jewish councils faced unbearable life-and-death decisions. Real-time intellectuals like Zelig Kalmanovich reflected on the profound moral compromises required just to survive. Caught between the German extermination machine, the rebellious underground, and the desperate ghetto population, the leadership operated in an impossible reality where survival came at an agonizing human cost.
Watch the lecture at the Online Event, Revisiting the Collaboration Discussion: Jewish Police and Leadership during the Holocaust, July 14, 2021:
