Vitka Kempner was born in Kalisz, Poland on 14th of March, 1920. Kalisz, on the Polish-German border, is considered to be one of the oldest Jewish communities in Poland. As of the 1931 census, 15,300 Jews lived there, 30 percent of the total population. At home, Vitka’s mother, father, brother Baruch, and horde of grandparents, aunts and uncles spoke primarily Polish, not Yiddish. Vitka’s mother and father, Hayyah and Zevi, ran a tailoring business.
Vitka was still in school when she joined Betar; a militaristic Jewish youth movement that taught self-defence. She was the first girl to join.
The Poland Vitka grew up in was one that was beginning to regulate against Jews.
The first was government jobs, being restricted to Christians. Then doctors and lawyers. In the mid-1930s, the National Democratic Party (NDP), emerged. NDP was a nationalist party that encouraged Poles across the country to boycott Jewish businesses. This only added to tensions, and soon increased reports of vandalism and violence targeting Jewish businesses and families surfaced.
When she was 16, a conference about anti-Semitism was set up to combat rising anti-Jewish riots. The government shut it down. At 18, another conference was banned.
In her last year of school, she joined the zionist youth group Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa'ir (the Young Guard). She moved to Warsaw to study in a seminary for Jewish students, continuing her involvement with the youth movement
In 1939, the Jewish population of Kalisz was over 20,000.
In 1939, when Vitka was 19, Germany invaded Poland and Kalisz was taken. The Schutzstaffel (SS) herded the Jews of Kalisz into a church. Vitka and her brother, assisted by their parents, escaped Kalisz with a number of other Jewish youths. At this time, politicians spoke of prison and self-deportation of the Jewish people. Vitka’s brother Baruch joined Mordecai Anielewicz, the leader of the Jewish Combat Organisation at the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, to fight in the uprising and was killed.
Vitka travelled to Soviet-controlled Vilna, Lithuania. Vilna served as a gathering place for members of Zionist youth movements trying to get to British-controlled Palestine, where they hoped to find safety from Jewish persecution. But the British had severely limited Jewish immigration. It was near impossible to get to Palestine, leaving many Jews stuck in Vilna to wait.
But in 1940, the Soviets took control of Vilna. They put a stop to leaving Vilna, to going abroad, and attempted to force those in Vilna to accept Russian citizenship. Vitka still had hopes of getting to Palestine, so she left Vilna for Slonim, Belarus. It was nice, for a month… And then the war began.
On the 24th of June, 1941, Germany invaded. In Slonim, the Germans began the slaughter in the first few days of their take over. So, Vitka decided to go back to Vilna to join the other Partisans. But getting to Vilna was difficult. Vitka had to get on a German train to get to the front lines. While on the train, one of the German soldiers discovered she was Jewish and raised the alarm, forcing Vitka to throw herself from the train to escape.
From there, she took buses and trucks, trekking the 200 kilometres between Slonim and Vilna by herself. It was not until she arrived in Vilna that she truly understood what was happening with the Jews. She learnt about how the Germans captured people in the street. Vitka and the other members of the Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa'ir movement made a plan. They made connections with the Polish resistance movement, who had access to a Christian convent where some of the Jewish resistance members could hide, including Abba Kovner, Aerie Wilner, and Haika Grossman. Just days after Vitka came back to Vilna, the Germans decided to expel the Jews into a ghetto.
The Nazis forced between 20,000–57,000 Jews into ghettos. Vitka shared an apartment with 11 other people, 10 men and a woman called Rozka Korczak.
Every night they met to discuss what they would do, to ascertain if there was anything that they could do. It was around this time that the Germans started taking Jews to Ponary. Vitka spoke of what it was like in an interview years later “And everyone, everyone looked and speaked [sic] and was really terrified because the future was very not clear.”
The Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa'ir decided to meet with their members in the convent. It was decided that they had to look for safety for their people, with the help of other organisations. This was the beginning of 1942. Abba Kovner spoke of how he believed that the destiny of Jews was all the same, how the jews of Vilna weren’t being singled out, they were just the first. That the same destiny awaited all the people in all Europe. These discussions left people feeling angry and confused. The ideas he spoke of were revolutionary.
Vitka knew that the movement needed external help, so she moved to live as a servant for a family outside the ghetto. They were a Polish German family, who she called ‘Fox Deutsch’. It became her mission to go to the convent and the ghetto to pass along news from the city. But others grew suspicious of her, so she moved to a second convent in Vilna, working as an educator. The Mother Superior had 9 nuns in her convent, hiding 30 Jews. For 2 months, Vitka stayed in the convent, until she felt it was her time to rejoin the ghetto. When she told Mother Superior, she was shocked. Vitka told her “We are halutzim, pioneers, and if the destiny of Jewish people is to die in [the] ghetto, we cannot save ourselves.”
She and Abba went back to the ghetto together, and he wrote the proclamation of uprising. He read it aloud in Yiddish in the ghetto in front of 150 people. They were excited, completely ecstatic. The declaration gave them hope and allowed them to see that there was another way. They didn’t have to go with their heads down, they could look their oppressors straight in the eye. And on the 21st of January, 1942, the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (FPO/United Partisan Organisation) was started. The FPO included all of the Zionist youth movements within the ghetto, and, according to Vitka, had a single goal; armed resistance.
““To do things other than those related to the FPO was unacceptable, to say the least. It was considered high treason. How could one be involved in a life of culture when the world was on the verge of destruction and Jews were going to die?””
German soldiers came to the ghettos, seeking workers to go assist the war effort from ‘labour camps’. There were some volunteers, but others were taken or forced to relocate ‘out east’.
The girl told her story to Abba Kovner, and the ghetto leader, Jacob Gens. Jacob Gens thought she was crazy, that the Germans wouldn’t kill them when they could use them to back bombs or clothing. He planned to keep it quiet to avoid panic. Abba Kovner planned to fight. He shared the information he’d learnt with Vitka and the rest of their group.
6 months after learning the truth about Ponar, the group set their plan into motion. Vitka trekked with a partner, Itzke Matzkevich, nearly 20 kilometres away from Vilna, an area far from labour camps and ghettos so that the German soldiers couldn’t blame the jews for what would occur. Vitka had spent weeks sneaking out of the ghetto and scouting the right place. Vitka had investigated the timetable of the German military trains travelling to Vilna. Then, they hid explosives in the train tracks. This here was their first act of anti-Nazi sabotage. 200 German soldiers were killed.
“And we heard when we ran away it was a 15 km from the ghetto, we heard the bomb exploded and the Germans thought that the Polish did it. And they killed many Polish people who lived closed to the place we did it. And when we came to the ghetto it was a very big joy. And for the first time, not only the Jewish people exploded but this was the first partisans act in Vilna, but only of Jewish. Nobody knows the Jews did it. And it was very early because this is the 40, early 42, no partisans group at all, there are very few partisans, the German were very astonished that in Vilna there are partisans. They didn’t know that there are Jewish partisans already, partisans, because Vilna was fair from the front.”
Soon after, Nazis stopped taking Jews to hit ‘quotas’, and life seemed to stabilise. When Germany lost at Stalingrad, the idea in the ghetto was that they would be able to last the year. When the Germans arrested resistance leader Yitzhak Wittenberg, betrayed by Gens, the population of the ghetto was okay with it. But the other resistance fighters were not, and rescued him.
In response, the SS gave them an ultimatum: hand him back over, or every single person in the ghetto would die. Fights broke out, so Vitka hid the man away somewhere safe, secret to everyone else. On one side was the population of the Vilna ghetto, demanding the man be surrendered so their life could return to what had become normal. On the other was the resistance, insisting that they rise up and fight to escape the death that was assuredly awaiting them anyway. Finally, the resistance surrendered the man, knowing that they could not lead those who did not wish to fight. The next morning, Wittenberg was found dead in his cell. He had taken an acid capsule he had managed to smuggle with him.
Plans were made to escape the ghetto, but the Nazis conducted a raid before they had the chance. They stormed their meeting place, the location given up by Jacob Gens. Thousands of Jews were taken off to labour camps, and many members of the resistance were killed in the following fight.
Those who escaped split into three fortified apartments on the same street, each stockpiled with rifles and bottles of acid. The building beside the first apartment exploded, and they opened fire on the assembled Nazis. The Commander of the first group was shot and killed in the crossfire, so Rozka assumed command. When the Nazis sent a bomber in, she ordered a retreat to the next building. Finally, the Germans left, and the fighters escaped through the sewers.
On September 23 and 24, 1943, the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated, and the remaining Jews were transported to Estonia. Vitka moved between the outside world and the ghetto, leading groups to safety and smuggling ammunition to rebel meeting points outside of Vilna. Vitka led the final group, made up of 60 fighters including Abba Kovner, to the Rudninkai and Naroch forests to join the other groups.
In the Jewish Partisans’ camp, Vitka was given command over the patrol section of the Jewish resistance camp, directing and assisting the groups that collected information and maintained contact with members of the underground in Vilna. She led units on combat missions, and performed her own acts of sabotage.
The Avengers, an all-Jewish resistance group Vitka helped start, sabotaged the waterworks and power plant of Vilna.
Vitka led groups of Jewish Resistance fighters to the forest, joining their camp until their numbers reached 600.
In missions Vitka was a part of, 5 bridges were blown up, 40 train cars and 180 miles of tracks were destroyed, and over 200 Nazi soldiers were killed.
They lived lives of severe poverty in their middle of a forest, underground bunker run with military rigor. Yet Vitka never took anything extra from farmers for herself.
“The comrades used to laugh at me and say that I was not a human being—you don’t need sleep or food and you don’t understand how a human being lives.”
In 1944, Russian forces liberated Vilna. Vitka was the first to reach the now liberated Vilna as commander of her patrol unit. It was there where they met Jewish Soviet soldiers for the first time. Vitka Kempner was awarded the highest badge of courage in the USSR.
From there, Vitka smuggled refugees into Romania, across the border.
Though the war had ended, it was not so easy for Abba or Vitka to forgive and forget. Abba founded another group called ‘Nakam’, meaning revenge in Hebrew. They planned to poison the waterworks of the cities most important to the Nazis: Munich, Nuremberg, Berlin, Weimar, and Hamburg.
When Abba was arrested for trying to smuggle poison into Europe, he gave Vitka an order: poison the German prisoners of war.
On the 13th of April, 1946, Vitka and members of Nakam broke into a bakery that supplied bread for the prisoners at the U.S. Army camp at Nuremberg. They worked to cover 2,300 loaves of bread with arsenic, non-stop for hours until a sudden noise alerted the guards.
Upwards of 1,900–2,283 prisoners fell sick, but no deaths were reported, miraculously.
Vitka lived with Abba in Palestine and had 2 children. They lived on a kibbutz with Ruzka and her husband. For a time, Vitka worked as an educator in the kibbutz school, until she was 45, when she got a degree in clinical psychology from Bar Ilan University. She invented “non-verbal therapy by colour”, a pediatric therapy method for children with learning difficulties.
“In war, many things are acceptable. You kill and there seem to be no consequences. But there are consequences— they just come after.”
