In this final chapter of “Remembering Vilna,” several of the survivors whose stories we’ve featured tell of their journeys to safety and new beginnings, even as the traumas they experienced remained ever present.

Chapter 9: Judgment and Revenge

Nov 15th, 2023 31m 24s

At war’s end, Vilna’s survivors struggle to regain their health, look for missing family members, and search for ways to leave Europe for the United States or Palestine. But a small group join an effort to seek revenge in Nuremberg, where an in

Chapter 8: Nazi Defeat

Nov 9th, 2023 38m 59s

July 1944. For nearly two weeks, the Nazis and the Soviets fight for every street and block in Vilna. When the smoke clears, Jews hiding in the sewers emerge into daylight while other survivors and Jewish partisans filter back into the devastat

Chapter 7: Liquidation

Nov 2nd, 2023 40m 12s

When the Nazis liquidate the Vilna ghetto, they send thousands of Jews to their deaths or to forced-labor camps. Others escape to the forest to join the partisans. Very few manage to hide. The Nazis also try to eliminate evidence of their effor

Chapter 6: The Underground

Oct 26th, 2023 28m 35s

Young people in the ghetto organize an underground group with the hope of leading an uprising against the Nazis. They risk their lives to build an arsenal, but when it becomes clear most Jews in the ghetto don’t support them, many escape to the

Chapter 5: Ghetto Life

Oct 19th, 2023 30m 20s

Life in the Jewish ghetto demands vigilance and adaptation. Families improvise spaces for hiding. Food is smuggled at the risk of execution. And while young people start to organize a resistance, cultural and sporting events prove to be a much

Chapter 4: The Ghetto

Oct 10th, 2023 33m 40s

They are given minutes to pack. A suitcase, a sheet-wrapped bundle, whatever they can carry. Thousands of the city’s Jews are marched at gunpoint to the newly enclosed Jewish ghettos, where the previous inhabitants have already been murdered.

Chapter 3: Nazi Invasion

Oct 5th, 2023 25m 45s

When Germany attacks the Soviet Union in 1941, the Nazis occupy Vilna and begin imposing their harsh antisemitic rule, banning Jews from sidewalks, requiring the wearing of an identifying yellow star, and worse. “Within just a few days,” Mira V

Chapter 2: In the Shadow of War

Sep 28th, 2023 29m 20s

With the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the country is split between the Nazi invaders and the Soviet Union. Vilna winds up in the hands of the Soviets, then the Lithuanians, then the Soviets again, who set about seizing proper

Chapter 1: Childhood Memories

Sep 20th, 2023 27m 11s

Recollections of life before 1939 evoke the rich diversity of Vilna’s thriving Jewish community, including its multiple synagogues and political and social organizations. The impact on daily life of rising antisemitism foreshadows far darker ti

Introduction: Remembering Vilna

Sep 20th, 2023 10m 42s

“Those Who Were There” co-producers Nahanni Rous and Eric Marcus introduce a few of the voices that, over the course of 10 episodes, will bring to life the once-vibrant Jewish community of Vilna, Poland (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) and chro

Preview: Into the Stacks at the YIVO

Sep 21st, 2022 22m 35s

Join co-producers Nahanni Rous and Eric Marcus on a research trip to the YIVO Institute in preparation for the upcoming season of Those Who Were There that focuses on the city of Vilna—a once thriving center of Jewish life and culture. Their gu

Episode 10 — Judith Perlaki

Apr 1st, 2021 26m 57s

Teenaged Judith Perlaki recalled cheating death twice after being deported from Hungary to Auschwitz. But most of her family wasn’t so fortunate. While assigned to sort the belongings of people sent to the gas chambers, Judith discovered the dr

Episode 9 — Elias Recanati

Mar 11th, 2021 25m 15s

When the Germans took control of the Greek city of Salonika, Elias Racanati’s family had one chance to escape—his mother’s family hailed from Spain. But they had to cross German-occupied Europe to get there.

Episode 8 — Malka Baran

Feb 18th, 2021 28m 45s

Malka Baran expressed her love of children by caring for a toddler hidden in the barracks of a concentration camp and teaching first grade at her DP camp. It was the start of her lifelong commitment to early-childhood education.

Episode 7 - Leon Pommers

Jan 28th, 2021 29m 9s

Fleeing Warsaw ahead of the invading Nazis, concert pianist Leon Pommers was propelled into a perilous journey around the world in hopes of reuniting with his sister in America.

Episode 6 - Esther Schwartzman

Jan 7th, 2021 27m

As Polish Jews fled across the border into Hungary bearing stories of Nazi atrocities, Esther Schwartzman’s family and community didn’t believe that such things could happen to them. Then in early 1944, everything changed.

Episode 5 - Abram Merczynski

Dec 3rd, 2020 24m 10s

When Abram Merczynski’s brother organized an orchestra in the Lodz ghetto, Abram promised himself that if he survived the war, he’d learn to play the violin. He lived—and kept his promise.

Episode 4 - Helena Jonas

Nov 12th, 2020 29m 15s

Deported to the Plaszów concentration camp, Helen Jonas faced almost certain death. Instead, she was chosen by Amon Göth—the camp’s notorious, brutal commandant—to be his servant.

Episode 3 - Annelies Herz

Oct 22nd, 2020 30m 8s

Teenage Annelies Herz saw that fellow Jewish forced laborers were disappearing. So to survive in wartime Germany, she and her twin sister went underground: they secured new identities and never stayed in one place for long.

Episode 2 -- Isaac Zieman

Oct 1st, 2020 32m 35s

Isaac Zieman was a passionate young Zionist with plans to make a life in Palestine. Instead, the Nazi invasion of Latvia propelled him on a years-long journey that took him across the Soviet Union and Europe and finally to the United States.

Episode 1 -- Sally Frishberg

Sep 9th, 2020 30m 37s

High school teacher Sally Frishberg used her childhood experience of being hidden for two years with her family in a Polish farmer’s attic to create one of the first public high school classes on the history of the Holocaust.

Season Two Introduction

Sep 9th, 2020 6m 21s

Hear excerpts from the second season of “Those Who Were There,” featuring testimonies drawn from the nearly 600 interviews conducted by the Museum of Jewish Heritage in affiliation with the Fortunoff Archive.

Episode 10 — Sam Kassow

Jan 16th, 2020 25m 23s

In October 1945, Celia Kassow gave birth to her son Sam in a German displaced persons camp. Seventy-five years later, Sam Kassow reflects on his mother’s life and an astonishing journey of discovery to his mother’s hometown in Eastern Europe.

Episode 9 — Celia Kassow — Part 2

Jan 2nd, 2020 21m 28s

When Nazi troops seized the Polish farm where Celia Kassow was in hiding, she fled once again—this time into the forest, where she joined the Soviet partisans.