Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye

[4] The goals of the FPO were to establish self-defense in the ghetto, to sabotage German industrial and military activities and to join the partisan and Red Army’s fight against the Nazis.

[5] Abe (Abba) Kovner, the movement's leader, and 17 members of the local Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair, stationed at a Polish Catholic convent for an order of Dominican Sisters, sheltered from the Nazis by Mother Superior Anna Borkowska (Sister Bertranda),[6] who was the first to supply hand grenades and other weapons to the Vilnius ghetto underground.

[citation needed] As the Germans demanded that Wittenberg should be handed over to them, the Judenrat and Gens convinced the majority of the inhabitants of the ghetto to acquiesce to that request, arguing that tens of thousands should not be sacrificed for the sake of one man.

As people assembled insisting that Wittenberg should be given to the Germans, he agreed to surrender to the Gestapo and was found dead in his cell on the next morning, having committed suicide according to most accounts.

Gens took control of the liquidation so as to rid the ghetto of the Germans, but helped fill the quota of Jews with those who would fight but were not necessarily part of the resistance.

Remaining in Lithuania after the war, she served as the Vilnius Yiddish Institute's librarian, and a beloved teacher there, lifelong advocate for the memory and legacy of the culture and heritage of the once illustrious Jewish Lithuanian community.