About 500 Jews escaped from work details and directly from the ghetto, and joined Jewish and Soviet partisan forces in the distant forests of southeast Lithuania and Belarus.

The Nazis established a civilian administration under SA Brigadefuhrer Hans Cramer to replace military rule in place from the invasion of Lithuania on June 22, 1941.

Between July and August 15, 1941, the Germans concentrated Jews who survived the initial pogroms, some 29,000 people, in a ghetto established in Vilijampolė (Slabodka).

[1] It was an area of small primitive houses and no running water which had been cleared of its mainly Jewish population in pogroms by Lithuanian activists beginning on June 24.

During this time, police cars roamed the ghetto streets and music was blared over loudspeakers to mute the terrified screams of families.

[1] The SS sent those deemed fit to work to Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia, and deported children and elderly people to Auschwitz.

Of Kaunas' few Jewish survivors, 500 had survived in forests or in a single bunker which had escaped detection during the final liquidation; the Germans evacuated an additional 2,500 to concentration camps in Germany.

[1] Throughout the years of hardship and horror, the Jewish community in Kovno documented its story in secret archives, diaries, drawings and photographs.

George Kadish (Hirsh Kadushin), for example, secretly photographed the trials of daily life within the ghetto with a hidden camera through the buttonhole of his overcoat.

The resistance acquired arms, developed secret training areas in the ghetto, and established contact with Soviet partisans in the forests around Kovno.

In 1943, the General Jewish Fighting Organization (Yidishe Algemeyne Kamfs Organizatsye) was established, uniting the major resistance groups in the ghetto.

The Germans executed 34 members of the Jewish police for refusing to reveal specially constructed hiding places used by Jews in the ghetto.