Handwritten Yiddish text on white paper.
Handwritten Yiddish text on white paper. Handwritten Yiddish text on white paper. Handwritten Yiddish text on white paper.
Envelope addressed to Mark Uveeler, c/oYIVO, 535 West 125th St, New York, USA. Two polish stamps on the upper right corner featuring Marie Curie.

Letter: “News concerning Vilna”

1941. Handwritten manuscript, thin onion-skin paper in blue pencil or carbon

Account by Miriam Abramowska, “Yedies vegn vilne” [News concerning Vilna]. Dated 1941. Letter sent to YIVO in New York reporting on events in Vilnius until the formation of the ghetto on October 12th, 1941, and after. It reports Jews being seized for forced labor, mass killings in the Ponar-Łukiszki forest, and the transfer of Jews into the ghetto within a single day. Regarding the living conditions in the ghetto, it describes that there are up to 40 people in a room. 20-25,000 Jews remain in the city as of the writing of this report.

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Unless otherwise stated, all artifacts featured in the exhibition come from the YIVO's Archives and Library collections. Digitization of many of these materials has been made possible by the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project.

Disclaimer: for the reader’s ease of finding wartime locations on current-day maps, we have at times used the present-day names of those cities and streets as they may be found on modern maps.