Changing Wilno into Vilnius

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 179-183:

The transformation of pre-war Wilno into post-war Vilnius was effected by removing those of its inhabitants who called it Wilno, the Poles who had constituted the majority of its population. Their departure followed the removal by genocide of the second largest ethnic group in the city, the Jews, who called it Vilna or Vilne. The same sequence took place in the other borderland city that Poles had held dear, known today as Lviv, which had also been inhabited largely by ethnic Poles and Jews before the war.

Vilnius’s reconstruction was principally a population project and only secondarily a rebuilding programme, especially in the Old Town. Czesław Miłosz described the pre-war city as an enclave of negative ambiguity, ‘neither Polish nor not-Polish, neither Lithuanian nor not-Lithuanian’. The aim of the reconstruction was to remove that ambiguity, remaking Vilnius as a city that was definitely Lithuanian and very definitely not Polish. It succeeded in establishing the city’s Lithuanian identity, but had to make do with concealing the ambiguities endemic to the Old Town and the surrounding districts.

Until the Nazi occupation, the heart of Vilnius’s character as a multi-ethnic city was a triangular district adjoining the central space over which the town hall presides. The historic Jewish quarter was not beyond the walls – unlike in many European cities, such as Kraków, whose Jewish residents had been sent to live in the separate township of Kazimierz at the end of the fifteenth century – but right in the middle of the city. A larger Jewish neighbourhood spread out from it across the western side of the Old Town. By 1939, according to one estimate, the central district was home to 75,000 people, of whom 35,000 were Jewish.

Many of that fraction were crammed into the overcrowded and insanitary alleys of the original quarter, which was an object of fascination for outsiders and a symbol of identity for Vilna’s Jews. During the First World War, a boy named Moyshe Vorobeychik often happened upon German soldiers painting and sketching scenes in the quarter. Some of them were notable artists in civilian life. Vorobeychik himself became a photographer, under the name Moï Ver, and produced an avant-garde album based on one of the Jewish streets. The project represented a desire shared by other young Jewish artists in the city, to innovate and embrace modernity while retaining their cultural roots. They formed a group called Yung Vilne, whose emblem was a young tree growing above one of the old Jewish quarter’s signature arches.

Max Weinreich, an eminent linguist and scholar of Yiddish, felt similarly about the relationship between learning and place. He considered that modern Jewish research needed an environment like that of Vilna, where ‘the houses and stones retain a memory’ of its Jewish cultural heritage. Weinreich was a leading figure in the YIVO institute of Yiddish studies, which continued a tradition of intellectual enterprise that had made Vilna a centre of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, in the nineteenth century. YIVO’s headquarters opened in 1933 on a broad modern street at a distance from the city centre, but the emotional heart of Jewish Vilna was still embedded in the sclerotic alleys of the old quarter. The enclave retained its allure for outsiders too, despite the warning in a guidebook by a Polish professor about ‘the typically eastern slovenliness of the inhabitants of this anti-hygienic district and its unbearable fug, which makes it impossible for a cultured European to visit these alleys, especially on hot summer days’.

After the Germans took control of Vilnius in 1941, they confined its Jewish population to two ghettos, one in the old quarter and one in the newer neighbourhood. The former was the smaller of the two, holding 11,000 people. It was liquidated after a month, in October 1941, leaving 29,000 people in the larger one, which was maintained until September 1943 and used as a source of labour. The ghetto inmates’ tasks included the construction of a model of Vilnius, which was produced by a team of thirty architects, engineers, draughtsmen and artists. They were forced to create a representation in miniature of the city from which they had been excluded, complete with the tiny zone where they were imprisoned in the middle of it. Four of them are known to have survived the war, but they were rare exceptions. The great majority of Vilnius’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, many of them shot by squads of Lithuanian volunteers at a killing ground in woodland outside the city. Several hundred managed to stay alive until the end of the German occupation, and a few thousand escaped – many of them involuntarily, deported by the previous communist authorities – into the depths of the Soviet Union. Nearly all of the survivors subsequently emigrated to the United States, Israel and other distant lands. Vilna, the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’, became an exile memory.

The dissolution of Wilno began with an attempt by Polish forces to recapture it. In July 1944, as the Red Army pushed westwards, the Polish underground state launched a nationwide operation to liberate cities and territories ahead of the Soviet advance. The battles of July were the overtures to the nine-week tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising, which began on the first day of August. Wilno’s political and emotional importance to the Polish cause was expressed in the codename for the Armia Krajowa (AK) assault against the city’s German occupiers: Ostra Brama, the Polish name for the Gate of Dawn. A grand and reverent window is set above the arch on the inside of the gate; through it an image of the Virgin Mary, clad in gilded silver, presides over the street below. The site is one of the most intense foci of the Marian cult at the heart of Polish Catholicism, and therefore of Polishness as it is orthodoxly conceived, venerating Mary as ‘Queen of Poland’. Thousands of silver votive offerings attest to its devotees’ faith that the image has miraculous powers. It is said that the first of the offerings came from a Polish-Lithuanian commander who led his men through the gate in an assault on the Swedes who occupied the city in 1702.

As a precedent, it was hardly auspicious. Instead of ejecting the occupiers with supernatural support from the Mother of God, the attackers were checked and forced to retreat. The assault in 1944 also lacked the miraculous intervention that would have been needed to achieve its double objective of driving out the Germans and keeping out the Soviets. After failing to overcome the German defences on the first day, and struggling to communicate with their comrades inside the city, Polish units operated alongside the Soviet forces. In the latter stages of the battle, AK troops fought their way through the Old Town to capture the city hall, and raised the Polish flag over the castle tower. It was quickly taken down by their inimical Soviet allies, who replaced it with a red one.

After six days, the Germans were defeated, and on the day after that, the Soviet leadership ordered the disarming of the AK soldiers. The ensuing arrests of Polish officers heralded a programme of repression that saw thousands detained in Vilnius as the year went on. That sent an ominous message to the Poles who comprised most of the city’s surviving population. In September, the Soviet and Polish authorities agreed terms for the removal of ethnic Poles from Lithuania to territory within Poland’s new borders. It was to be a notionally voluntary exodus, not an expulsion. Lithuanian Poles were sent away from their homes and birthplaces in railway goods trucks, but they were not herded onto the trains at gunpoint. The official term was ‘evacuation’, which suggested that the Poles were being given aid – and that they were under threat.

Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog's (1968) Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change was one of my most memorable textbooks during my early graduate work in linguistics, in a class taught by one of my most memorable professors, Derek Bickerton.