Vilna Ghetto
Nazi ghetto in occupied Lithuania
The Vilna Ghetto was a World War II Jewish ghetto established and operated by Nazi Germany in the city of Vilnius in the modern country of Lithuania, at the time part of the Nazi-administered Reichskommissariat Ostland.
During the approximately two years of its existence, starvation, disease, street executions, maltreatment, and deportations to concentration and extermination camps reduced the ghetto's population from an estimated 40,000.
Only several hundred of the city's pre-war Jewish population managed to survive the war, mostly by hiding in the forests surrounding the city, by joining Soviet partisans, or by sheltering with sympathetic locals.
Background
Before the German-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Wilno (Vilna in Yiddish) was the capital of the Wilno Voivodship in the Second Polish Republic. The predominant languages of the city were Polish and, to a lesser extent, Yiddish. The Lithuanian-speaking population at the time was a small minority, at about 6% of the city's population according to contemporary Lithuanian sources. By 1931, the city had 195,000 inhabitants. According to the census of 1938 there was a slight increase so that the urban population was registered at around 208, 000, making it the fifth largest city in Poland, with varied industries and new factories, as well as a well respected university.
Wilno was a predominantly Polish and Jewish city since the Polish-Lithuanian borders were delineated in 1922 by the League of Nations in the aftermath of Żeligowski's Mutiny. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Joseph Stalin transferred Wilno to Lithuania in October, according to the Soviet–Lithuanian Mutual Assistance Treaty.
The public source identifies “Vilna Ghetto” as nazi ghetto in occupied Lithuania. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Vilna, Ghetto and Nazi.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q707539. VIAF identifies the subject as 8262154260842624480002. Authority coordinates are 54.683, 25.317. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939, 1931, 1938 and 1922.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vilna Ghetto” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.