Gevik Heller — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Taken from 21 biographies found in the street /an article by Leah Price, the International Institute for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem.

At the end of summer in 1943, Gevik Heller was 16. Following the death of his father, the teacher and educator Dr. Moshe Heller, who was the director of the statistical department of the library in the Vilna Ghetto, Herman Kruk who was the director of the ghetto library took him under his wing. Gevik was one of his assistants and so was able to provide for his mother.

Just like his benefactor, Herman Kruk, young Gevik kept a record of what was happening in the ghetto. Just a few pages of his diary survived and were only found after his release. Those pages of Heller’s chronicle, which were written up to the time when the ghetto was liquidated on 22^nd September, 1943, recount the last days of the Vilna Ghetto. They describe the gnawing anxiety about their deportation and the unceasing rumors about the imminent end of the ghetto, the scurrying around, the uncertainty, and the attempts to figure out the misleading bits of information filtering through. Gevik, like the rest of the people in the ghetto, looked for a way out of such a despairing reality. Should he stay in the ghetto and be sent with everyone else to Estonia? After all, don’t the letters sent from those who had just been deported there augur bad things to come? Or should he make an effort to join the ranks of those being transferred to work camps outside the ghetto? Or, perhaps, flee to the forest? Would he be accepted by the underground? With all this going on, Gevik kept to his daily routine, as much as possible, working in the ghetto library. On 15^th September, 1943, while he was in the reading room, he learned that Ya’akov Gens, the head of the Judenrat, had been shot to death the previous day. Kruk instructed him to remove the articles from Gens’s office at 6 Rudnicki Street, and store them. On 21^st September, Heller wrote in his diary: “Amongst the material we brought from there, were works which had won awards from the Writers’ Society: poems by Sutzkever (I have read them), works by Kalmanovitch …, an invitation from actors of the ghetto theatre to participate in their forum in honor of Gens…, a story written by Blecher about his mother’s death, dedicated to Gens…”, etc.

The diary of young Gevik Heller, the whereabouts of whose death are unknown.. was published in the Yad Vashem Research Collection in 2003.