Jewish Partisans Help Liberate Vilna; 2,500 of 57,000 Jews Survive

The Red Army liberated Vilna on July 13, 1944, a year after the final liquidation of the ghetto. Jewish prisoners who had been kept in labor camps to exhume and cremate the bodies of earlier murder victims in Ponary were now taken to Ponary and murdered. Some 150-200 managed to flee before this liquidation and survived. Jewish partisan units that had fled from the Vilna Ghetto into the forest now helped the Red Army forces liberate the town.