As Jews were being deported from Vilna to Ponary, several inhabitants of the ghetto realized that the actions being perpetrated against them belonged to a genocide scheme. Several leading members of the Ha-Shomer ha-Tza'ir youth movement in Vilna slipped out of the ghetto, found refuge in a monastery a short distance from town, and attempted to understand the meaning of the events and the conclusions to adduce from them. Abba Kovner said, "One mustnΓÇÖt believe that those who were taken from us are alive, that their removal was merely a deportation. Everything that has happened to us thus farΓÇöthat is, PonaryΓÇöis death, and even this fact is not the whole truth. It is immeasurably greater and deeper than that. The annihilation of thousands is but a portent of the extermination of millions.... Vilna is not just Vilna. Ponary is not a [passing] episode. The yellow Schein is not an invention of the local commandant. We are facing a carefully thought-out method, which for the moment we cannot fathom.... Is there any possibility of rescue? As brutal as the answer sounds, we have to state it: No, there is no deliverance!" In a meeting with members of the youth movement on December 31, Kovner showed them a poster in which he urged Jewish young people to resist: "Hitler is plotting to annihilate all of European Jewry.... Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter! True, we are weak and defenseless, but the only answer to the enemy is resistance!" It was the first time that an Einsatzgruppe murder Aktion was judged to be part of a general plan to obliterate European Jewry, and the first time that Jews were urged to defend themselves against the Nazis with arms.
