In 1941, Jacob Gens was given an unthinkable task: deciding which Jewish people would be turned over to the Germans. Gens, the Jewish chief of police for the Vilna ghetto, an area designated specifically for Jews in Lithuania during World War II, carried the anguish with him, according to his family.
He shared details regularly with his daughter, Ada Gens-Ustjanauskas, a former longtime West Hartford resident and Holocaust survivor, who aided immigrants and refugees and was a prominent business owner in the region.
“My father risked his life despite knowing he would be killed,” Gens-Ustjanauskas said in an email to the Courant.
“He never asked for anything in return,” she said. “He only wanted to help his people because that was the type of person he was.”
Alexander Phibbs, the great-grandson of Gens, listened to his grandmother over the years share the stories of her father’s predicament.
“He’s talking to his daughter, saying ‘This is what I have to do with human lives and this is not an easy task and I know I am not going to be forgiven for this. I know how people see me now. I don’t expect them to say kind things about me after the war,’” Phibbs said. Phibbs said Gens made it clear to his daughter that she should not feel the need to defend him.
Gens is known as one of the most complex figures in Holocaust history and historians are in disagreement about how his actions should be understood. Phibbs said he believes there is one side of the story that is yet to be fully told: his grandmother’s.
He said he hopes to share her vision to better understand Gens and the complexities of the role he held coupled with his duties as a father and educator. Many Holocaust survivors credited Gens with saving their lives including the former executive director of the ADL, Abraham Foxman.
Alexander Phibbs in front of Jacob Gens at Holocaust Museum in Lithuania. Courtesy of the family.
Phibbs has formed a nonprofit, the Gens Family Project, to restore Jewish life, testimony and civic history in Lithuania before, during and after the Holocaust.
Reflecting on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is Tuesday, Phibbs, a Simsbury resident, said he wants to preserve his grandmother’s legacy, particularly her work in helping refugees and immigrants after the war and as an interpreter for U.S. presidents and senior political leaders during the U.S. Baltic independence movement and in federal Nazi war crimes investigations. Phibbs has produced a documentary, The Commandant’s Daughter, that will debut at the JCC in West Hartford in the spring.
“I would say the most important part about sharing her story, sharing the video is highlighting during these terrible times that we have people who are willing to help,” he said. “That we have people that are willing to defend the people who need defense and that they’re not always heroes as you see them.”
Helping others
Gens-Ustjanauskas, 99, said that her father helped people without thinking about his legacy.
“Despite my father’s difficult position in the Vilna Ghetto, he was a leader and his goal was to save as many people as he could,” she said. ”His behaviors spread to others. He did his best even when he knew it wasn’t enough.”
Prior to the war, he served as a captain in the Lithuanian Army and worked as a teacher before completing his education in law and economics. He married a Roman Catholic Lithuanian woman.
The Jewish elders in the ghetto offered Gens the position of the Jewish chief of police in 1941.
And even though a close friend offered to hide him and his family, he refused, according to Phibbs.
“He would not save himself while the rest of Lithuania’s Jews faced humiliation and death,” according to information from the Gens Family Project.
His family did not want him to take the position, Phibbs said.
“What he showed my grandmother when he accepted the position is that he knew his life was practically over,” Phibbs said. “Being known to the Germans meant death and that he wouldn’t make it out.”
He gave off the impression to the Germans that he was a single man and hid his family including his daughter in an apartment across from the ghetto, Phibbs said.
Yad Vashem reported that the murder of Vilna’s Jews halted temporarily in 1941.
“Until the liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943, of the 20,000 Jews in the ghetto, it was primarily the sick and elderly that were murdered,” Yad Vashem said.
Jacob Gens. Courtesy photo
According to the recollections of Vilna Ghetto survivor and Dr. Mark Dworzecki, Gens understood how he was viewed.
“Many of you look upon me as a traitor, and many of you wonder by what right I come to your literary gatherings,” he said. “I, Gens, am leading you to your death, yet I, Gens, want to save you from death. I, Gens, let you dig your dugouts, and I, Gens, try to bring work, life certificates, and benefits to the ghetto.”
He led the Vilna Ghetto until Sept. 1943 when he was “ordered to return to Gestapo headquarters following accusations that he was helping partisan groups,” according to the Gens Family Project.
Even though he was warned that he would be executed, he chose to report to the Gestapo, where he was murdered, Phibbs said.
Foxman credited Gens with saving his life. He said that when the Germans invaded Vilnius in 1941 they ordered all Jews to the ghetto.
“Word got out that a Jewish child was outside the ghetto,” Foxman said, referring to himself.
He said his father told him that Gens said a child’s chances are greater outside the ghetto and that he paid off the Germans to let him go.
Foxman, who led the ADL from 1985 to 2015, said that Gens paid the price with his death.
“He truly believed he was doing good,” he said.
While some people viewed Gens as the devil incarnate for working with the Gestapo, others saw him as an angel who intervened between the Germans and the Jews.
Foxman said the experience makes him believe in miracles and in good people.
Phibbs said he understood the controversial role his great grandfather found himself in.
“Having the Jewish police choose the people by hand is not a popular role,” he said. “And if your family was taken, I would probably feel the same way as they did. And you can’t blame them. What people overlook is this is a system created by the Germans.”
The role was complex, Phibbs added.
“If you didn’t see what was happening on a daily or weekly or monthly basis, you didn’t see the work, you didn’t see the fear, you didn’t see the Germans coming in and shooting Jews in front of you in the head because they could, for no reason other than they would say maybe one lady says they didn’t like the way you looked at them,” Phibbs said.
Phibbs said his great-grandfather always tried to negotiate sending fewer Jews than the Germans requested.
“So he had to have an iron fist in some ways, but he would negotiate as much as he could in other ways because he knew what it was like to serve,” he said.
Mira Gonen’s father, Benjamin Gonen, was 12 years old when he was sent to Vilna Ghetto. His grandfather, Aba Goniondskis, turned down the role of Jewish police chief of the ghetto and was later killed by the Nazis.
Gens looked after the boy in the Ghetto, providing food for him.
Mira Gonen, speaking from Tel Aviv, learned a month ago from Phibbs that Gens had saved him. She said she wished her father had known before he died 12 years ago but as a boy he was too young to know.
“There was always part of the story missing, like my dad said, ‘I wasn’t so hungry in the ghetto’ relatively to those times and he had no explanation why and suddenly all the parts were connecting,” Gonen said.
Ada -Ustajanauskas and Jacob Gens. Courtesy of the family.
Hiding survivors
When her father was serving in the ghetto as chief of police, Gens-Ustjanauskas, Phibb’s grandmother, was 14 years old.
Living in an apartment across the street from the ghetto, she and her mother hid Holocaust survivors and listened intently daily to her father’s stories.
“They were taking risks in the city,” Phibbs said.
Speaking in testimony to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Gens-Ustjanauskas said she learned the philosophy of helping others from her father.
“I have been helping people since 1947 and he never got anything for his help,” she said. “I never ask anything for my help and I help out. I think that is something that goes through the genes.”
Phibbs said his grandmother chose to spend her time in the ghetto helping other Jews and that she dedicated her life to service.
After her father’s death, Gens-Ustjanauskas was forced into hiding with her mother, surviving in the Lithuanian countryside.
In 1945 she escaped to Poland and then to Germany.
She then began working for the International Refugee Organization helping displaced people reunite with their families and resettle across the world, according to Phibbs.
Phibbs said his grandmother’s story is integral and historically fills in gaps recognizing people who might have been either overlooked or there wasn’t enough information on them.
“It shows how her early years were shaped by her father, her mother and then the experiences she went through during the Holocaust,” Phibbs said. “She wanted to comfort immigrants and help welcome them into places where they wouldn’t face persecution again.”
She married in 1949 and moved to Hartford in 1953, where she raised six children. She and her husband Antanas opened an international food store and parcel agency now known as Cosmos, which closed in 2022 after 65 years in business.
She helped thousands of immigrants navigate complex immigration systems also assisting USCIS and other federal agencies, the Gens Family Project said. She traveled internationally with American presidents and vice presidents to Lithuania and the Baltic states.
In 1990, Gens-Ustjanauskas provided interpretation for then-President George W. Bush while meeting with Lithuanian Chairman Vytautas Landsbergis.
Phibbs said she was connected to the community in West Hartford. She moved to Florida a few years ago.
“The funniest thing is, she was a 90-year-old woman going to work every day in her office above our store, putting teas and everything on the shelves upstairs, helping lines out the door with immigrants coming in wanting to do their immigration papers,” he said. “You would never know that she’s a Holocaust survivor.”
Phibbs said she is just one immigrant who dedicated her life to helping other people who are in a situation that she knows all too well.
And her story sends a message for the current times, Phibbs said.
“What you see, when you learn the history of Germany and all the countries it invaded, it’s little steps,” he said. “It’s little laws. It’s changing laws. It’s scapegoating certain groups of people. And you realize that it’s not a far stretch. It’s a slippery slope when you don’t know the full extent of where that’s going to lead you.”
