When their lives were critically threatened, Jews had to find a hiding place. They sought people who could help them by taking them in or finding quarters in attics, basements, holes in the ground, or sheds. Sometimes it was the helpers who took the initiative and offered a hiding place. Often the Jews could not leave their generally very cramped hiding places for extended periods of time. They therefore had to depend entirely on the help of others. Living in very close quarters was physically and emotionally demanding. When several people shared a hiding place, there was a lack of private space. Many also suffered from hunger.
In early October 1943, everyone in the Liepaja ghetto in Latvia was deported to Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camp. Among the few who managed to escape were David Zivcon, his wife Henny, and another couple. Their friend Robert Seduls set up a hiding place for them in his cellar. Up to April 1944, other Jews joined them. Some of those in the cellar spent five hundred days there, without ever seeing the light of day. Constant fear of being discovered and the tight quarters led to tension among those in hiding. It became increasingly difficult for Seduls to feed the eleven people there. When Seduls was killed on March 10, 1945, by a Soviet shell, his wife Johanna assumed the care of those in hiding until liberation.
More than one thousand Jews performed forced labor in a German Wehrmacht camp near Vilna (Vilnius). The Red Army approached the camp in the summer of 1944. The Jewish prisoners feared they would be murdered when the camp was liquidated, so they set up hiding places. Working at night, they partitioned off a room in a cellar by building a wall and dug an underground entrance. Additional hiding places were set up on the camp grounds. On July 1, 1944, the camp commander, Major Karl Plagge, warned the Jews that the SS was about to clear the camp. About two hundred people fled in panic into the prepared hideouts. They had to endure there for days without food and with little air. Not until the camp was liberated by the Red Army could they leave their hiding places.
In the first six months after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, roughly 500,000 Jews in Belorussia, Russia, and the Ukraine were murdered. The others were imprisoned in ghettos. Some evaded murder by escaping into the forests. Jewish families came together in camps there and formed armed groups of partisans. The largest camp, with hundreds of families, was founded by Anatolij (Tuvia) Bielski and his brothers in the Belorussian Naliboki forest. The small, provisional camp with tents grew into a village community with workshops, a school, an infirmary, synagogue, theater, and a prison. Several thousand Jews survived the war in such camps.
