a city has died

"The Germans entered in June [1941], now it's February, seven long months now. But Vilna still doesn't seem to have awoken. A kind of lethargic sleep hangs on the city, on her narrow, crooked side streets, her church towers, and on the dead walls that divide the city from the ghetto, from Ghetto I and from the barely remaining traces of Ghetto 2.

"The stores are locked up with a holiday calm. The dulled courtyards of the Jewish district are frightening in their emptiness. Niemiecka [Street], the main artery of the Vilna business district, is a quiet, calm alley, which doesn't remember life. The Poles I meet on the street look at me, frightened. All around, a dead emptiness and, over the city, from one end to the other, a terrible melancholy circulates—a city has died.

"Vilna in February 1942."

~~ from The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939—1944 by Herman Kruk