The Day of Atonement

"Yom Kippur. The Day of Atonement. Should we fast? The question was hotly debated. To fast could mean a more certain, more rapid death. In this place, we were always fasting. It was Yom Kippur year-round. But there were those who said we should fast, precisely because it was dangerous to do so. We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we were capable of singing his praises.

"I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God's silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against him."

~~ from Night by Elie Wiesel

bereft survivors

"These men and women weren’t settler-colonizer overseers of a master race; they were the spat out, spat upon, vilified, starved victims of Imperial Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and of Nazi Germany a generation later, the survivors of an unprecedented industrial slaughter in which 6 million had been murdered. Many of them—when they arrived in Palestine, often bringing with them utopian, universalist, socialist beliefs—were emaciated and destitute. They were the bereft survivors of unspeakable horrors."

potatoes

"Recently the camp received potatoes for the winter. Eighty percent rotten. Nevertheless, the camp came to life. In the camp, mountains of potatoes are heaped up, and everyone can pick them. But the potatoes stink of rot, are reshuffled by hundreds of hands. The selected potatoes are hidden in bunkers and people cannot use them freely anymore. The resignation of the Advisory Committee and the prevention of the free use of potatoes again aggravate the situation of supplies in the camp. Nevertheless, recently there has been no starvation in the camp."

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

All that is left are the books

"The Jews of Ukmerge have been dead for a long time. All that is left are the books from the local Jewish library. Recently the books have also been taken out of there and brought to a 'Jewish grave' to the RR [Rosenberg] Task Force in Vilna, which does Judenforschung ohne Juden with Jewish brains . . .

"Seven cartons of books were brought here."

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

Little Gardens in the Courtyards

"As last year, so this year, many little gardens are planned for the courtyards, as for example, at Szpitalna 5, Jatkowa 15, Szawelska 5, Lida 8, Strashun 3, Szawelska 1, and Strashun 15. Smaller gardens will be planted in almost all ghetto courtyards.

"Instead of flowers over us, we will make our courtyards bloom for the time being."

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

Everything is Dead

"In the ghetto, it is as if everything were dead. The offices aren't open. People aren't working in the workshops. No one understands the events that have occurred. Rarely is there clear and certain information. Everything is veiled in fog. Everything looks unlikely. Every rustle is blown out of proportion. Some say the executions were carried out by Latvians. Some know that they were carried out by the 200 Ukrainians brought especially for that. People say that Hingst and Murer didn't know about the events in Ponar. The street seethes and argues incessantly. No one works, not even in the German units. The ghetto and the ghetto Jews are truly depressed. Everything is dead."

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

from "A Tormenting Day"

"[W]hen they kill thousands, we say it is painful, inhuman, beastly; and when seven are killed we say almost the same thing. Where is the proportion? [. . .]

Not only have we lost everything else, now we have also lost our sense of proportion. We cry for 1,000 just as for 10,000. Did we then mourn less for the 30,000 annihilated Vilna Jews than for the hundreds of thousands of Warsaw Jews? . . .

As Heine says:

Jewry is not a people—it is a misfortune. We are drowning in that misfortune and forgetting what is white and what is black. Is it any wonder?"

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

pleasantly calm

"It has been calm for a few days, even pleasantly calm. Nothing special has happened. Better and better news comes from the front. It grows clearer by the day that a big breakthrough is coming. The Germans are running away from the Caucasus. The Stalingrad-Rostov and Rzhev-Rostov fronts have bigger successes from one day to the next. Today, as I write these lines, the Reds are 120 kilometers from Kharkov and a few dozen from Rostov. Leningrad is liberated [from the siege], and the Germans are driven out of Kronstadt. Today Leningrad celebrates the liberation of the city. In short, it is calm in the ghetto, even pleasantly calm."

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

Police Will Collect Library Books

"There are subscribers to the library in the ghetto who do not return their borrowed books. Now such 'frozen' readers are put on a special list to be given to the police. The books of such subscribers are recalled by force.

"In especially malevolent cases, people will be punished for keeping library books."

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

a flower

"Outside, it is late autumn. I am not allowed to buy a flower in the street, although I am among the happy ones, who have the right to 'pass.' So I gather beautiful golden oak leaves. Instead of a flower, a leaf, a dried, yellow autumn leaf.

"It is autumn and sad in my soul. . . ."

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

100,000 books

"In November, the ghetto library went beyond the figure of a hundred thousand books distributed to readers. Because of this, the library is organizing a big cultural morning recital, which will take place in the Ghetto Theater on Sunday, the 13th of this month, at noon. On the program: Opening by G. Yashunski, welcome from the ghetto chief, writers, scientific circles, teachers, and the Youth Club. Dr. Ts. Feldman will speak on 'The Book and Martyrdom,' then a lecture by H. Kruk, '100,000 Books in the Ghetto.' The second part will be a concert of words and music.

"The finale: distribution of gift books to the first reader in the ghetto and the youngest reader of the library."

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

Hunger

"Here in the ghetto, hunger encompasses more and more circles. There is already a feeling of shame at being full. . . .

"Our friend receives a letter from Warsaw: his father, mother, and brother-in-law have died of hunger.

"I know of cases of cooking potato skins, cases of poor people not wanting to take any money. They beg for a crust of bread.

"People walk around half wild, mean, upset—doctors explain it as hunger. . . .

"The same hunger increases many new diseases of hunger among us. But we shall write separately about that."

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

something is rotten

"Rumors reach us everywhere that something is rotten among the Germans. Demoralization is rising over their heads. Through the intervention of Jews, Germans buy gold and furs, they take money left and right, deal in Jewish property and estates, etc.

"Most of the soldiers, from the lowest to the highest rank, are drinking horribly. They themselves recognize that going to the front is certain death. . . . The certainty of victory has long vanished from their mouths; on the contrary, sayings mocking the Führer abound, showing clearly that the stem is rotting away."

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

March 24, 1942

"'Blessed be He who has kept us alive and sustained us to reach this present time.'"

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

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

Snatchers

"The whole city is depressed about the men who have disappeared. Groups of Snatchers wander around the streets and courtyards, snatch men wherever they can, and drag them off. The excuse is that they are taken 'for work,' but seldom does anyone come back."

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

the jaws of the wolf

"Thousands of people have worked, thousands have been dragged off, thousands went off voluntarily. Only I, the whole time, for 10 weeks, have been hiding, however threatened with the severest consequences. I shall not willingly crawl into the jaws of the wolf. That's what I've decided."

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