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

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