Memorial Day

"But to me, he didn’t seem like a threatening monster or lunatic who’d fought in both world wars—volunteering to 'kill the Krauts' both times, first as a teenage runaway, the second as a volunteer nearing forty, out too late with his drinking buddies and willing to serve abroad despite three children already and one on the way. I was just a 7-year-old kid excited to see Grandpa, and he seemed like a nice old man. To win us over, he bought gifts, and I can’t remember what mine was, but for my sister, he bought a two-foot-long, plastic baby doll. It was for an age range years below my sister’s, and nothing at all she’d play with, but you could tell he was trying to play the good grandparent despite any talent for the role."

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

shrug

"I pulled the man out of the shrubs by his feet until his own body was on the lawn. His cameras rode up over his head. I turned him over, grabbed him under the arms, and dragged him across the grass to the summer house, laying him down behind it. Whoever found him would wonder for a moment how it had happened, rob him, shrug, and maybe get someone to bury him."

~~ from An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans

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

September 9, 1942

"They are killing us off in Europe; they are killing us off by the thousands from the Rhine to the Volga. The blood of the Jews is like the vapor in air that Faustus saw when the Devil claimed his due; but no one claims us but death; our due is, apparently, the 'sympathy' of a few men of good will. From this morning's Times, however, I learn that French Catholic priests have been fighting Vichy's submission to the Nazi Jewish policy. Saliege, the Archbishop of Toulouse, has written this pastoral letter: 'There is a Christian morality, there is a human morality, that impose duties and confer rights. These duties and these rights derive from the very nature of man."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, entry from September 9, 1942