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

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