Witness for the Prosecution

Real treasures, as we all know, lie buried. Herman Kruk’s diary is a case in point. This seminal document of Holocaust literature, chronicling life in the ghetto of Vilna and in a labor camp in Estonia, was first published in Yiddish in 1961 and has, until now, never been published in English. Its belated publication is a powerful addition to the literature of the Shoah.

Vilna, the Yiddish name for the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, was a thriving center of Jewish learning and Zionist activity. At the start of World War II, nearly 60,000 Jews lived there. The city had nearly 100 synagogues and six daily Jewish newspapers, as well as the first Yiddish academic institute, known as YIVO. All of this, however, was dismantled and destroyed when the Germans invaded the city in 1941, and by the time Russian troops entered the city in July 1944, only a few thousand of Vilna’s Jews who had been subject to Nazi rule were still alive. Poet, diarist, librarian, Kruk did not survive, but his words did.

A member of the Bund, the Jewish Marxist party, Kruk lived in Warsaw until 1939, when he fled the German army and ended up in Vilna. He remained until the remnants of Vilna’s Jews were transported to extermination camps in Estonia. He was killed in a mass execution Sept. 18, 1944, one day before the Soviet troops liberated Estonian camps. A chronicler of all that he saw and experienced, Kruk understood the importance of his work:

Neighbors in camp Klooga often ask me

Why do you write in such hard times?--

Why and for whom? ...

... For we won’t live to see it anyway.

I know I am condemned and awaiting my turn,

Although deep inside me burrows a hope for a miracle.

Drunk on the pen trembling in my hand,

I record everything for future generations ....

Kruk buried the last installment of his manuscript a day before he was killed. One of the six friends who assisted in the burial survived and returned soon afterward to retrieve the document.

Kruk’s writing comes to light after more than half a century lost in Soviet, YIVO and Israeli archives. YIVO had published a significant part of it in 1961. That it was hidden from the sight of most people interested in the subject makes the painstaking efforts of Benjamin and Barbara Harshav all the more valuable. Even so, at more than 700 pages, “The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania” will leave its readers eager for the next edition, for not only was Kruk an archivist but, in addition to keeping a diary, he collected documents. Some of these were unfortunately lost, and it is the inevitable frustration of this volume to read in a footnote that a copy of a document that Kruk had attached here or there can be found only in the YIVO’s Kaczerginski-Sutzkever Collection. The subject matter is trying, and we should not be teased so by the volume’s editors and publishers, for we are dealing here with unique testimony about the Holocaust, and all relevant documents ought to be published in an annex, a companion volume if need be. But this is my only complaint, a strange one, I admit: I couldn’t get enough of this bulky masterpiece.

As Benjamin Harshav explains in his excellent introduction, Kruk’s narrative runs in three parallel strands: The author puts together an objective record and documents the unfolding story but also gives his personal take on events and people and leaves for us a portrait of the Bundist milieu in the Vilna ghetto. Even though an “outsider”--a Warsaw Bundist in a Vilna ghetto, administered by a Jewish Council and controlled by revisionists (that is, right-wing Zionists)--Kruk has a privileged vantage point from which to observe and record. He ran one of the busiest, most frequented and loved institutions in the Vilna ghetto: the Strashun Library. People knew about his project and were bringing him stories and material.

What does he write about? All of ghetto life and death is there, each daily entry divided into small, independently titled segments. In an Israeli archive, Harshav discovered a manuscript of 100 pages, “Kruk’s own detailed table of contents ... often including ten or twenty topics recorded in one day.”

Take, for example, Segment 8 of the Oct. 29, 1942 entry (16 segments in all): “Walk to the Right in the Street--The police calls to the attention of the general ghetto population that, regardless of all previous warnings, people in the ghetto are not very careful about keeping to the right when walking in the street. Because ghetto sidewalks are very narrow, the order to stay strictly on the right is more than justified--it is a necessity of ghetto life. In the future, they will be stricter and will punish people for not walking on the right side.”

And from there, in one swoop, we move to eternity. In Segment 11, he writes: “More About Oszmiana--This evening, eight [automobiles] with things from Oszmiana came to the district commissar of the Vilna district .... The German drivers say 800 Jews were murdered there. A typical case: the automobiles with clothing were unloaded by Jewish workers. A barefoot girl spotted a pretty pair of women’s shoes and asked a German if she could take them. He told her that if she knew where the shoes came from, she would surely not want to use them, even if they were made of gold. So the German explained. ‘Now,’ the German added, ‘if you want, take them.’ Of course, the woman took the shoes.”

In virtually all Holocaust-era diaries--detailed, unique, specific to the place and reflecting vagaries of each author’s individual destiny--one finds a common theme, a recurring line: “Whatever we may have foreseen and written about many times,” to quote from Kruk’s entry of Oct. 28, 1942, “it is all hardly a fraction of the actual situation.” One cannot grapple with the surrounding reality. The diarists all seem to be saying that it cannot be communicated; one cannot express it, and yet they strive precisely to do that. As a result, what they do is like telescoping a vast and overwhelming experience into a simple image, into a sentence, into a word sometimes; like drawing a compact synthesis of something that simultaneously “cannot” and “must be” conveyed and is articulated under a powerful inner compulsion.

A text that originates in such circumstances, I imagine, must be written with utmost care, each word chosen deliberately and put down like a step on a mountaintop. Isn’t this, in a manner of speaking, how poetry comes to life?

In recalling the composition of her greatest poem, “Requiem,” Anna Akhmatova recounts the genesis of that poem. “In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said: ‘Yes, I can.’ And then something like a shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.”

As a great poet knew all along, single voices can break through leaden silence, but they too are often part of that silence. The fate of several hundred thousand Jews murdered in the Belzec extermination camp must be teased out from the one and only line that its victims have left: “Mamusiu, przeciez ja bylem grzeczny ... ciemno, ciemno

No, it is not I, it is someone else who is suffering.

I could not have borne it. And this thing which has happened,

Let them cover it with black cloths,

And take away the lanterns ...

Night.

In the meantime, quietly in the background, on the crossroads of war-torn Europe, a great poet from Vilna, Czeslaw Milosz, kept humming in “Rescue,” his shattering volume of wartime verse, “There will be no other end of the world; / there will be no other end of the world” in his poem, “A Song on the End of the World.”

Holocaust memoirists have done their task: They bore witness. Now, to make sense of our century’s dark times, we must do ours: Read their testimony as it had been conceived, as we read verse, one line at a time.