The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944 [Hardcover]

Herman Kruk (Author), Benjamin Harshav (Editor), Barbara Harshav (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300044941 | ISBN-13: 978-0300044942 | Publication Date: September 2002

For five horrifying years in Vilna, the Vilna ghetto, and concentration camps in Estonia, Herman Kruk recorded his own experiences as well as the life and death of the Jewish community of the city symbolically called "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." This unique chronicle includes many recovered pages of Kruk's diaries and provides a powerful eyewitness account of the annihilation of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. This volume includes the Yiddish edition of Kruk's diaries, published in 1961 and translated here for the first time, as well as many widely scattered pages of the chronicles, collected here for the first time and meticulously deciphered, translated, and annotated. Kruk describes vividly the collapse of Poland in September, 1939, life as a refugee in Vilna, the manhunt that destroyed most of Vilna Jewry in the summer of 1941, the creation of a ghetto and the persecution and self-rule of the remnants of the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," the internment of the last survivors in concentration camps in Estonia, and their brutal deaths. Kruk scribbled his final diary entry on September 17, 1944, managing to bury the small, loose pages of his manuscript just hours before he and other camp inmates were shot to death and their bodies burnt on a pyre. Kruk's writings illuminate the tragedy of the Vilna Jews and their courageous efforts to maintain an ideological, social, and cultural life even as their world was being destroyed. To read Kruk's day-by-day account of the unfolding of the Holocaust is to discern the possibilities for human courage and perseverance even in the face of profound fear.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This authoritative, stunningly edited edition of Kruk's acclaimed journals, news postings and poems of life and death in the Jewish ghetto of Vilna and later in a labor camp in Estonia is as major addition to Holocaust literature and Jewish history. In 1961 a Yiddish edition of the Vilna diaries was published. This larger new edition has been painstakingly assembled from those diaries and other documents and writings by Kruk that were widely scattered and only found since the 1961 edition; Harshav has also added a wealth of new footnotes. The potency and the power of Kruk's chronicle resides in its scrupulous detailing of everyday ghetto life-what people ate and read, the self-imposed rules for how Jewish women dressed, Jewish collaborators, Christian resistance to camps and deportations, news reports from the ghetto newspaper-while consistently placing it in a broader political and social context based on reports that filter into the ghetto from the outside. Because Vilna was a center of Jewish learning and culture-it is where the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (now in New York) was founded and was the site of some of Europe's most vital Jewish libraries and schools-Kruk's elaborate delineation of the destruction of this world takes on an almost mythic quality. This lost culture resonates throughout this mesmerizing and heartbreaking book. Photos.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Yiddish

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 786 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (September 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300044941
• ISBN-13: 978-0300044942
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.2 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #858,266 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #30 in Books > History > Europe > Lithuania

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chaos, Mayhem, Fear, Viciousness, Courage, Kinndess, Love, February 8, 2003

By 

William A. Thompson (macomb, il United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944 (Hardcover)

This is a deeply affecting work, compulsively readable, yet always painful to read, account of the slow garroting of the Jewish community in Vilna. From one page to the next, one is amazed (even now) at the viciousness of the Fascists and the humanity, ingenuity, courage of those they oppressed. God and the devil are both in the details and Kruk gives us plenty of all three.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Librarian's diary as reviewed by a librarian, May 16, 2006

By 

M. F. Gloger (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944 (Hardcover)

Herman Kruk was a librarian. Even as the Vilna [Vilnius] ghetto was reduced to inhuman conditions, Kruk risked his life to smuggle books into the public library he set up. While the Nazi regime tried to reduce Jews to a subhuman status, with harsh labor, restrictions, and eventual extermination; Kruk helped to initiate literary contests, plays, and lecture series. His diary reflects the intellectual and cultural activities of the ghetto, as well as the minutiae of the library.

Kruk's diary is an overwhelmingly human document. His tears for the destruction of his beloved Warsaw and the personal horror felt when hearing rumors of the massacre of Jews elsewhere in Europe are not diluted or diminished by his desire that his diary become a publicly read record of the destruction of Jewish Vilna.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptionally Comprehensive: Includes Jews Disarming Poles, and Other Seldom-Told Details, July 18, 2009

By 

Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944 (Hardcover)

After fleeing eastward from Warsaw during the German-Soviet conquest of Poland in 1939, Kruk was at Luck (Lutsk), Volyn (Wolhynia). He saw firsthand the Jewish-Soviet collaboration [Zydokomuna] at Poland's expense, and wrote: "The day after the entry of the Bolsheviks, groups of the new militia disarmed Polish soldiers. A Jewish fellow stopped a high Polish officer and challenged him to give him his weapon. The officer gave his revolver, which he carried on his belt. Finally, the young militiaman began removing the medals from the officer. The officer complained that he couldn't take them from him. The fellow threatened him with a rifle. The officer then took another revolver out of a holster and shot the militiaman on the spot. The officer was arrested." (p. 22). After the Germans invaded their erstwhile Soviet allies (June 1941), Jewish youth changed their clothing styles in order to hide their Bolshevization. (p. 46).

The Jewish Ghetto police were described by Kruk as being "More German than the Germans" in terms of their unrelenting confiscations of the Jews' wealth for their own benefit. (p. 187; see also p. 160, 182). Because of this, they lived in relative wealth (p. 115), and spread their corruption to the Jewish people in general. (p. 313).

Kruk follows the progressive destruction of the Vilna (Wilno, Vilnius) Ghetto by the Germans, and does the same, from contacts' information, relative to the Warsaw Ghetto. The Germans removed the Polish Blue police from service when it came time for the "resettlement" of Warsaw's Jews, and replaced them with Ukrainian and Baltic collaborators. (p. 386, 569). Warsaw's Jews eventually realized that they were being sent to their deaths at Treblinka. (p. 350, 519, 530).

Kruk's view of Poles soured with time. He considered them generally unconcerned about Jewish deaths, and just waiting to acquire Jewish properties. (April 1943; p. 522). Earlier, in contrast, he wrote: "In the street at Maistas, masses of Christians brought packages of meat and distributed them to the Jewish workers marching to the ghetto. The sympathy of the Christian population, more precisely of the Polish population, is extraordinary." (p. 110)(September 1941; p. 110). He also wrote of Christians showing open sympathy to Jews (February 1942), which the Gestapo felt compelled to counter. (p. 210). Poles warned and helped Jews flee the ghetto. (May 1942; p. 289). Ironic to the modern portrayal of Poles being one in spirit (if not action) with the Germans against the Jews, a quoted German directive (January 1943) justified the isolating of the Jews in part because the Jews and Poles were united in opposition to the Germans! (p. 451).

Ironic to the current emphasis on Jews and Poles being "unequal victims" (which in practice means that Poles are hardly thought of as victims at all), Kruk often exhibited a "like Jews, like Poles" attitude, as in the German mass shootings of both at nearby Ponary. (p. 311, 319). Two million Poles were sent to the Reich for forced labor (p. 154), and Poles hid among Jews to avoid this fate. (p. 172). Poles were among those who faced reprisal atrocities from the Germans for the deeds of Soviet guerillas. (p. 420).

Unlike the current selective emphasis upon Poles sometimes killing fugitive Jews, Kruk focused on the overall lawlessness, which included members of all nationalities responsible for individual murders of very sort. (p. 311). For instance, a Jewish bandit is known to have murdered a Russian Orthodox priest during a robbery. (pp. 235-236, 240). The nearby forests were full of bandits of all nationalities. (p. 311, 512, 581).