On this day in 1942, in the town of Sarny in occupied Poland, now in Ukraine, German forces and their auxiliaries began two days of mass shootings. An estimated 14,000 to 18,000 people were killed, most of them Jews, among them Jews brought in from the smaller towns and villages around Sarny and held with them in the ghetto.

Before that August the town kept the ordinary furniture of religious life. There were synagogues and prayer houses, a Hebrew school and a Yiddish one, teachers and cantors, shopkeepers who closed early on Friday afternoon, women who lit lamps at dusk. Almost all of that was gone within forty-eight hours.

A small number got out during the roundup and lived, and it is largely because of them that we know anything at all: statements given after the war, and the memorial book that survivors and emigrants later compiled, street by street and family by family, so that the names would exist somewhere. Eighty-four years on, the names are what there is to read today, and reading them is the whole of the work.