On this day in 1943 the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated. Lithuania marks its Holocaust Memorial Day on this date. Of roughly 208,000 Jews living in the country when the German occupation began, an estimated 190,000 to 195,000 were murdered, more than ninety-five per cent.
Inside the ghetto, at Strashun Street 6, there was a library. Herman Kruk, a librarian who had fled Warsaw, ran it and kept a diary of what was borrowed. In December 1942 the staff marked the hundred-thousandth loan since the ghetto was sealed, and Kruk noted with a scholar's honesty that he was not sure what it meant that people in such a place read so much. They read poetry, they read history, they read novels in Yiddish and Polish and Russian. Children came for schoolbooks. Cards were still being stamped in the last weeks.
Some of the collection survived, hidden by the workers who were forced to sort it for shipment and who smuggled pages back past the gate. Most of the readers did not.
Their names are recorded in Vilnius, and at Ponary, where the killing was done.
Miriam, thank you for this. In Vilnius the day is marked with readings of names, hours of them, read aloud in turn by whoever will stand and read — a slow way of counting, and the only honest one.
Kruk's diary survived as well: pages hidden before the liquidation and recovered afterwards, so the library's own record-keeper is still readable. The issue slips and the borrowing counts are among the few places where ordinary days in the ghetto are written down at all.