"The time of horrors I leave for future worlds. I write because I must write—a consolation in my time of horror. For future generations I leave it as a trace."

Herman Kruk, March 24, 1944

For five horrifying years, the librarian Herman Kruk recorded his own experiences and those of others, determinedly documenting the life and daily resistance of European Jews in the deepening shadow of imminent death. This unique chronicle includes all recovered pages of Kruk's diaries and provides a powerful eyewitness account of the annihilation of the Jewish community of Vilna. The widely scattered pages of the diaries, collected here for the first time, have been meticulously deciphered, translated, and annotated for this volume.

Kruk describes events both public and private in entries that start in September 1939, when he fled the German attack on Warsaw and became a refugee in Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania." His diaries go on to recount the two tragic years of the Vilna Ghetto and a subsequent year in death camps in Estonia. Kruk penned 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.

Kruk's writings make real the personal and global tragedy of the Vilna Jews and their courageous efforts to maintain an ideological, social, and cultural life even as their world was being destroyed. The diaries record the reality of daily ghetto and camp life, rumors about the world war raging outside the walls, reactions to the endless persecution, and stories of instances in which Lithuanian peasants tried to save Jews from death. To read Kruk's day-by-day account of the unfolding of the Holocaust is to gain a powerful understanding of the gradual, relentless dicovery of the Nazis' fatal intent, to recognize the horror of the abyss, and yet to discern possibilities for human courage and perseverance.

Benjamin Harshav is J. & H. Blaustein Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, Yale University. Barbara Harshav has translated more than twenty-five books of fiction and nonfiction from French, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish into English. She teaches translation theory and practice at Yale University.

"The pages of his diaries were recovered from hiding places after the war, assembled and published in the original Yiddish by YIVO in 1961," Dr. Carl J. Rheins, Executive Director of YIVO stated. "This English edition, which contains new material not previously published, is even more powerful and potent. We hope that all who remember or treasure the lost Jerusalem of Lithuania will join to mark this historical milestone."

Concurrently, in cooperation with the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum of Lithuania, an exhibition of The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Documents of the Vilna Ghetto will open at YIVO. This unique collection of 16 authentic posters from the Vilna Ghetto, displayed for the first time in any American museum or academic institution, reflects the multi-faceted cultural activities of the Jewish community as it resisted dehumanization and death.

The reception and opening will take place on Tuesday, September 24, 2002, from 4:00-6:00 PM, at YIVO in the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street in Manhattan. Please call to make a reservation: 917-606-8200.

Among the speakers at this event will be:

Dr. Samuel Kassow, Dana Research Professor of History, Trinity College

Prof. Marija Krupoves, musicologist, Slavic Studies Department at Vilnius University

Rachel Kostanian, Deputy Director, Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum of Lithuania

David Rogow, Vice-Chairman of Nusach Vilne (Friends of Vilna)

The new English-language edition, published with assistance from the Nusach Vilne Society, has been edited by Professor Benjamin Harshav, Blaustein Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Yale University, and translated by Barbara Harshav. Special thanks are in order to YIVO's Roberta Newman and Dr. Paul (Hershl) Glasser for their assistance in editing and standardization of place name spellings.

Kruk, who organized and oversaw the library of the Vilna Ghetto, also played an active role in several of the ghetto's social welfare and cultural organizations. He was recruited to serve the "Einsatzstab des Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg," which plundered YIVO and other Jewish libraries for treasures the Nazis hoped to use in a Frankfurt-based "Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question." But Kruk, along with poet Abraham Sutzkever and others, secretly worked to rescue and hide many rare books and artifacts from the Nazis.

"[Kruk's] insights into the dilemmas faced by the ghetto's leadership on the one hand, and the resistance movement on the other...[and] the deep commitment to the preservation of Jewish culture, make this diary one of the essentials documents from that tragic era," noted Yehuda Bauer.

Like Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto, Kruk was a resolute chronicler of day-to-day life under the Nazis, with full awareness that he might not live until the war's end. He hoped that his diary would survive to reveal the horrors of that time to future generations. In September 1943, during the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, Kruk was deported to the Klooga camp in Estonia, where he continued to write his journal under increasingly worsening circumstances. He was taken to another Estonian camp, Lagedi, on August 22, 1944, and murdered there, on September 18, 1944, shortly before the Soviet liberation.

The pages from his diaries were recovered from hiding places after the war, assembled and published in the original Yiddish by YIVO in 1961. These were among the first full-length diaries of life in the Nazi-created ghettos to be released.

The Last Days of Jerusalem of Lithuania retains many of the painstakingly researched notations of the original edition, but also adds new material, including never-before-published excerpts of Kruk's diaries from 1939-1941 and from his last days in the Estonian camps. The book also contains some 30 illustrations, mostly drawn from the YIVO Archives.

Purchase the book from Yale University Press