Epstein, Lazar, The Silenced Human Soul 2017 — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

The people become strangers to each other. People squirm from the pressure of the urge to live, from the terror of death, from the great unknown, from the feeling of uncertainty. Is there anyone thinking about something, about what will happen tomorrow? No! Eventually the best human instincts will be completely silenced in the ghetto, and the worst and inferior animal feelings will erupt from the people. As the body is no longer ashamed of its nakedness, so is the soul [...] There is nothing to talk about hygiene, nor about aesthetics, manners, traditions. Man has become completely hollow.

Dr. Lazar Epstein wrote these things in the Vilna ghetto. Dr. Epstein, a public health expert, headed the sanitary and epidemiological department in the ghetto from its establishment in the fall of 1941 until its liquidation in the fall of 1943. His notes included side by side reports and notes on public affairs as well as personal reflections and impressions .

He often reviewed in his diary the activity in the field of health, culture and education and more than once brought tables and data in various fields of existence that lay out a fairly comprehensive picture of life and death in the Vilnius ghetto. In the writings of Lazar Epstein, an observation of the transformations brought about by the German occupation and confinement in the ghetto in the intergenerational relationship, the nature of the relations between the sexes and the social stratification created in the Vilnius ghetto and the consequences of these transformations on the day-to-day life of the individual and the Jewish public stands out. More than once, Epstein stood for revelations of social and moral disintegration in Jewish society in the ghetto. Along with the diary entries, the book The Silenced Human Soul collected several poems that Epstein wrote in the Vilna ghetto, a sketch he composed to promote the sanitation operations in the ghetto.