Herman Kruk — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Herman Kruk (Yiddish: הערשל קרוק‎) was a Polish-Jewish librarian and Bundist activist who kept a diary recording his experiences in the Vilna Ghetto during World War II.

Life

Kruk fled Warsaw and relocated to Vilna at the outbreak of the Invasion of Poland. While confined to the Vilna Ghetto, he organized and oversaw the creation and operation of a library in the Ghetto. He also played an active role in several of the ghetto's social welfare and cultural organizations.

Kruk continued chronicling his experiences after he was transferred to the Klooga concentration camp. The last entry was made on September 17, 1944, when he buried his diaries inside the camp at KZ Lagedi in Estonia. The following day, he and almost all the other prisoners were forced to carry logs to a pile, spread them in a layer, lie down naked on them so they could be executed and burned in a massive pyre. The Red Army arrived the following day to find the aftermath.

His diary was published posthumously in 1961 by YIVO in original Yiddish (Yiddish: טאגבוך פון ווילנער געטא‎). Expanded English translation, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps 1939-1944, was published in 2002 (ISBN 0300044941).

He is one of the main characters in Joshua Sobol's play Ghetto.

From: Wikipedia

A View of and Awareness of the Great Catastrophe – Benny Mer, translated from: Haaretz, 17.04.06

The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto by Herman Kruk, which will soon be published in Hebrew, envelops between its hundreds of pages, the exceptional story of the ghetto: the Tree of Creation which continued to burgeon on the walls of stone, even in the shadow of Ponar.

On one side of the German street in Vilna stood the centuries-old Jewish ghetto; about one month after the Germans had entered the city, in August 1941, a new ghetto was set up on the other side. Today, the tables have turned: the old ghetto has been renovated and become a prestigious area, and the ‘new’ ghetto is dilapidated and waiting for real-estate development. The roads there are emptier with fewer cafés and shops for tourists. The poor live there, they have not yet been moved to the suburbs, and others come to rummage through the bins and remember that which has been forgotten.

This ghetto, as with the whole of Vilna, was small, and you could walk through it in an hour. For about two years I wandered those streets – Rudnicki, Shavli, the Butchers’ Street and others – almost daily, while translating Herman Kruk’s Diary of the Vilna Ghetto from Yiddish. I had promised myself that I would, eventually, come across the place where everything had taken place, and then maybe I would understand something not described in words.

The Vilna Ghetto: so much has been written about it, although very few survived it. It wasn’t especially big; about 20,000 Jews only lived there for about two and a half years, but they held on to something very vibrant - a Jerusalem of Lithuania. As Kruk wrote in his diary, thanks to the relatively good physical conditions (compared to other ghettoes), it was possible to create the ‘Cultural Wonder of the Vilna Ghetto’ in it. This ghetto had two schools, an extensive library, a theatre, exhibitions, lectures, choirs, concerts, chess classes, literary competitions etc.

How was all this possible? First of all, it came about in the aftermath of tragic circumstances. A few days after they had entered Vilna, the Nazis started to seize Jews off the streets and execute them – in Ponar, which lies about 12 km from the city. Within two months, the remaining Jews were housed in two ghettoes, but the smaller one of the two was quickly liquidated. In total, 35,000 of the 57,000 Jews living in Vilna were murdered in less than six months after the city had been occupied. Most of the Jews living in the ‘large’ ghetto were fit for work. The ghetto functioned as a work unit, and so managed to survive for over two years and keep the devastating hunger at bay: people made a living out of food stamps and there were a number of public kitchens. However, the spiritual and cultural blossoming would not have taken place if it had not been for the people of Vilna, themselves. What I previously wrote about the city in my list – ‘poor in material but rich in spirit’, that a young tree sprouted from the stone walls – was more than true in the ghetto. The spiritual-cultural creation was as diverse as the composition of humans by their creator: sages, Zionists, Bundists, Communists; musicians, singers, artists, educators. They all continued creating in the ghetto, as did the disputes, for the sake of heaven and for others, from time immemorial.

One of the pivotal intellectuals in the ghetto was Herman Kruk, and, despite having written in his diary “We, the people from Vilna”, he had only arrived in the city at the end of 1939. Kruk was born in Plock, Poland, in 1897, and started out as a communist; after some time, he moved to the Bund Movement which advocated Jewish-cultural autonomy (with Yiddish as its language), in each and every country, and later became one of its leaders. He was also a journalist, bibliographer and head librarian of the Grosser Library in Warsaw. At the outbreak of World War II, he fled with a group of intellectuals eventually reaching Vilna, which had been occupied by the Soviets. Within a short time, he was involved in the city’s Bund activities and wrote an essay on the history of the children’s library. In 1940, he obtained a visa to the USA, but got held up and, in June 1941, once again found himself in German hands.

He already started writing his diary while on the roads of Poland and now, after the German occupation, he said: “If, indeed, I am still here, then I must devote myself to writing ‘The City Journal’ … the Jews were placed in the ghetto – and I shall write it all down. My journal must see and hear and serve as a mirror and conscience of the great catastrophe of these terrible days”. Two days later, he added: “Now a new period of my life is starting, which may be the more difficult of all. I have delivered myself into the hands of fate and am now wearing the ‘yellow badge’ just as Jesus wore the crown of thorns”.

This is how his secret writing routine began and continued till the ghetto was liquidated – at the beginning, on his own, and then with the assistance of his secretary, Rachel Mendelsohn-Kovarski. However, it was natural that those who researched historical writing, would start writing their own chronical, and would try and collect every piece of information and document the ghetto. No other diary written in the Vilna Ghetto is as detailed and accurate as this one. It is “raw material for a future historian”, as Kruk wrote – and even more so.

As the days in the ghetto passed, Kruk discovered that evil is an infinite concept, and what was the worst of all yesterday could be even worse today and tomorrow. At first, he still writes about the kidnapping: “A stone in the wall will cry out to the rabbi who is an imposing figure, and now he is bareheaded and bleeding”, but all his negative superlatives quickly come to an end, and he makes do with facts. After a year, on 5.9.1942, he writes: “We have already kicked the habit of writing about such things with emotion. Our hearts have dried up. We talk about such things today with dry eyes, just as our lives have dried out. It’s enough that we are able to remember those dates”. 

Kruk compared what happened during that period with other troubles in the past, even though he understood that there was no precedent for their extermination. He recalled Dante’s Inferno, the communist persecution during the Tsar’s reign, and he questions whether it is possible to compare their destruction to the riots in the Ukraine which took place during his teens. But, can he be blamed for short-sightedness because he didn’t know how to express the unprecedented catastrophe in an unprecedented way?  How could a moral person imagine how far things would go? Other memories from the ghetto were written in retrospect, after the end was already known, and everything was written under its cloud. Kruk reports chronologically and not hierarchically; the report on Ponar appears in his diary next to the increase in the price of bread.

Kruk’s continues writing with bitter irony, in an old Jewish style which is more suited to the old hatred of Jews. He writes about the Jewish police in the ghetto: “It is, after all, a kingdom right down to the last detail, even having a jail…” and he laughs, with gallows humor, at the names of the Nazis active in the ghetto; Herring, Kittel, Murer (murer in Yiddish meaning bitter), Schweinenberg, Weiss ‘the Black’ etc.

Kruk’s diary bears no similarity to Victor Klemperer’s diaries, which were translated into Hebrew and recently published. Kruk did not isolate himself and did not see what was happening from nonpartisan aspect, like Klemperer. The psycho-philological perception was also foreign to him. He commingled with people he was ideologically motivated, so he was not in a position to write a personal diary. His secretary, Rachel Kovarski, wrote that, “The pivotal thing about Herman was his Bundism. Especially in the ghetto, he was not a private person, but a Bundist with an important job. His approach to all the ghetto questions, both political and cultural, was marked by Bundism”. (Yediot von Yivo 198, Summer 2004).

This Bundist perspective is strange and new to most Israelis. The Vilna Ghetto is connected here to the Zionist fighters, such as Abba Kovner, who talked about the ghetto in Israel. And, here we have a glance from outside, at ourselves, actually. After two years of translating the diary, Kruk’s worldview seemed very natural to me. Only in retrospect, did I notice that he had not talked about the synagogues in the ghetto, and that the main holiday which made him happy was 1^st May; I eventually became acquainted with the unfamiliar world of the Bund and its activities in Poland and the Vilna Ghetto. However, it was only natural that I should also be angry with the initiative of Jacob Gens, chief of the ghetto Jewish police force and later head of the Judenrat, to teach in Hebrew in the ghetto schools. “How did he dare to Hebraize Yiddishist Vilna?”, and surely in the Promotion of Enlightenment Library run by Kruk, only less than one percent actually read books in Hebrew?

Nevertheless, Kruk’s bitter enemies were the revisionists. And not for nothing: the members of this movement filled the ranks of the Jewish Police in the ghetto, which Kruk nicknames as ‘The revisionist police’. The Judenrat headquarters and the police were located in the ghetto’s main street, Rudnicki Street. Nowadays, it is a wide and tranquil street, but back then, an additional row of densely built buildings had been constructed and subsequently destroyed after being bombed by the Russians. In the yard of no. 8, the following memorial plaque was placed: “The Judenrat occupied this house. On 3^rd November, 1941, 1,200 Jews were brought together here to be exterminated”. The Jewish police used to eat, drink and be merry, celebrated by having orgies, even after hunting down Jews and handing them over to the Germans. One could, somehow, understand why Kruk was suspicious of Gens’ positive initiatives, such as setting up a theatre in the ghetto. Kruk’s opposition to the theatre became a symbol for Yehoshua Sobol’s play, Ghetto. Kruk wrote in his diary on 17^th January, 1942, after he had learned that most of Vilna’s Jews had been murdered at Ponar, that “There is no room in the cemetery for a theatre”. In his play, Sobol confronts the characters of Kruk and Gens.

Gens: What have you got against the theatre?

Kruk: When I received the invitation, I felt personally affronted. It may be possible to enjoy oneself in other ghettoes, even entertained, but here, at this moment in time, theatre? It is a disgrace.

Gens (…): I want to give the people in the ghetto a feeling of cohesiveness. To remind them that they belong to the nation, a great nation, with culture, endurance and creativity … even in the most difficult of circumstances …

Kruk: You are building yourself a kingdom, and this theatre is going to be your Versailles. We shall not be party to this revisionist farce”. (Ghetto, p. 34-36).

In the introduction to his play, Sobol says that Kruk was eventually persuaded that the theatre was not only “a source for the livelihood and employment of actors and artists, but also a valuable tool for calming the waters, to restore morale and normalize life”. Actually, it is difficult to find anything explicit in the diary in favor of the theatre. However, Kruk reports on all the plays performed in the ghetto, saying that they were ‘very successful’ and that their proceeds went to the good of the public. Nonetheless, he continued to be suspicious of the theatre. He got his real excitement from books and literature; he totally revered secular books. In the preface of the Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, his brother Pinchas Schwartz said, that all his life “he had never stopped personifying his faith, as there is no better way to redeem the masses other than through education and knowledge”. Schwartz added that, when entering the ghetto, Kruk and his brother-in-law wallowed in the muck, “upon seeing the holy books rolling around in the mud and blowing in the wind”. It was, therefore, obvious why the Judenrat chose the librarian from Warsaw to run the library in the Vilna Ghetto. The library was such a success until it became, as Kovarski testified, “a sort of separate realm”.

Since he saw his mission as being of the utmost importance, it is no wonder that Kruk “thought highly of himself, perhaps rightly so” as Kovarski writes. “It is difficult for me to write about his personality. We don’t usually see people in their entirety when we see them on a daily basis. We usually see their virtues and shortcomings in small doses … he was sensitive, a little romantic and, in spite of everything, a little pliable and easy to influence”. I got the same feeling after a prolonged acquaintance with his diary. As far as I was concerned, his personality remained an enigma. But, in the end, it is not surprising. Kruk did not write about himself in the diary, only inexplicitly. He saw himself as a public emissary, the Vox Populi in him could be heard loud and clear, according to his socialist beliefs. Except for one photograph, it was difficult for me to compare his likeness, and so was happy to hear about him first hand from Dr. Rachel Margolis, who had lived in Vilna until immigrating to Israel about ten years ago. She was a member of the underground and worked in Kruk’s library. She remembers him as being “well dressed, which was unusual considering the conditions in the ghetto, always elegant, and wearing a pressed shirt”. We all knew each other very well, and we all knew that he had a lover.

Kruk spent most of his energy working in the library. In his diary, he proudly reports on the opening of a reading room in the children’s department, which was designed to “satisfy the great and pressing hunger to exchange books”. The library’s activities reached their peak on 28.11.1942, at a special event marking ‘100,000 books’ being exchanged there. In addition, Kruk was involved in the ghetto literary activities, and served as Vice-Chairman of the Writers and Poets Union.  In May 1942, he organized a literary evening in honor of the poet Abraham Sutzkever who recited his poem ‘The Grave Child’, as it is written at the end:

“And a newborn is a wonder, a child is born

In the dark, in the holy pit, among the nettles.

We shall no longer reveal the lofty secret,

The child lies amongst the dead, the milk

He suckles is his mother’s tears…”  (translated from Yiddish to Hebrew by Pesach Ginzburg).

‘After the poet had recited his poem’, wrote Kruk in his diary, ‘there was a very long, silent pause until someone took the floor'. Two months later, on 25.07.1942, he ended his remarks during the evening dedicated to the literary movement Yung Vilna, with a reference to the movement’s symbol: “Here a new plant is climbing up the gate, a small plant – Yung Vilna. Today, more than ever, we can perceive and understand the meaning of such a brilliant concept. New plants are climbing up the gates of our new ghetto. The fruits of which will probably bring honor to future generations”.

On the eve of Purim 2006, a special evening was held at the Lėlė Puppet Theatre in Vilna in memory of the poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, who used to be a member of the Yung Vilna. Wearing a black, yellowy-pink dress, Maria Krupoves, who released the disc ‘Songs from the Ghetto’ and teaches at the Vilna Yiddish Institute, sang songs written by Kaczerginski. The songs she sang included 'Shtiller, Shtiller' (Hush, Hush – be Silent my Son)) which was composed by the 11-year-old Alik Wolkowyski (who later on was known as the broadcaster and pianist Alexander Tamir). I entered the theatre auditorium but, since the whole evening was held in Lithuanian, I snuck back out and managed, in the dim light of twilight, to read the sign at the entrance: ‘Thanks to the efforts of the Jerusalem of Lithuania artists, the Vilna Ghetto Theatre performed in this building during 1942 – 1943’.

Hasia Shafnerflig, who I met in Vilna, used to go to the ghetto theatre with her children, but she was never a member of the library. Perhaps it has something to do with the ideological disagreement mentioned above that Hasia and her husband were revisionists. Today, she is 85, and still organizes gatherings with former partisans at the community center. "My Hebrew school 'Tarbut' was right here in this building" she said. Before the war, she married Boris Friedman, who was a member of Betar. “I had two children in the ghetto and we worked at patching pants. We tried to live as well as possible, and it was important that there be a school, theatre and choirs. My husband served with the Jewish police while all the time preparing people to go to the forests and take revenge. He went to the forest with thirty fighters and, as a punishment, his parents, the children and I were arrested. We spent the whole night in the ghetto prison when, all of a sudden, the police came and said that the Friedman family was free to go. I think that Gens had something to do with it. A while later, I was told that I could go to the forest, but without the children. You can imagine that that was the most difficult night of my life. In the end, I went, because I had been told that the children would join me later. However, the children eventually went to Ponar together with the whole family”.

Kruk mentions Hasia’s husband in his diary. ‘Following the liquidation of the community in Ashmyany, Lithuania, on 28.10.1941, the Jewish police who had participated in the Aktion came back as if returning from a victory parade. Two days after their return, there was a meeting of all the police in the ghetto in which Gens justified what had taken place under the pretext that they had been rescuing Jews. Dessler, the Chief of the Jewish police, spoke openly about everything and arrested no one. Most of the police agreed with the Chief’s theory, and even applauded him. Friedman (one of the policemen) was outspoken about the fact that, even though they agreed with what had been said, there was no reason to applaud’. The diary also mentioned that Friedman had gone to the forest.

Despite his strong opposition to the ghetto leadership and the revisionists, Kruk didn’t play down their good sides. For instance, he recorded the involvement of Josef Glazman, Deputy Commander of the revisionist police, in the underground and the fight against the Nazis. In general, nearly all the events that took place in the ghetto – good and bad – were entered into his diary. He gave a lengthy account of a murder in the ghetto – the murder of a Jew by Jews. The six robber-murderers were judged in the ghetto courthouse and sentenced to death by hanging. In place of the gallows which stood directly opposite the Judenrat building, there is, today, a monument to the ghetto in a small garden.

Kruk speaks fairly about the Polish and Lithuanian residents of Vilna, who surrounded the small ghetto from every direction. Church domes could just about be seen from various corners of the ghetto and they seemed to proclaim that ‘outside’, people were getting on with their lives. So, what did the Jews think about their neighbours? Kruk knew very well that the Jews in Ponar had been murdered by Lithuanians, and that some of the Poles were happy that the city had been purged. However, the socialist who had once believed in peace amongst nations, excitedly reports about every discovery of brotherhood between men, of the Polish-Lithuanian underground and about the activities of the partisans; he is somewhat comforted by the Pope’s condemnation of the Nazis’ actions and the world’s minute of silence. Kruk talks about the Righteous Among the Nations, especially Ona Šimaitė, the Lithuanian librarian from the University of Vilna, who helped save both people and books; a tree was planted in her memory at Yad VaShem, and a memorial plaque was placed outside the Yiddish Institute in Vilna.

Despite their isolation, the Jews in the ghetto were fully aware of their situation. By 20^th July 1941, one month after the German occupation, Kruk poses a question in his diary: ‘What is happening in Ponar?”, and on 7^th May 1942, he makes an accurate account of the extermination and signs ‘with a shaking hand we total the data at 47,447 murdered Jews’.

The Germans (and Gens) tried, however, to calm the waters, but after it became common knowledge that the Nazis were exterminating the Jews throughout Europe, and especially when the remaining Jews from the surrounding towns arrived at the ghetto, despair reigned in the ghetto, a fact which Kruk repeats time and again. At Pesach 1943, he writes: “There is hardly an optimist left among us. Everyone is totally convinced that the end is closing in on them. For how could our fate differ from that of the others? What was done to the others must surely be done to us, too”.

The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto was suddenly discontinued on 15^th July, 1943. The following day, the Gestapo issued the Vilna Ghetto with an ultimatum, to hand over the commander of the FPO, Yitzhak Wittenberg, otherwise the ghetto will be in jeopardy. The organization’s command decided to hand him over and so Wittenberg was brought to the Jewish police but subsequently committed suicide in his cell. Kruk wrote, of course, about this dramatic affair, but at the end of the war, after the diary had been found, certain pages were torn out by Jews who did not want the names of those who had given him up to be known.

The liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto started at the beginning of August, lasting until the end of September, 1943. Jews who were able to work were sent to camps in Estonia, the old and sick were sent for extermination, and the underground fighters, who were worried that if they fought back the whole ghetto would be liquidated, escaped to the forests and fought back as partisans. Kruk, who wasn’t a member of the underground but hid the fighters in the library, was amongst those sent to the Klooga work camp in Estonia.

Later on, when working at the Jewish Museum in Vilna, Rachel Margolis came upon some songs written on torn pages.  She immediately recognized Kruk’s handwriting and felt ‘as if he, himself, were telling me about the last terrible days in the camp, about the fear, the suffering, the continual wait for death’ (The Forward, 11.6.2004). The camp inmates were subjected to forced labor, working with concrete. Kruk wrote, for instance, in his poem on 8^th May, 1944: “Men and women like ants / in various shades, colors and clothing / and tatters. Grey scarves upon / the heads of the women / prisoners are drawn towards the sound of clogs…..”. He marvels at the spring, but ‘bids farewell to the tree and nature in its splendor’.

On 18^th September, 1944, the Red Army arrived at the gateway to these camps. That morning, the Nazis had tied the prisoners up, those left of the Vilna Jews, shot them and set them on fire. It took the Soviets a few days to liberate the camp, but the embers still continued burning. Herman Kruk was amongst the thousands who had been murdered. The night before he was killed, he called a number of prisoners and showed them where he had hidden his camp diary and asked that, whoever survives, should come and get the diary. He had done the same thing when hiding his diary at the Vilna Ghetto. One of those at the camp was Nissan Anolik who returned to Lagedi and found the diary. Together with his brother Binyamin (a member of kibbutz Lochamei HaGetaot), they gave the diary to Abba Kovner in Vilna.

Vilna had previously been liberated, on 13^th July 1944. The Jewish partisans had returned to the city, and amongst items found in the boltholes (where people and belongings were hidden), were many pages from Kruk’s diary. The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto was assembled and restored and published by VIVO, New York, in 1961.  Many years later, in 2002, it was translated into English by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav, and was published as a 732-page book called The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania. That was when Yad VaShem decided to publish this rich and complex diary and now, after having been translated, it is in the process of being scientifically edited.

Together with the rest of the few survivors, Hasia Shafnerflig and Rachel Margolis returned to liberated Vilna. They both married, had children, and took part in re-establishing the community in Vilna. Actually, Hasia, the Zionist, remained there, and Rachel, who leaned towards the left, came to Israel. How was it possible to go back and live amongst the murderers of yesteryear? I asked Margolis and she answered emphatically: “There is no race of murderers. There were certain Lithuanians who murdered, and there were also Lithuanians who were murdered at Ponar because they had refused to collaborate”.

The young tree of Vilna Jewry no longer blooms in the stone alleyways of Vilna. Only silent ruins remain where there had once been a ghetto – inscriptions in Yiddish were found under the plaster, and there are new memorial plaques and a monument. Other than those, there is no evidence that the ghetto had ever been replete with schools, children’s homes, brothels, bath house, soup kitchens, hospital, jail and courthouse. There is no trace of the overcrowding and hustle and bustle that abounded in these now quiet streets, which still have the same names but in Lithuanian (Straszuna Street, where Kruk’s library was located, has been changed). Once again, I have to ask myself what I was expecting to find there: shadow or echo, or a hidden page from the diary? I walked quietly along Shavli Street and peeked into one of the gardens.  Two children were walking towards me and talking. It took a moment or two before I realized that they were talking about me. When they understood that I wasn’t a Lithuanian, they said ‘Guten Tag – Good Day’, and went on their way, laughing. Had they greeted me in German because that was the only foreign language they knew? Quite possibly. But wasn’t it natural to think that, perhaps, they were laughing at me?