Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Simaite

23. The Ghetto Library

155 chapter 23 The Ghetto Library vilna 1942 Herman Kruk lives at Number 6 Strashun Street, where the Judenrat and morgue are located. Carpenters build coffins in the courtyard outside his apartment. On May 19, 1942, this slight man, with dark hair and almond eyes, turns forty-five in the ghetto. “I shall get no flowers here—no one to give me anything,” he writes in his diary. “I will not celebrate—there’s nothing to celebrate. I bear my 45 years all alone, and especially the brand-new experiences from the 44th to the 45th” (Kruk, The Last Days 292). His forehead, broad and smooth in the prewar photograph will age a decade over the next two years. He left Warsaw in September 1939 amid a throng of cars, bicycles, and pedestrians, traveling with five others by horse and wagon, and train. Bombs punctuated the men’s journey through Poland, as did terrible news from Warsaw. Planes accompanied the group as it journeyed to Vilna through devastated villages and arrived only days before the Soviet invasion. All six men had left their wives behind, assuming the women would be safe (Harshav xlii). In Kruk’s case, he left his second wife, a woman he married after the death of his first in childbirth. He never saw her again. Two weeks after entering the ghetto, Kruk finds himself at the helm of an absurd yet strangely beautiful project: to create a haven of quiet, culture, and learning—a library. His office is out over the 156 The Ghetto Library debris-littered courtyard, and it is here that Kruk dictates his letters and chronicle to his secretary, Rachel Mendelssohn. Typed in triplicate on long sheets of paper, single-spaced and dense, the chronicle is Kruk’s most prized possession, the hashish of his ghetto life, as he puts it: “more than a thousand pages of woe, pain, and dread” (Kruk, The Last Days 324). Because of this chronicle, we know a lot about the reading habits and intellectual life of the Vilna Ghetto. The space they have taken over had already been a library. The Enlightenment Library originally housed 45,000 books, but of these over 10,000 have gone missing, pillaged by both Germans and ghetto Jews. The card catalogue is gone too. A door in the library’s lobby leads to a big, empty hall transformed to a reading room. Closed in 1925 for lack of funds, oddly it is under the conditions of the ghetto that the reading room’s reopening becomes possible, its windows repaired, walls whitewashed, and boards collected for bookshelves. Half the reading room’s books are fiction, and the other half periodicals and children’s literature. Glass cabinets placed along the walls display Torah scrolls, silver wine cups, candle holders, and embroidered curtains for Torah arks. The library’s collection grows to include sacred and valuable objects that people bring in hope of saving them. What accumulates is literally an embarrassment and tragedy of riches. Eventually the library staff will stop displaying new artifacts, since the destruction they attest to is too stark and terrible. The Torahs not on display will lie wrapped in bed sheets in the corner of the ghetto archive with public announcements, orders, reports, theater posters, and other paraphernalia stored for posterity. In this way, the ghetto librarians archive the destruction of their culture. The library is among the first public institutions in the ghetto, and its first cultural establishment. It looks exactly as it did in former times, with clean floors, impressive bookshelves, and unexpected serenity. In the first two weeks of the library’s existence, there are already 1,500 members. 157 The Ghetto Library The initial functioning of the reading room is short-lived. It must close for several months because of cold weather and a typhus epidemic. But by September 1942, the library will have become the only building in the ghetto with central heating, fed by steam from a ghetto bath house. A seven-day work week is put into effect. The library opens to the public from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Reading conditions are poor, as electricity is now restricted to 6:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and after 9:00 p.m. Late-night reading is impossible because of the blackout order. Fines are imposed in the ghetto for burning lights or using...