@article{277602,
      recid = {277602},
      author = {Kruk, Herman, and Harshav, Benjamin,},
      title = {The last days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania : chronicles  from the Vilna ghetto and the camps, 1939-1944 /},
      publisher = {YIVO Institute for Jewish Research,},
      address = {New Haven, CT :},
      pages = {lii, 732 p. :},
      year = {2002},
      abstract = {For five horrifying years in Vilna, the Vilna ghetto, and  concentration camps in Estonia, Herman Kruk recorded his  own experiences as well as the life and death of the Jewish  community of the city symbolically called "The Jerusalem of  Lithuania. This unique chronicle includes many recovered  pages of Kruk's diaries and provides a powerful eyewitness  account of the annihilation of the Jewish communities of  Eastern Europe. This volume includes the Yiddish edition of  Kruk's diaries published in 1961 and translated here for  the first time, as well as many widely scattered pages of  the chronicles, collected here for the first time and  meticulously deciphered, translated, and annotated. Kruk  describes vividly the collapse of Poland in September,  1939, life as a refugee in Vilna, the manhunt that  destroyed most of Vilna Jewry in the summer of 1941, the  creation of a ghetto and the persecution and self-rule of  the remnants of the "Jerusalem of Lithuania, " the  internment of the last survivors in concentration camps in  Estonia, and their brutal deaths. Kruk scribbled 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 and their bodies  burnt on a pyre.  Kruk's writings illuminate the tragedy of  the Vilna Jews and their courageous efforts to maintain an  ideological, social, and cultural life even as their world  was being destroyed. To read Kruk's day-by-day account of  the unfolding of the Holocaust is to discern the  possibilities for human courage and perseverance even in  the face of profound fear.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/277602},
}