Hope is stronger than life: Vilna Ghetto diary

ENIn his Vilna Ghetto diary, Zelig Kalmanovich wrote: “The hope is strong that this creative power will serve us after the liberation to gather the shards of the nation in its own land and unite the dispersed people of Israel.” This publication puts together the shards and separate fragments of a testimony whose manuscript had been dispersed in the maelstrom of history, stored today in parts in Vilnius and in New York. Kalmanovich began writing his diary in Hebrew, on cut-up letter paper sewn into a little blue notebook, on May 16, 1942. A little over a month later (June 22, 1942), on the anniversary of the beginning of hostilities in Vilnius, Kalmanovich took a book of subscription forms for the magazine published by the YIVO Institute1 and used the empty backs of the forms to record his memories of the early days of the war. The final entry in the blue notebook was made on July 19, 1942. The diary continued on the forms between July 26, 1942 - August 30, 1943. In addition to diary entries, both books contain German-language quotes from Franz Rosenzweig’s Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption) and Max Scheier’s Von Ewigen im Menschen (On the Eternal in Man).