By Anonymous Members of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police
March 15, 2014
Some unknown members of the ghetto police chart both their own brief histories and the darkness of the human soul during the Holocaust in Lithuania. Covering the period from June 1941 to the end of 1942, the text--written in Yiddish and buried in the old ghetto site--was found in 1964 by the Soviets, who sat on the material for 25 years. Carefully and unobtrusively edited by ghetto survivor Schalkowsky, the material chronicles the removal of Kovno Jews to the ghetto, the savage beatings and rapes and thefts along the way, and the grave and brave attempts of those confined to organize and to maintain some sort of humanity in the eye of the Nazi hurricane. The anonymous authors employ various narrative strategies. They present charts of the sorts of infractions they dealt with (sanitation offenses kept them busy), tell stories about the viciousness of the Lithuanian locals and the Nazi guards, narrate the horrors of not knowing what was happening, and chronicle the harsh Nazi punishments for even the most minor infractions, the mass shootings, the forced labor, the paucity of food, the insistence that Jews give up their money--even their books. The authors also tell us about their own failures--their own occasional violence against other Jews--and they also look at some of the ghetto residents who made life worse (if that's even imaginable) for the rest. By the end, the police have organized an effort to maintain the cultural life of the community--concerts, lectures and other events. The detail is extraordinary, and while the authors occasionally assail their tormenters (in print), the tone is otherwise grimly, wrenchingly expository. An introduction by Samuel D. Kassow (History/Trinity Coll.) tells what happened, and there is no light whatsoever in that dark story. Amid all the unspeakable brutality, cruelty, fear, loss and despair, hope somehow lingers until the final gunshot.
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June 1, 2014
The authors of the documents that form this history, which was translated and edited by Kovno survivor Schalkowsky at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, were murdered by the Nazis in March 1944. The documents, type-written in Yiddish during 1943 and describing 1941-42 events in Kovno, lay buried under the ruin of the ghetto in Soviet Lithuania for 20 years and were then deposited in Soviet files for a quarter of a century more. Samuel D. Kassow's (history, Trinity Coll.; Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive) detailed introduction places the policemen's report in the context of what is now known of the World War II Jewish Kovno. Without mentioning helping Jews leave the ghetto to join the partisans fighting the Nazis (for fear of their manuscript's discovery by the Germans), the policemen relate their struggles to implement directives of the elected Jewish council, hoping to buy time until liberation, nearly always following the demands of the German command while trying to keep their pledge to devote themselves "to the well-being of the Jewish community in the ghetto," a community doomed to annihilation. Notes and a bibliography further add to the educational value of this work. VERDICT Of interest to readers seeking to understand the actions of Jews during the Holocaust.--Joel Neuberg, Santa Rosa Junior Coll. Lib., CA
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