A Diary of the Nazi Ghetto in Vilna

Zelig Kalmanovitch

1942

Sunday, [December] 27, [1942]

This morning I was in the children’s nursery. Women who work leave their children from 7 to 6. There are 150 children between the ages of three months and two years, [one group] from two to three years, [one group] from three to six, and another group that studies reading and writing. Speeches, dramatic presentations…

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Creator Bio

Zelig Kalmanovitch

1881–1944

The Yiddish linguist and historian Zelig Kalmanovitch was born in Goldingen, Courland (now Kuldiga, Latvia). Before World War I, he showed a keen interest in the politics of diaspora nationalism as well as in Yiddish linguistics and literature. In 1919, he received his doctorate from St. Petersburg University, settling in Vilna in 1928 where he became a leader of the YIVO and the editor of its major journal, YIVO-bleter. Kalmanovitch was a major cultural leader of the Vilna ghetto, where he kept a diary in Hebrew in which he questioned the viability of armed resistance and supported Jacob Gens’s policy of buying time through productive labor. This diary was found by Avrom Sutzkever after the war. Deported to labor camps in Estonia in 1943, Kalmanovitch died in the fall of 1944.

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