A Diary of the Nazi Ghetto in Vilna

Zelig Kalmanovitch’s diary, written in Yiddish and recovered after World War II, is one of the most significant documents to emerge from the Vilna ghetto. Kalmanovitch recorded his entries in a series of small notebooks between 1941 and 1943. Before his deportation to a camp in Estonia, the notebooks were hidden as part of what was known as the Paper Brigade’s efforts to protect Jewish cultural treasures; thousands of Jewish books, manuscripts, and cultural artifacts were gathered and saved from Nazi destruction. They were recovered from the ruins of the ghetto after the war. The first major publication of the diary appeared in the YIVO Bleter in 1951. A Hebrew edition, titled Yoman be-Ghetto Vilna (A Diary in the Vilna Ghetto), was published by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem. The original notebooks are now part of the digitized collections shared between YIVO in New York and the Lithuanian Central State Archives.