Elisheva (Elka) Rubinstein
Moty Stromer | Foreword by David Silberklang
Luigi Fleischmann | Editor: Daniella Zaidman-Mauer
Heniek Fogel | Editor: Helene Sinnreich
Chajka Klinger | Editor: Avihu Ronen
Ruth Leimenzon Engles| Edited by Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky
At last, I have gotten a notebook in which to write. I have a pencil. I will try. Maybe it will make it easier to push through the days. It’s hard for me. As soon as dawn breaks, my first thought is: how does one endure until the end of the day.
Ruth Leimenzon Engles, May 15, 1944
A few days after the Germans occupied Vilna at the end of June 1941, Ruth Leimenzon’s husband was seized by local collaborators and was never seen again. Ruth, the sole survivor of her murdered family, managed to survive two years in the ghetto using her intelligence and common sense, helped by luck and perhaps miracles. Just two days before the ghetto’s liquidation in September 1943, Ruth escaped with the help of a Christian woman, her former boss’ wife, and found a hiding place in a barn on a farm 20 kilometers from Vilna, where she hid for nearly a year. During the last two months in the barn, Ruth wrote a diary in Yiddish describing her three-year ordeal.
Lazar Engles (Engelstern)
The moment we first set foot on the soil of the Naliboki Pushcha, the atmosphere was completely different. We felt a new kind of security, as if we were in our own partisan kingdom…. We had survived so many dangers, but we were now among Jews in the forest.
Prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Lazar Engles (Engelstern) lived a peaceful and fulfilled life in his beloved city of Vilna with his wife and two daughters. The Nazi occupation of the city in June 1941 and its subsequent ghettoization marked a rapid escalation of horrors for Lazar and his family.
Yehuda Bacon, Edited by Sharon Kangisser Cohen and Dorota Julia Nowak
Ilya Gerber, Edited by Lea Prais
Emanuele Artom, Edited by Guri Schwarz