It Happened ON OUR PLANET

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.

On Duty - The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust

By Jan Grabowski

The Polish Police, commonly called the Blue or uniformed police in order to avoid using the term “Polish,” has played a most lamentable role in the extermination of the Jews of Poland. The uniformed police has been an enthusiastic executor of all German directives regarding the Jews.

Emanuel Ringelblum, Warsaw, 1943

Shortly after the occupation of Poland in the fall of 1939, the Germans created the Blue Police, consisting mainly of prewar Polish police officers. Within a short time, this police force was responsible for enforcing many anti-Jewish regulations issued by the Nazis. Who were these policemen, and how did they transform from ordinary policemen to murderous executioners? And what was the role of the Germans in this horrifying picture?

Lipman Kunstadt | Edited by Sarah Rosen and Dalia Ofer

I decided to stop writing the diary and to destroy the pages… I eventually overcame the despair and listened to the counterargument…a miracle may occur and your fragmentary writings will be the only remaining memory of Transnistria. (Lipman Kunstadt, August 26, 1942)

Diary from Hell in Transnistria is a painfully vivid and intricate account of life in the Dzhurin ghetto in Transnistria, written by Lipman Kunstadt, who was deported there from Radauţi, Romania, with his wife, his children, his mother, and his sister on October 14, 1941. Kunstadt, who was well-educated and a journalist, was appointed secretary of the Jewish council in the Dzhurin ghetto, where he had access to a great deal of information about its inner workings. He began writing his diary in Yiddish on April 11, 1942, at great risk, sparing no criticism against the ghetto leadership. 

Vera Komissar

A child’s cry pierces the stillness. The wail breaks the dismal silence that fell when the doors were locked. It’s as if the child’s tears give us all permission to let out our despair. Julius Paltiel grew up in Trondheim, Norway, where he lived with his mother and his brother. Like all the Jews of Norway, their lives changed forever when the Nazis came to power in April 1940. His arrest at the age of eighteen in 1942 marked the beginning of a journey of inconceivable horror and brutality in the Nazi concentration camps. Initially incarcerated in Falstad, a Nazi concentration camp in his native Norway, Julius Paltiel was then deported to Germany by sea in February 1943 before boarding a train to Auschwitz. He was selected for forced labor to work for IG Farben in Auschwitz III–Monowitz. In January 1945, he was sent on a death march to Buchenwald where he was liberated by U.S. forces on April 11, 1945. Julius Paltiel is one of the few Norwegian Jews who survived and returned from Auschwitz and one of the Jewish survivors who testified in the war crime trials against the Nazi perpetrators in Norway. He dedicated his life to the fight against antisemitism to ensure that such horrors would never happen again. As one of only a handful of Holocaust testimonies from Norway, In Spite of It All sheds light on Julius Paltiel’s personal ordeal to survive the Holocaust as well as on the Jewish persecution and murder of Norway’s Jewish community. This tale of survival also serves as a warning of the atrocities that are possible at the hands of ordinary human beings.