Yad Vashem Publications

Peretz Révész

Yehuda Bacon, Edited by Sharon Kangisser Cohen & Dorota Julia Nowak

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.

Zoltán Roth

There were many times when I felt an irresistible desire to stop, and those were moments that I had to really choose between fighting for life or not. My other option was to continue walking. It seems that struggling for the yet unlived part of my life was stronger. I didn’t stop.

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