Written in a Barn: The Diary of a Young Woman from Vilna
A powerful Holocaust diary, newly translated into English, provides insight into daily life in the Vilna Ghetto.
My mother’s diary is quite unique in the annals of Holocaust literature. It is the only diary written by a mature woman about the Vilna Ghetto. Also, unlike most of the personal histories in the Holocaust literature, which were written many years after the actual events occurred, my mother’s diary was written under conditions in which her very survival was at risk. Reading this diary will give any reader a much clearer understanding of the survivor experience.
—David Engles
On June 22, 1941, the Nazis invaded Lithuania, occupied Vilna, set up a ghetto, and murdered almost all of the Vilna Jews during the next two years. My mother, Ruth Leimenzon Engles, managed to survive and, just before the liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943, she was able to escape and find a hiding place in a barn on a farm a few kilometers outside of Vilna, where she hid for ten months. During the last two months in the barn, she wrote a diary describing her three-year ordeal—over two years under the Nazi occupation of Vilna and then ten months, from September 1943 to July 1944, in the barn.
My father, Lazar Engles, who married my mother after the war, kept the diary safe and brought it to Israel when he retired and made aliya in 1968. A few years later, in 1972, the diary was published in Yiddish with the title Farshribn in a shayer (Written in A Barn) by the Ghetto Fighters’ House, which is in a kibbutz near Haifa. The original manuscript is kept in the archives of the Ghetto Fighters’ House.
My mother died in the summer of 1955. She was just forty-five years old. I was nine years old and was away at a summer camp when she passed away. I never got a chance to say goodbye to her, and even worse than that, to my great regret and loss, I never got a chance to discover what an exceptional person she was. Many years later, in 2002, when I was fifty- six years old, I spent half a year diligently and carefully translating from Yiddish into English the diary that she had written in 1944. That is when I came to appreciate what a truly remarkable person my mother was.
Photograph of David Engles mother, Ruth
The diary is an extraordinary document. It was written by my mother in the spring of 1944, after enduring a very cold, harsh winter in an environment where discovery of her hideout meant certain death at the hands of the Nazis or collaborators. It is a powerful narrative in which my mother, not knowing if she will survive, reveals her deepest thoughts and feelings, as she describes how she survived—using her intelligence and common sense, and helped by luck and perhaps miracles. She was thirty-four years old at the time, and her perspective is that of a mature woman.
The diary may be viewed from three perspectives. First, it is my mother’s own personal story of how she survived by strength of will and unwavering fortitude. In these pages, she bares her soul as she writes down her personal thoughts, ideas, and feelings about everything she has lived through and is still living through in the barn.
Second, the diary recounts an interesting and suspenseful story as my mother describes her escape from the ghetto, just before its liquidation, with the help of the wife of her former boss, as well as her daily life in the barn, never knowing if she will survive the danger that lurks just outside the barn door.
Vilna ghetto after the war. // George Kadish
Third, the diary is also an important and unique historical document. It is the only diary written by a mature woman about the Vilna ghetto. In it, my mother describes many aspects of life in the ghetto during her two years there, from June 1941 to September 1943. She comments about the Jews, the Germans, the Lithuanians, the Judenrat, the Jewish police, and the various classes of people that emerged in the ghetto. Her descriptions are so vivid that the reader feels as if he himself is there with her. Her comments and observations about the people whom she writes about reflect deep, psychological insight.
The story that my mother relates of how she survived, of how she never gave up and never lost hope is truly inspirational. There are many passages in the diary that reflect her amazingly positive attitude about life, even in the darkest circumstances. The following excerpt clearly exemplifies this attitude. It was written on July 4, 1944, when the Soviets were on the verge of liberating Vilna, and my mother was now thinking about a future life, which until then she had not even thought would become a reality.
First page of Ruth’s diary
My desires are not at all very great. I want only to have a tranquil life, without aggravation. I cannot imagine what that will look like. But it does happen that the impossible becomes possible. Who could have ever imagined it to be possible that in one day, not even twenty-four hours, all of Vilna’s Jews could be confined in one little corner? And then that in the course of two years Vilna would be completely “liberated” of such a dense well-established Jewish population that had been there for hundreds of years? If that can happen, then it could also happen that something, which today seems impossible to me, might become possible. I must believe this and not question it.
My mother’s words also reflect the universal experience of Holocaust survivors. Many of the survivors did not want to speak about their Holocaust experiences. The following paragraph may provide an insight into the reluctance of survivors to talk about what they suffered and what they lost. This paragraph was also written on July 4, 1944.
If indeed I live to see the Soviets and crawl out of here to the free world, then I must completely make myself over, wipe out entirely all sentimental feeling. I have to forget everything and everyone, just as if nothing and nobody had ever existed in the world until now. I have to accept everything with a good-natured spirit, without a sense of tragedy. Only in this way is it possible for me to continue to exist. It is a difficult task, and I have doubts as to whether I can pull it off.
. . . .
From time to time, however, my nerves would fall apart. In the last few days, I find myself in a very upsetting condition. I feel as if I have a ball of thread in my throat. The air in the barn is, of course, fresh enough, but it seems to me that I just can’t breathe. I want to run away from my hole. All I have to do is just push open the door, and I would be in a thick forest with green meadows. Everything is alive and blossoming. After all, it’s summer. It smells of freshness and freedom. I want to run through the forest, without being afraid that someone might come up behind me, and for no reason at all, just for the fun of it, shoot a bullet into me. I want to run and scream, to hear my own voice. It seems to me, that if I could be alone in the field and scream it all out, my heart would grow lighter (strange wild ideas). I want to walk through the city streets, without a yellow patch, on the sidewalk, not in the gutter, not having to be afraid of any toddler, and not avoiding the police guard at the intersections. I want to examine the ruins, go up to Ponar. I also, along with many others, have a part of me there. I want to go, wherever I wish to go, not as part of a group and not with a guide. I want freedom. It cries out from within me, from my entire being – freedom! How does one live to see that moment? Do I know? I give myself an accurate assessment, that freedom will not bring me happiness. It is likely, that when it comes I will find myself even more unhappy, broken both physically and spiritually, alone, as on a field of corpses. Corpses peer out from every corner. For the time being, I still hope. Yes, I must admit, that even though common sense indicates otherwise, deep in my heart, I do hope. One should believe one’s mind, but the heart feels more strongly. Who knows, maybe?
Excerpted from Written in a Barn: The Diary of a Young Woman from Vilna
By Ruth Leimenzon Engles; Translated from the Yiddish by David Engles
Edited by Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky (Yad Vashem [Jerusalem, 2023]).