Herman Kruk (1897–1944)

Herman (Hersz) Kruk was born to a Jewish family in Plock, Poland. His parents were Hanoch and Pesa Kruk. He did military service in the Polish Army in World War I. He joined the Jewish Labor Bund, a socialist party, in about 1920 and was a journalist for its publication. He also became a librarian and was named director of the organization's Grosser Library in Warsaw. In 1938, he married Paulina Varadi. After Nazi Germany invaded Poland at the start of World War II, Kruk fled Warsaw to Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania. There he was confined to the Vilna Ghetto. During 1941-1942, he organized and oversaw the operation of a library in the Ghetto. He also played an active role in several of the
Ghetto's social welfare and cultural organizations. He was keeping a diary of his experiences that continued after he was deported to the Klooga and Lagedi concentration camps in Estonia. His last entry was made on September 17, 1944, when he buried his diaries in front of witnesses inside the camp. The following day, he and almost all the other prisoners were forced to carry logs and pile them into a pyre, where they were shot and then burned by the Nazis. The Red Army arrived the following day to find the aftermath. Kruk's diary was recovered and published in 1961 by the YIVO Institute in the original Yiddish. An expanded English edition, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps 1939-1944, was published in 2002.