Barbanel's ghetto diary

Barbanel's ghetto diary is the secret chronicle of the Kovno Ghetto, a vast and meticulous record of captivity compiled by Josef Barbanel, the chief aide to Dr. Koenig, during the Holocaust. Written in a small, neat Yiddish hand that the young runner Yehoshua compared to stitches sewn into the page, the diary grew into thousands of pages and filled a trunk with material. It survived the destruction of the ghetto, was smuggled out piece by piece, and was recovered decades later in New York, where it became the historical and emotional heart of the novel's meditation on memory, testimony, and justice. The diary is not merely a document; it is an act of resistance against erasure, a moral imperative to record indelibly what happened to a people marked for annihilation.

Origins and the Act of Writing

Barbanel began keeping the diary as a matter of necessity, not profession. When the young Yehoshua, who served as a runner for the Kovno Ghetto Council, asked him one day if he was by profession a historian, Barbanel looked surprised, then smiled and shook his head. "You are one smart kid, Yehoshua," he said. "Yes, I'm a historian, by necessity. But you wouldn't tell anyone, would you." This was a statement, not a question, and Yehoshua swore he would not; the two shook hands on it. The diary was illegal under German rule, which forbade unauthorized writings or photographs and had confiscated all cameras. But because Barbanel was the chief aide to Dr. Koenig, he had always to be writing something, and it was relatively easy for him to enfold his secret history within his formal duties.

Whenever Barbanel received reports, he either wrote down verbatim what he was told or asked the person reporting to write a statement. He kept a diary in which he reported everything that happened, along with the relevant documentation: the latest regulations, the execution orders, the deaths, minutes of the council meetings, orders signed by the infamous Commandant Schmitz, proscriptions, dicta, identity papers for the work details. Every imaginable item went into this history. He used whatever paper he had on hand, including unused student exercise books. Yehoshua often saw him writing, and even years later could close his eyes and see Barbanel's handwriting, the characters very small, the words flying off his pen line after line in his passion to say what happened each day, each moment, of their lives as captives. It was a supple, deft determination to put it all down, record it indelibly, as something of immense human importance. As it was. As it always will be.

Smuggling and the Role of Greta Margolin

Once Yehoshua knew about the archive, he was brought further into Barbanel's confidence. Every week or so, Barbanel put in his hands a packet wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine, with the instruction: "For Miss Margolin, and watch your step." Yehoshua would slip the packet under his shirt and run with it to the hospital, to a nurse named Greta Margolin, who was Barbanel's friend and, as Yehoshua realized only when he was older, his lover. Miss Margolin was every bit as brave as Barbanel. Not only did she keep the diary for him, but she was involved in the very dangerous business of smuggling women who were pregnant out of the ghetto, and in at least one case of a woman who had somehow escaped attention, delivering the baby and taking them both out, how and where, Yehoshua did not know. She was a real nurse, the only real nurse there, and Yehoshua, then a boy, was in love with her. He looked forward to these runs, though they were probably the most dangerous thing he did. Her position as a nurse was a factor in keeping the diary safe until she could smuggle it out of the ghetto, across the bridge, to a hiding place in the city or perhaps in the countryside.

The Radio and the Archive's Growth

Barbanel's secret archive was complemented by another forbidden instrument: a shortwave radio kept inside a wall in the attic dormitory over the council offices. Two or three nights a week, Barbanel would climb the ladder to the boys' quarters, and they would assist him as he pried open the wall board to expose the radio and plug it in to a socket affixed to their one light fixture. They had several training practices in closing the radio down quickly, and one boy always kept watch at the window while another stationed himself beside the door to listen for any sounds below. Though Dr. Koenig knew and approved of Barbanel's secret archive, he did not know, or pretended not to know, about the radio. By the time Yehoshua was aware of it, the diary must have run into thousands of pages, volumes, a whole trunk full of material. Since neither Barbanel nor Greta Margolin was to survive the destruction of the ghetto, to this day those papers are hidden there in the earth of Eastern Europe, in its rubble, in the wreckage and ruination and dust of its Christian tradition.

Recovery and the Weight of Testimony

Decades later, the archive surfaced in New York. In a small office in the International Arrivals Building at JFK Airport, Sarah Blumenthal, Pem, a young woman from the U.S. Attorney's office in New York, and various customs people watched as an inspector took up a hammer and chisel and went to work on a chest. The chest sat on a steel table, larger than Sarah had understood from Pem's description; she had imagined it as the size of a footlocker, but it was larger, deeper. It looked homemade, hammered together with big heavy nails and metallic corner pieces, painted white, with raw lumber showing where the paint had flaked off. The customs man found the rusted locks impervious and asked if he could pry off the hasps, which, he warned, would splinter the wood. Without quite realizing the proprietorship she had been granted, Sarah nodded her approval. Yet the sound of the splitting wood made her wince, as if her father's history were seeping into the room.

The hasps were pried off and the thick rope was cut. The attorney took a small camera out of her bag and snapped three or four pictures of the Russian writing across the top of the chest. Then the inspectors carefully lifted out packages of various sizes wrapped in oilskin, with an oilskin lining against the inner sides of the chest. The fierce preservation of these materials was unmistakable and, to Sarah, itself an urgent message that brought a sob to her throat. The inspectors unwrapped the packages to find sheaves of paper bound in twine, booklets, manuals, folders, rolled-up blueprints, diagrams, stapled documents, and envelopes of various sizes, each labeled in a small, neat Yiddish script. They opened every packet, every envelope, ran their hands along the inner walls of the chest, and agreed among themselves that there was nothing here of interest to them. They replaced everything, more or less as they found it, and excused themselves. Then Pem and the attorney dove in.

In notebooks, students' bluebooks, and unbound pages, they found a diary in one increasingly familiar hand covering a period of three years, from 1941 to the date in 1944 when the ghetto was dismantled and the survivors were marched to the railroad station. There were reams of documentation: rules and regulations issued by the Germans, innumerable orders with the signature of Commandant Schmitz, confiscating all domestic animals, then all wagons. Sarah held in her hands typed lists of those who had died in the ghetto and also those who were taken from the ghetto and never again seen. Each name had a date and place of birth next to it. Not infrequently, the names of entire families were listed. There was no time or distance in Sarah's apprehension of these pages; they were not historical but, in their simple exact notation, a curve of the universe's light flashing through her, lasing her consciousness into these leaves of paper, letter by letter, as if the newly dead were being written down as she read, with the thunderings of jets and the drone of passing traffic in her ears.

The Photographs and the Runners

Among the archive's contents was an envelope of forbidden little black-and-white photographs: a line of men and women marching to work behind barbed wire; a husband and wife and their child on a bench having their picture taken, the cloth stars sewn to their coats; simple pictures, calm, expressionless faces; a woman on her knees in the vegetable garden; the members of the council posing in business suits with stars; a body in a business suit hanging from a gallows, the head, awry, staring heavenward; winter, snow on the ground. And here, seven little boys in front of a wood cabin, standing at their idea of attention on the steps, wearing military-school caps and stars on their breasts that might possibly be imagined as insignia of their office as runners for the council. They were unsmiling little boys, one with shoulders hunched up in the instinctive posture of self-protection, or perhaps he was cold; they were all underdressed, with short pants and sweaters and jackets they had outgrown. But each of them stood at attention, feet together, arms pressed against his sides, looking into the camera in the full knowledge of death. Sarah found her father in the first row. The diary and its photographs thus completed a circuit of testimony: the boy who had carried the oilcloth packets through the ghetto, who had sworn to keep Barbanel's secret, was now revealed to Sarah as one of those seven little boys, immortalized in the very archive he had helped to preserve.