Kovno Ghetto

The Kovno Ghetto is the historical site of atrocity that forms the moral and narrative center of E. L. Doctorow's City of God. It is the place where the novel's central act of archival resistance occurred, where the crimes of the Nazi commandant were committed, and where the testimony that shapes the lives of the novel's characters originates. The ghetto is not merely a setting but the source of the book's deepest concerns: the recording of history under conditions of annihilation, the transmission of trauma across generations, and the elusive pursuit of justice for crimes that resist legal closure. Through the recovered diary of Josef Barbanel and the childhood testimony of Sarah Blumenthal's father, the ghetto reaches forward into the novel's present, binding the Holocaust to the contemporary struggles of its characters.

The Ghetto as Historical Site and Narrative Source

The Kovno Ghetto is introduced in the novel as the setting of a Holocaust testimony that Sarah Blumenthal recognizes as drawn from the Abraham Tory diary, a historical account of the Lithuanian ghetto. The ghetto is described as larger than the novel represents it, a factual correction that signals the novel's engagement with historical accuracy even as it adapts the record. The ghetto's history is one of mass murder: ten thousand people perished in less than a day, machine-gunned from embankments into pits, with men, women, and children murdered and buried alive. This scale of atrocity is attested by several sources, grounding the novel's fictional reconstruction in documented horror. The ghetto is thus established not as a symbolic or abstract place of suffering but as a specific, historically verifiable site of genocide, one whose precise dimensions and death toll matter to the novel's moral accounting.

Life Inside the Ghetto: The Council and Its Runners

Within the ghetto, the novel depicts a structured Jewish community attempting to maintain order and record under occupation. The Kovno Ghetto Council, led by Dr. Koenig, governs the captive population, and its chief assistant is Josef Barbanel. The council employs a corps of seven boy runners who carry news and instructions from the council to families in their houses, relay messages between council members, and stand watch by the square at the entrance to the bridge to warn of the approach of the open car with the half-track filled with soldiers behind it, which signaled that the next bad thing was about to occur. These runners wore special caps, like police caps with a military brim, and stars sewn on their jackets, a uniform that gave the ten-year-old Sarah's father a perverted military sense of himself. He felt privileged that his star was not like all the other stars but some indication of rank, and the military-style hat and knowing what was going on almost before anyone else made him feel special. Barbanel called him his best runner, choosing him for the most important matters. The runner's cap was granted officially only toward the end, and it saved his life in more ways than one, as Sarah later reveals. The runners' role was thus both a mark of distinction within the ghetto's desperate hierarchy and a practical means of survival, a doubled significance that the child experienced as an illusion of importance even as he knew full well what was happening.

Barbanel's Secret Archive and the Diary

The ghetto's most significant internal act is Josef Barbanel's secret documentation of the community's destruction. As chief aide to Dr. Koenig, Barbanel received reports and 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 relevant documentation: the latest regulations, execution orders, deaths, minutes of council meetings, orders signed by the infamous Commandant Schmitz, proscriptions, dicta, and identity papers for work details. He used whatever paper he had on hand, including unused student exercise books, and wrote in a neat Yiddish, like stitches sewn into the page, the characters very small, the words flying off his pen line after line in his passion to say what happened each day of the captives' lives. This activity was illegal; the Germans forbade unauthorized writings or photographs and had confiscated all cameras. But as the chief aide to Dr. Koenig, Barbanel had always to be writing something, and it was relatively easy for him to enfold his diary within his formal duties. When the young runner asked him if he was by profession a historian, Barbanel smiled and shook his head, saying, "You are one smart kid, Yehoshua. Yes, I'm a historian, by necessity. But you wouldn't tell anyone, would you." The boy swore he wouldn't and they shook hands on it. The diary, by the time the runner was aware of it, ran into thousands of pages, volumes, a whole trunk full of material. Barbanel also kept a shortwave radio hidden inside a wall in the attic dormitory over the council offices, which Dr. Koenig knew of or pretended not to know about; two or three nights a week, Barbanel would climb the ladder to the quarters and the boys 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, with one boy keeping watch at the window and another stationed beside the door.

The Archive's Survival and Recovery

Neither Barbanel nor his companion Greta Margolin survived the destruction of the ghetto, and the papers were hidden in the earth of Eastern Europe, in its rubble, in the wreckage and ruination and dust of its Christian tradition. The archive's survival is attributed in part to Greta Margolin's position as a nurse, which was a factor in keeping it safe until it could be smuggled out of the ghetto, across the bridge, to a hiding place in the city or perhaps in the countryside. Decades later, the archive chest resurfaces and is impounded at JFK Airport, where customs insists it must be opened. At Pem's request, the chest remains sealed until a Justice Department attorney can be present when it is cracked open, so that if the archive includes documentary proof of the identity of the ghetto commander, S.S. Major Schmitz, it will resist a challenge in court. The chest is larger than Sarah understood from Pem's description, deeper than a footlocker, homemade, hammered together with big heavy nails and metallic corner pieces, painted white with the paint flaked off to reveal raw lumber. When the customs man pries off the hasps, the sound of the splitting wood makes Sarah wince, as if her father's history is seeping into the room. Inside are packages of various sizes wrapped in oilskin, with an oilskin lining against the inner sides of the chest, a fierce preservation that brings a sob to Sarah's throat. The inspectors unwrap 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 find nothing of interest to them and replace everything. Pem and the attorney then dive in, discovering a diary in one increasingly familiar hand covering a period of three years, from 1941 to the date in 1944 when the ghetto is dismantled and the survivors are marched to the railroad station, along with reams of documentation, rules and regulations issued by the Germans, and innumerable orders with the signature of Commandant Schmitz.

The Photographs and the Runner's Identity

Among the archive's contents is an envelope of forbidden little black-and-white photos that Pem hands to Sarah. The photographs show 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; 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 there, 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 are unsmiling little boys, one with shoulders hunched up in the instinctive posture of self-protection, or perhaps he is cold; they are all underdressed, with short pants and sweaters and jackets they have outgrown, but each of them at attention, feet together, arms pressed against his sides, looking into the camera in the full knowledge of death. Sarah finds her father in the first row. The photograph confirms the testimony she has heard all her life and gives it a visual, material form, connecting the abstract history of the ghetto to the specific face of her father as a child.

The Ghetto's Legacy: Justice Denied

The ghetto's legacy extends into the novel's present through the pursuit of its commandant. S.S. Major Schmitz, who signed the orders preserved in Barbanel's archive, is the object of a decades-long effort to bring him to justice. Sarah's father wrote letters to the Justice Department and received bureaucratic replies; two 1977 articles from the Times reported a deportation hearing and a finding. Three people testified that the man in question was the ghetto commandant, but his lawyer shot down their testimony, as they were elderly and easily befuddled. The defendant testified he was Helmut Preissen, an ex-corporal who only did guard duty in the ghetto for three months before being shipped to fight on the Russian front, the same identity he presented to immigration authorities after the war. The judge found in his favor. Letters to and from the Simon Wiesenthal Center agreed with Sarah's father that Preissen was almost certainly Schmitz, but short of convincing documentation, the identification could not be made to justify reopening the case, although their file was kept open. The Justice Department was less agreeable, its lawyer somewhat defensive about his handling of the case. The recovered archive, with its orders signed by Schmitz, was meant to provide the documentary proof that had been lacking. But at the end of the novel, Pem reports that they found out the son of a bitch died two months ago, in a home in Yonkers, in his sleep. "We had him good and nailed, too. Damn!" Pem says. The commandant never had to stand up in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was. The ghetto's archive, preserved at such cost, arrives too late to secure the justice it was meant to enable, and the commandant escapes accountability, dying unpunished in an American nursing home.