After being published in August 2023 in Israel by Yad Vashem, “Written in a Barn: The Diary of a Young Woman from Vilna,” is finally available in the United States on the Amazon website. It is also available on the Yad Vashem website. This unique diary, the only diary by a mature woman about the Vilna ghetto, was written by Ruth Leimonzon Engles in 1944 while hiding from the Nazis in a barn for ten months on a farm near Vilna.
In her diary, Ruth describes how, after losing her husband to the murderous Nazis, she was able to survive over two years in the Vilna ghetto, finally escaping just two days before its liquidation. She also writes about her life in the barn, dealing with the daily challenges in her hideout, where discovery meant certain death at the hands of the Nazis or collaborators. Her descriptions are so vivid that the reader is made to feel as if he himself is there with her. The diary is not only an interesting and suspenseful story of Ruth’s survival, but also an important historical document.
The author describes many aspects of life in the Vilna ghetto during her confinement there from June 1941 to September 1943. Her comments and observations about the Jews, the Germans, the Lithuanians, the Judenrat, the Jewish police and the various classes of people that developed in the ghetto life reflect deep psychological insight. She was 34 years old at the time that she wrote the diary and her perspective is that of a mature woman, in contrast to Anne Frank for example, who was a teenager when she wrote her diary.
The diary, which Ruth wrote in Yiddish, is an inspirational narrative in which she bares her soul, as she reveals her personal thoughts and feelings about everything she had lived through, not knowing if she would come out of her situation alive. In the process of absorbing the diary, the reader gets to know Ruth intimately. Ruth died in 1955 at the age of 45. Her son, David, who was just nine years old at the time, never got to know his mother until 2002, when he “met” his mother again by translating her diary into English.
A few years ago, he sent his translation to Yad Vashem, and, recognizing what an important addition this was to the Holocaust literature, they published it last year.
All the proceeds from the book sales go to Yad Vashem. The reader of Ruth’s diary will gain deep insights into the universal experience of Holocaust survivors and why so many were reluctant to talk about what they suffered and what they lost.
