‘Megillat Ruth’: The diary of a young woman from Vilna

Anne Frank was not the only Jew who wrote a moving personal diary describing the horrors she experienced during WW II. Many were likely written, but only a few survived. Anne Frank’s is the most famous; now another equally moving one, although quite different, has just been published. 

Ruth Leimenzon Engelshtern (Engles) was a young Jewish woman who kept a diary while hiding in a barn for almost a year at the end of World War II before Lithuania was liberated from the Nazis by the Soviet Red Army.

Switching between the time she lived in the Vilna Ghetto, where she spent the previous two years, and her period in hiding, when she would often go for days on end without a morsel to eat or a drop to drink, Ruth’s diary gives us a rare, personal insight into the extreme suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust. Lazar Engles, Ruth’s second husband, referred to it as a “tragic and extremely important document about the Holocaust period.” 

During the Vilna Ghetto’s two-year existence, starvation, disease, street executions, maltreatment, and deportations to concentration and extermination camps virtually wiped out the 60,000-strong Jewish community.

Only several hundred people managed to survive, mostly by hiding in the forests surrounding the city, joining Soviet partisans, or, as Ruth did with the help of her former boss’s wife, by sheltering with sympathetic locals.

RUTH’S DIARY was kept safe by Lazar Engles, a friend of her first husband, who was killed in June 1941. “All my thoughts were focused in this direction – that this ‘Megillat Ruth’ would see the light of day and would be made available to the public,” Engles said.

He met and married Ruth after the war. The couple had a son, David – who, in 2002, spent half a year “diligently and carefully” translating the diary from Yiddish to English. “That is when I came to appreciate what a truly remarkable person my mother was,” he wrote in the opening chapter of the book.

Indeed, not only did David learn about his mother’s remarkable resilience and resourcefulness from her writings, but readers of her diary are also left in no doubt about the extraordinary qualities that enabled her to evade death on numerous occasions.

Written in the spring of 1944, after Ruth endured an exceptionally harsh winter in the barn where discovery meant certain death, the diary served as a means of “pushing time” and gave Ruth someone to talk to. “At times, it seems to me like I am having a conversation with someone,” she wrote.

While it contains some minor errors concerning dates (keeping track of time while hiding in extreme conditions is virtually impossible), the diary “is a powerful narrative in which my mother, not knowing if she will survive, reveals her deepest thoughts and feelings,” David said. It also includes important details about the life of Jews in Vilna until their complete annihilation.

Historical context is provided at the beginning of the book, thus enhancing the reader’s appreciation and understanding of her writings.

THE DIARY itself is hard to read, as Ruth – who was considered one of the lucky ones, having just managed to escape death when the ghetto was liquidated – went on to suffer unimaginable hardship in hiding. Certain themes reappear throughout, the most prominent of which is bathing: “For me, this is one of the most important issues.” With no access to water, she was at the mercy of the woman in whose barn she hid for months to provide her with the means to wash herself.

“After 156 days, 22 weeks, I again washed myself once during the last few days…” she wrote. “I couldn’t wait to get into the water. I crawled into that tub full of hot water and washed myself over and over. This was for real, not a dream, as I had often dreamed.” 

Ruth’s insightful musings then surfaced: “Is it possible for a human being who is living in normal circumstances to understand what it’s like not to bathe for 156 days?” she asked, before explaining how she coped with her intolerable situation. “I used to seek ways to make my situation easier to bear. Every day, even on the coldest days, I would take everything off my body, air it out, and sit for a minute totally naked. I would give myself an ‘air bath.’ I was waging a battle against the lice.”

Human nature, and the overwhelming desire to save oneself, is another issue about which Ruth wrote extensively. “Man’s nature is such that no matter what is happening around him, as long as he is alive, he seeks to save himself.” This attitude in no small part helped Ruth to survive when the odds were stacked firmly against her at every stage of the war.

Surviving the ghetto

WHILE SHE suffered extreme hardship in the barn, one of the issues that upset her the most during the war, and to which she returns time and again in her diary, is the behavior of the Jewish police in the ghetto. 

She wrote about one occasion where she received more considerate treatment from a German than a fellow Jew: “Isn’t that a laugh? This German turned out to be more sympathetic than the Jews!” 

She then broadened the issue: “What then can we demand of other nations? In a time of such pain, of such humiliation, all you saw from [the Jewish police] was arrogance and impudence.”

Nevertheless, Ruth made the ghetto – to which she refers extensively in her diary – her home for some two years, eschewing the chance to escape earlier in the war when she had the chance. While approaching the ghetto gates, she wrestled with her thoughts: “All the way there, I struggled with myself. Maybe I should turn back? But then I imagined what might await me if I didn’t set myself up in the ghetto. I would suffer, prevailing upon Christians, fearing every little movement. And then one fine day they would tell me that I had to leave?”

While this ultimately became her fate, Ruth stayed in the ghetto for as long as she could. “I was longing to be among Jews,” she explained.

Other unusual aspects of the ghetto that Ruth touched upon in her diary include the theater. It seemed strange to her that people “could have the fortitude to see a play or hear a concert when living in a cemetery,” although eventually she came around to their way of thinking. “But now I think that perhaps they were right. Fixating on everything that was going on around us would have made it impossible to go on living. So you had to distract yourself and push it out of your head as much as possible. Today, all those theatergoers are no longer here. So at least they took advantage of whatever was available.” 

Wise words from a wise woman.

RUTH FOUND happiness, albeit briefly, after the war with her second husband and their son, David. Ill health got the better of her less than a decade later, and she passed away in New York in the summer of 1955, aged 45. 

Ruth’s legacy continues to grow. David and his wife, Eva, have two children, nine grandsons, six granddaughters, and one great-grandson, all of whom live in Israel. “For Eva and me, the rebirth of Israel as the Jewish homeland represents the victory of the Jewish nation over all her enemies, both past and present,” he said. 

This extraordinary book affords readers the privilege of joining Ruth as she navigates her perilous path through the Holocaust. Anyone looking to broaden their understanding and knowledge of this dark period in Jewish history would do well to read it. 

WRITTEN IN A BARN: 

THE DIARY OF A YOUNG WOMAN FROM VILNA

By Ruth Leimenzon Engles

Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky

168 pages; $27.37