Exhibit of the month

 

 

 

 First page of the first notebook of Riva Gavronska's diary, manuscript in Yiddish, 1944

Riva Gavronska's hand-written diary is written in Yiddish with a purple or graphite pencil and consists of two small-format semi-thick notebooks. The covers of both notebooks include an indication of the name of the author: Riva Gavronska. The cover of the first notebook contains the date ‘6/VII–1944’, the second – ‘14/VII–1944’. The last line of the handwritten text on the cover of the second notebook shows the name of the author in purple pencil: ‘Rivka Gavronska’.

                The exact title of the diary, which is also supported by its content, is ‘My Escape from the Ghetto’. The first sentence of the diary reveals that Riva is writing it after managing to escape from the liquidated Kovno Ghetto: ‘20 July 1944. I write these lines hiding between two pine trees in the forest of Kleboniškiai village. A sprawling tree serves as my table. I want to [tell you] about the last days of my escape’. The specific date given before the first sentence indicates the day the diary was written rather than the date of the events being described. The first excerpt of the diary tells about the historical circumstances of the final days of the Kovno Ghetto, including the desperate efforts of the inmates of the ghetto who had survived to that day to escape from it by all possible means, because the front was approaching, and concentration camps or death awaited them them.

                The diary of Riva Gavronska testifies to the vitality of the character of its author, her ability to break out of the clutches of death, confirms in itself that this prisoner of the Kovno Ghetto survived the Catastrophe. However, at this point further study of her life did not give a clearer answer to the question of how her life unfolded after the war. So far, all attempts to trace her name in the already world-famous diaries of the Kovno Ghetto (by Avraham Tory and other prisoners of the ghetto) have failed. Genealogical data in the virtual space points to several individuals bearing Gavronska's maiden name who come from Lithuania, but none of them can be clearly associated with the Riva of these diaries as the existing data is not sufficient.

 

 

[...] I looked around. Nothing. I kept on walking. As I approached the cemetery near the beach, I saw a creepy scene that imprinted itself deep into my memory. There were sixteen corpses laying on the ground. All lined up in one row. Night and day victims. They were wrapped in thick white sheets, some completely covered. Some half-covered, only barefoot stiffened legs were visible. There were people gathered there. Some Jews were digging graves. A couple of women brought canvases and wrapped the corpses in them right there on the spot. [...] People were sobbing. And weeping. This was nothing like ‘mourning the deceased.’ This was about the living dead bemoaning the soul of our nation's bitter and cruel fate. People were mourning their relatives who had perished, a small handful of the remaining European Jews (the Kovno Ghetto was the last one in all the Baltic states).