Hell on a sheet of paper

Yad Vashem publishes journal entries written by Avraham Cytryn, a teenager who lived in the Lodz ghetto and perished at Auschwitz.

"When I lived in the hell of the ghetto and saw the flowing blood of my innocent brethren," runs one entry, "I decided to put my testimony in writing. I would have liked to extricate the soul of the accursed ghetto from the frozen jaws of imprisonment, and to reconstruct the cruel existence of the inhabitants of Litzmannstadt who were enslaved, dispossessed, and exposed to daily dangers and the shock of helplessness. I would have liked the blood to flow over the page, so that the memory of those merciless years would be passed down to the coming generations."