An excerpt from the great Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever’s memoir of the Vilna Ghetto

“Malines were built everywhere: underneath ruined buildings, in cellars, underneath garbage dumps, in caves, and everywhere else imaginable.”

The poet Abraham Sutzkever (1913-2010) moved into the Vilna Ghetto not long after the Nazis created it in September of 1941 and with his wife Freydke escaped to the forest in September, 1943. During his two years in the ghetto he worked with the theater and youth groups and was part of the legendary Paper Brigade, a group of ghetto inmates and their allies who rescued priceless Jewish books and manuscripts from Nazi destruction.

Full article and translation here.