Between World Wars I and II, about 37,000 Jews lived in the
Lithuanian city of Kovno, also called Kaunas. they constituted
one-quarter of the population and tended to cluster in the
commercial, artisan and professional middle class. Kovno's
Jewish community, home to one of the most prestigious religious
institutions in Eastern Europe, also gloried in its rich secular
culture and became a center for Zionist activity. After the
German Wehrmacht overran the Baltic states in 1941, Elkhanan
Elkes, a respected doctor who was the personal physician to the
Lithuanian prime minister and the German ambassador to
Lithuania, was confined to Kovno's ghetto. As good a doctor as
Elkes was, however, it was really his extraordinary role as head
of the ghetto's Jewish Council that so captures the admiration
of Sara J. Bloomfield (WCAS72), director of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Under Elkes'
leadership, almost the entire Kovno ghetto methodically -- and
secretly -- chronicled the destruction