Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust, (Eds.) Simone Gigliotti, Jacob Golomb, Caroline Steinberg Gould, Essays in Honor of Berel Lang, (Lanham:Lexington Books, 2014):235-250 Through the Lens of a Contemporary Historian: The History of the Jewish Police in Kovno Ghetto Written in the Ghetto (1943) Dalia Ofer When confronted with the “History of the Police in Ghetto Viliampole (Kovno)” (hereafter: History) in the late 1990s, I was greatly moved and curious. The 253 typed pages in Yiddish with the unusual title aroused great anticipation. It was written in the ghetto and hidden sometime in 1944, in a wooden barrel overlaid with tin together with hundreds of other documents from the archive of the Jewish police in Kovno. It was discovered in 1964, when a bulldozer worked in an area of the former Jewish Ghetto in Viliampole (Kovno). The Soviet authorities, however, did not allow scholars access to the collection, which became available for research only after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is a very special document, as we do not have such detailed information about the day- to-day activities of the Jewish police from other ghettos. 1 The History itself is in many respects only one of its kind in ghetto documentation. It presents a narrative which endeavors to integrate the history of the police with the history of the ghetto. Thus it confirms already available information from Kovno, but often grants it a particular perspective and flavor. Moreover, because of its systematic efforts to cover the behavior and attitudes of the police in the context of