The Warsaw Ghetto September 1942.A dreaded word spreads like wildfire: Einkesslung! That meant the Gestapo and its Latvian and Lithuanian henchmen had made a kesl or encircling of part of the Ghetto trapping within it tens of thousands of Jews whose fate — deportation to Treblinka — was now sealed. Located within this area too was the building housing the offices of the Warsaw Kehillah where hundreds of Kehillah officials and employees huddled inside quaking with fear like trapped quarry. One man however Dr.HillelSeidman sat calmly at his desk and wrote “SS brigades are now encircling us.” The others stared at him in amazement as if he had gone mad. Perhaps they were right. His need to record everything happening around him was indeed a kind of self-induced madness to prevent the reality from driving him truly insane.Dr.Seidman viewed his diaries not as a mere journal of events but as a living memorial to an entire world called Polish Jewry which had been built over a millennium. For him bearing witness to the glory of that world and the epic tragedy of its destruction virtually overnight was a holy mission that nothing could stop him from fulfilling.