“Vilna Ghetto – hundred thousand books. Celebration in the honour of dispensing one hundred thousand books. On the 13th of December, in the theatre of the Vilna Ghetto”, was printed on a poster from 1942, inviting Jews to celebrate the importance of their library.Only five days after the establishment of the Vilna Ghetto, on the 11th of September, 1941, the ghetto library opened in this building. It housed almost 40 thousand books. The Nazis demanded that there was no communist literature in the library, and additionally, some works of Jewish authors were forbidden. Nevertheless, there was a lot of fictional and scientific literature in several languages. Thanks to the efforts by the library director Herman Kruk (1897-1944) and other library workers, books were continuously purchased or acquired by other means. In spite of the mass killings in the first few months of the ghetto's establishment – when almost a half of its residents were exterminated – the number of the library readers increased. In the time span of fifteen months, one hundred thousand books were dispensed. This translates into more than two hundred books being borrowed per day. Soon after the celebration of the reading scale, the library was reorganised into two sections – children’s and adults’ – further coping with the crowded librarian desk. Readers who were late to return the books that they borrowed were tried at the Ghetto court – in the spring of 1943 eight such unfortunates were handed probationary sentences of “one day of detention” and were also obliged to cover the expenses of the court and of the lost library property.There was also an archive section in the library. It collected various materials pertaining to Jewish life in the Ghetto: diverse documents, including rulings of the Nazi leadership, documents of the Vilna Ghetto administration, and various certificates.