Later, he goes to the Synagogue Courtyard. With its impressive library, ritual bath, and houses of worship great and small, it was the Lithuanian Jerusalem’s functional equivalent of the Holy Temple. Now the courtyard lies in ruins, and in his anguish, Grade’s voice takes on the proclamatory cadences of a prophet. Not just any prophet but, I think, Ezekiel, the subject of an early poem of his. Ezekiel did his prophesying from exile before and after the destruction of the First Temple in the Babylonian conquest of 586 B.C.E., another defining cataclysm in Jewish history. In Ezekiel’s most famous vision, he sees a valley full of dried bones and, channeling the words of God, raises the bones, creating an army of the resurrected. Grade wouldn’t have encountered bones—the Nazis ordered Ponary’s corpses to be dug up and burned during the war—but from under the heaps of stones come prayers, “all the prayers that Jews have uttered for hundreds of years.” He hears them without hearing them, because what screams, he says, is the silence.