Saul Issroff

Normally I won't say I've read a book until I've looked at every page, but I'll make an exception for this four-volume, 1900-page collection of source material on the Holocaust in Lithuania. Only the first 120-odd pages can be "read" in the normal way. The rest is simply a series of lists of Lithuanian victims of the Holocaust. The authors explain at the beginning that they were trying to collect the name of every Lithuanian Jew killed in the Holocaust. They admit this is an impossible show more endeavor, but they're still trying and this book is the summary of their efforts thus far. Included are census lists, lists of camp and ghetto inmates, deportation lists, and information provided by surviving relatives.

Pitifully little information is available for many of the victims listed. There is, for instance, the Goldsmith family: Mannes Goldsmith, his wife Chassa Beila Goldsmith, and eleven children, one of them named Meike, the rest without names, none of them with assigned genders. They all died in Keidaniai on August 28, 1941. There were many victims in Keidaniai who died on that date; I suppose that was the day the Einsatzgruppen reached that town. In Zheimelis on August 8, 1941, was another mass murder. Curiously, most of the victims whose ages are listed are elderly. Some are middle-aged, but there are no young adults or children. Perhaps the liquidation of a nursing home?

Sometimes what little evidence is available tells an intriguing story, like the Meriash family from Kovno. The mother, Rachel, died at Ninth Fort on October 29, 1941, age 42. Many Lithuanian Jews were killed at Ninth Fort during that time period. Something is interesting about the others in the family, though. Yisrael died in Auschwitz at the age of twelve, in July 1944. The father, Yechezkel, died at Dachau, age 47, sometime in January 1945. The last survivor was nineteen-year-old Nachum, nicknamed Nochke, who was named for his grandfather. He died at Dachau, like his father, in April 1945. Dachau was liberated the 29th of that month: Nochke had almost made it. How on earth were Yechezkel and his sons able to survive as long as they did? The vast majority of the Lithuanian victims were dead by 1943, and very few were ever at Auschwitz or Dachau. I wonder, perhaps, was the family in hiding somewhere, together or individually? Did they get discovered in the summer of 1944? But every family's story is always the same, in the end.

On the Yad Vashem website there's a quote from a young man named David Berger who presumably died in the Holocaust. He says something like, "I just want someone to remember that there once existed a man named David Berger." This is what the authors of this book are trying to accomplish, and they did an excellent job.

This is a veritable gem for Jews of Lithuanian descent trying to trace their ancestry, and for serious researchers and scholars on the Holocaust in eastern Europe. Obviously not appealing to the everyday reader, however. show less