Life Must Go On: The Remarkable Story of Sol Lurie, the Kovno Ghetto and the Tragic Fate of Lithuania’s Jews by Bea Lurie and Steven Leonard Jacobs
As time passes, the number of new Holocaust memoirs has inevitably dwindled. The latest is cowritten by the daughter of a survivor and a historian who provides context. Sol Lurie was 11 when the Nazis seized Lithuania and his middle-class childhood idyll was shattered. Ninety-five percent of Lithuania’s Jews were killed, many by Lithuanians, not Germans. “Sol knew early on that there were good Germans,” some of whom risked their lives, writes Bea Lurie, recalling her father’ memories.
Life became harder in the ghetto established by the Nazis and worse still when the survivors were brought to concentration camps where death was the only sure exit. Sol was taken to several camps, eventually to Buchenwald, where he was liberated by the Soviet army in 1945 on his 15th birthday. The Nazis used him for slave labor; he survived through a combination of determination and good fortune on a diet of bread made with sawdust. Among the horrors he witnessed was the burning of corpses on wood fires.
The value of another Holocaust memoir? As the American Diversity Report’s Deborah J. Levine writes in her forward, we live in a time when neo-Nazis are marching under one flag or another, malicious podcasters spread lies unchecked and Holocaust denial is rising. “We must stop bystander syndrome and its silence,” she insists.
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