(Reviewer: David Saks, Vol. 80, #1, Autumn, 2025)
In the closing weeks of June 1941, the regime of Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, as the mass invasion of the Soviet Union was called. Lithuania was one of the Soviet territories invaded, and shortly thereafter German forces, with the participation of many local Lithuanians, set about the mass killing of the Jewish population. The massacres continued throughout the summer of 1941. From the end of that year until late 1943, those Jews still alive – some 43 000, or one in five out of Lithuania’s pre-invasion Jewish population, were confined within ghettos in the country’s three main cities, Vilnius/Vilna, Kaunas/Kovno and Šiauliai/Shavl. Out of the latter’s pre-war population of 8000, between 350 and 500 Jews were still alive at the end of the war.
In 1949, a vivid, evocative memoir of life in the Shavl ghetto was published in Munich by the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Germany. The title was Azoy zaynen mir geshtorbn (“So we died) and the writer was Levi Shalit, a survivor of the ghetto and subsequently of Dachau to which he was sent after the ghetto’s liquidation. Shalit went on to become an eminent Yiddish journalist, author and activist for Jewish and Zionist causes. For thirty years, he lived and worked in South Africa, where amongst other things he became the long serving editor of the country’s leading Yiddish publication the Afrikaner idishe tsaytung (African Jewish Newspaper). He eventually moved to Israel, where he died in 1994.
Shalit’s original memoir did not include an account of the year he spent in Dachau Kaufering concentration camp, but ended with his arrival there in July 1943. The intention to publish an expanded edition with a concluding section about life and death in Dachau was finally realised in 1975 when it was brought out by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the camp’s liberation. It appeared as a supplement to Jewish Affairs, as The Road from Dachau: Thirty Years after the Liberation.
At a time when so few still understand Yiddish, Shalit’s powerful testimony was until very recently a closed book for most people. That, fortunately, is no longer the case, thanks to the appearance earlier this year of an English rendition, entitled So We Died: A Memoir of Life and Death in the Ghetto of Šiauliai, Lithuania. It was translated and edited by Veronica Belling, Ellen Cassedy andAndrew Cassel and published by the University of Alabama Press.
Veronica Belling will be well known to Jewish Affairs readers for her multiple noteworthy contributions to the journal going back more than thirty years. She is among this country’s foremost Yiddish scholars, her previous publications in the field having included a translation of Leibl Feldman’s The Jews of Johannesburg (2007), Yiddish Theatre in South Africa (2008) and Yakov Azriel Davidson: His Writings in the Yiddish Newspaper, Der Afrikaner, 1911-1913 (2009). In addition to co-translating Shalit’s memoir, Belling also contributes an introductory chapter inter alia recounting his life and career, giving an overview of the history of the Jewish community in Shavli and its eventual destruction and a summary and commentary on the themes and contents of the book.
So We Died is divided into four sections. Part One, entitled ‘O, Israel, People of Faith’, describes the German invasion of Shavl, the ensuing murder of thousands of Jews in the city and surrounding countryside and the herding of survivors into the Shavl ghetto. The second (‘So We Lived’) describes daily life in the ghetto while the third (‘The Masada Book’) recounts attempts to organize a resistance group, of which Shalit himself was a member. The final section (‘The Community Dies’) recounts the transformation of the ghetto into a concentration camp, the seizure and deportation of the community’s children and the writer’s experiences in Dachau.
The following quote from the introduction provides useful insights both into Shalit’s literary and creative gifts and into what gives this particular Holocaust-era memoir its own uniquely memorably and evocative flavour: “Shalit was a creative writer, and in his introduction he makes it clear that his intention was to use his literary abilities to illuminate the reality of life in all the ghettos, not just Shavl. Composed in Germany shortly after the war, Shalit’s narrative proceeds not day by day but through a carefully constructed set of themes and anecdotes. Shalit’s intention was not simply to document the events he lived through but to present them in compelling story form. His unique talent is his ability to traverse effortlessly from reportage to story and back. His stories become more and more dramatic until they reach a crescendo”.
So We Died: A Memoir of Life and Death in the Ghetto of Šiauliai, Lithuania by Levi Shalit, translated from the Yiddish and edited by Veronica Belling, Ellen Cassedy, and Andrew Cassel. Introduction by Veronica Belling. Afterword by Justin Cammy. 271pp, bibliography, index, University of Alabama Press, 2025.
- David Saks is a former Associate Director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and editor of Jewish Affairs
