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Notes from the Valley of Slaughter
A Memoir from the Ghetto of Šiauliai, Lithuania
by Aharon Pick
Translated by Gabriel Laufer and Andrew Cassel
Published by: Indiana University Press
320 Pages, 14 b&w photos, 1 map
- eBook
- 9780253065605
- Published: March 2023
$35.99
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Notes from the Valley of Slaughter is an eyewitness journal and diary of the Holocaust, written in the ghetto of Šiauliai, Lithuania, by Dr. Aharon Pick (1872–1944). A physician, scholar, and community leader, Pick was a keen observer of the hardships of ghetto life, and his journal represents a detailed account of the tragic events he witnessed as well as a sensitive, almost poetic personal testament.
Pick's journal covers the tumultuous late 1930s, the 1940–41 Soviet occupation of Lithuania, and the catastrophic German invasion and occupation, during which more than 90 percent of Lithuania's Jews were murdered. Pick was among a handful of Šiauliai Jewish physicians spared execution and allowed to work for the occupiers. Although Pick succumbed to illness in spring 1944, shortly before the ghetto was liquidated, his son Tedik buried the manuscript before fleeing the ghetto, retrieved it after liberation, and carried it with him to Israel.
Notes from the Valley of Slaughter is one of only a handful of diaries to survive the annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry. Translated for the first time into English and extensively annotated, it conveys Pick's voice to a wider international audience for the first time.
Acknowledgments
Retrieving a Voice from the Ghetto
Notes on the Text
Part A
1. Before the Bolsheviks' Arrival (A Preface)
2. The Blosheviks in Lithuania
3. My Son's Admission to the Lithuanian University
4. On the Eve of War
5. The Start of the War
6. The Germans Enter Šiauliai
Part B
7. Afflictions
8. The Edicts
Part C
9. The Rules of the Ghetto
Part D
10. From My Diary
Notes
References
Index
Aharon Pick was born in Kėdainiai, Lithuania, in 1872. After graduating from the Sorbonne, he practiced medicine in Šiauliai, Lithuania. In 1941, along with his wife, Dvorah Tatz Pick, he was forced into the Šiauliai ghetto, where he worked in the ghetto hospital. He died of illness in June 1944.
Gabriel Laufer, the son of two Holocaust survivors, was born in Budapest, grew up in Israel and currently lives in Charlottesville, VA. He earned a PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University and served as a professor at the Technion in Israel and at the University of Virginia until his retirement. He is the author of A Survivor's Duty which describes the survival of the author's father in the Holocaust and his own participation in Israeli wars.
Born in 1950 and raised near New York City, Andrew Cassel spent 35 years writing and editing for US newspapers, covering business, politics, and culture. A graduate of Dartmouth College, in retirement he earned a master of liberal arts degree at the University of Pennsylvania, also studying Yiddish in the US and Europe. He has translated a range of historical and biographical essays while curating a website devoted to Jewish history in Lithuania and elsewhere.
"The diary of Dr. Aharon Pick is a historical document of extraordinary importance. A talented physician and intellectual who was steeped in Jewish culture documented the events pertaining to the Jews in the city of Šiauliai during the Holocaust, from the Soviet regime through the ghetto years under Nazi German occupation. Pick meticulously chronicled and analyzed the events, enlightening his "future readers" with profound insights into human nature and the essence of humanity exposed in what he termed the "Valley of Slaughter." The diary sheds light on numerous aspects of Holocaust research: the history of medicine in extreme situations, the Jewish society's reaction pattern to gradual destruction, ethical dilemmas, philosophical reflections on the unique nature of the Holocaust, and more. Pick's first-person testimony of coping with the Germans' decrees to murder fetuses in their mothers' wombs is singularly powerful, making the diary essential reading."
~Miriam Offer, Western Galilee College
"In this important account — part memoir, part diary — of Jewish life under Bolshevik and then Nazi occupation in Siauliai, Lithuania, the English-language reader gains access for the first time to the observations and reflections of Aharon Pick, a medical doctor active in Jewish communal affairs and politics. Pick wrote with a journalist's flair for an important story and a humanist's care for the individual. His searing record offers scholars fresh insights into Jews' experience of the Holocaust in Lithuania and will be suitable for classroom use as well."
~Alexandra Garbarini, Charles R. Keller Professor of History, Williams College
"Dr. Aharon Pick's memoir and diary open a new window into the wartime history of Šiauliai, the site of one of Eastern Europe's lesser-known ghettos. Superbly edited and introduced by Gabriel Laufer and Andrew Cassel, this deeply personal account, suffused with a spirit of intense anguish, forces us to confront the day-to-day reality of the persecution and death which the Nazis and local collaborators inflicted on one of Lithuania's oldest and most prosperous Jewish communities."
~Saulius Sužiedėlis, Millersville University of Pennsylvania
Listen to Gabriel Laufer and Andrew Cassel talking about Notes from the Valley of Slaughter on the A Graceful Life Podcast
Watch Gabriel Laufer talking about Notes from the Valley of Slaughter on the local news.
Listen to Gabriel Laufer and Andrew Cassel talking about Notes from the Valley of Slaughter with the Sons and Daughters of Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia on youtube.