“It was necessary to kill the girl, so we decided to drown her,” wrote Aharon Pick, a doctor who died in the Šiauliai ghetto. All the inmates were subsequently sent to Stutthof and Dachau concentration camps; few survived.
The story originally appeared in Lithuanian here.
Before the war, Šiauliai was home to around 8,000 Jews, but only a few hundred survived. When the occupying Nazi German authorities decreed that Jews in the ghetto could not "reproduce", a child born in the ghetto was considered a danger to everyone.
The ghetto elders encouraged and required women to have abortions. The “lesser evil”, the death of one person rather than several, was the choice they had to make. At first, they tried using morphine to poison the children, until discovering “a more effective way”, wrote Pick.
For years, the diary Pick began in 1942 laid abandoned on a bookshelf in Israel. Only after his son’s death, it was published in Hebrew, before later appearing in English.
The manuscript was turned into a book thanks to two translators and editors, Gabriel Laufner and Andrew Cassel. The memoir, Notes from the Valley of Slaughter, tells the story of the Šiauliai ghetto in northern Lithuania.
LRT.lt interviewed one of the translators, Cassel, who visited Šiauliai earlier this year.
Most of the diary talks about the Šiauliai ghetto and the Holocaust. However, Pick also describes the earlier life of the Jewish community. Could you tell us a bit more about the Jewish community's relations with Lithuanians?
Pick starts his diary by talking about how Lithuanian attitudes towards Jews changed in the early 20th century. He describes how, even though he worked with Catholic Lithuanians in the hospital, their relationship became strained.
From the beginning, he heard whispers, for example, about “Lithuania for Lithuanians”. (Pick says in his diary that he did not feel any clear hatred from the Lithuanians from the beginning, but he did hear a mother quietly telling her son: “Shut up! A Jew is coming.” Pick recalls smiling at the woman, and there was no conflict.)
He also remembers that his colleagues received a pay rise, but he did not. He expressed resentment about this in his diary. Life for the Jews in Lithuania was getting worse and worse, and the relations between the Jews and the Lithuanians were declining throughout the entire period of the independent Lithuanian state.
In June 1940, there were rumours that Lithuanians were going to organise a pogrom. On the day it was supposed to happen, Soviet tanks rolled in. Recalling the Bolshevik invasion, Pick describes in detail what happened, from the change of government to the loss of his own job.
It’s important to note that Pick’s book consists of two parts. The first part is not a diary, but rather a memoir written after the events. Pick started writing in 1942, trying to put together and remember what had already happened. Once he has described what he remembers, he begins to record what is happening at present. The text thus, as it were, catches up with events.
He devotes a large part of the text to various prohibitions: Jews were not allowed to walk on the pavement, Jews had to wear a five-pointed yellow star on their chest and their back, Jewish doctors were not allowed to treat non-Jews, and Jews were not allowed to use the hospital and pharmacies.
Pick talks about food rations, the quantities available to people in the ghetto, and the places where food is given to them. The quantities were getting smaller and smaller.
In the diary, Pick talks about how these conditions affected people’s mental state. The lack of food and the forced labour changed even the people he knew well. People were so tense that they no longer recognised each other on the street; even their faces had changed. The sense of uncertainty was enormous, and many people in the ghetto had lost loved ones.
Pick wrote in a medical, surgical way. For example, he described the fall in moral standards. People in the ghetto did not treat each other with honesty and integrity. In Pick's view, people did things that they would certainly not have done under normal conditions. Some people took to food smuggling. Even cows were brought into the ghetto.
Pick himself was the only one in Šiauliai who had an X-ray machine and also knew how to use it. Despite the machine being taken away from him, Pick was asked to work on it. Interestingly, it gave him a sense of escape – he had something to do, and he had a job. Working there, he was able to get some food for himself and his family. Everyone was trying to survive.
The first days of Nazi Germany were horrible – two-thirds of all the Jews in Šiauliai were killed in the forest. Many others were allowed to live because they needed labour. The vast majority of the Jews who were not killed worked in the leather factory. It turned out that the Lithuanians were more keen to eliminate all the Jews, but the Germans did not agree, because they needed the labour force. They knew how to work – leather was important for the army.
The whole social structure of the city was changing. I recently spoke to the painter Samuel Bak who survived the Vilnius ghetto. The ghetto was a very diverse Jewish community, it was not homogeneous before the war. There were wealthy and the poor and people from various social backgrounds. Human life changes radically: those who have money and status lose it. Did Pick talk about this?
Maybe a little indirectly. After all, he was himself a man of high social status in the Jewish community – he healed not only Jews but also Christians. When this diary was first published in Israel in 1997, one of the children whom Pick vaccinated, and a photograph of who survives, wrote the foreword to this book.
He remembered the doctor well. Pick was a member of the intelligentsia: he listened to music at home, apparently had a music machine of some kind, and he would quote various Russian poets and Italian literature.
He considered himself a man who deserved respect. 'Nobody treats me any differently from an ordinary worker,’ he wrote. It may sound arrogant now, but it was not unusual at that time. As you say, there was a social structure, people had their places. And the war destroyed that.
You mentioned that the book only came out in Israel in 1997. That's strange because it was written much earlier than that. Tell us the story of how it came about.
Doctor Pick wrote in about 3 notebooks. His health was deteriorating, he kept mentioning pains. We do not know what happened to him – maybe cancer, maybe something else. The last entry in his diary is dated June 7, 1944.
He wrote a lot about what was happening in the war, he was always getting news and he was happy that the West had invaded Normandy. He hoped he would be saved, but he died in about two weeks.
Pick’s son, who was a member of the Jewish police in the ghetto at the time, buried the manuscript and escaped from the ghetto. He hid in the woods. About three or four weeks later, the Red Army bombed Šiauliai very heavily [about 80 percent of the city was destroyed].
The Germans liquidated the ghetto and transported the people to the concentration camps of Stuffhof and Dachau. Many of them died and only a few hundred remained. The son of. Pick returned to Šiauliai and, together with his cousin who served in the Red Army, dug up the manuscript.
Later, Tedek, the son of Pick, found himself in the refugee camps and eventually emigrated to Israel. There, Tedek founded a kibbutz together with other Holocaust survivors. He built a family and lived there until 1975.
Interestingly, this diary was just sitting on the shelf of Pick’s son and not many people knew anything about it. After Tedek's death, other survivors decided to publish the diary. I heard about the memoirs from a cousin who lived in Israel and knew about my grandfather's friendship with Pick in his youth. He sent me a newspaper clipping about the publication of the book in Israel. I was immediately interested, even though I don't speak Hebrew well enough to be able to read it fluently.
Later, around 2018, I met Gabriel Laufer, who speaks Hebrew very well, and we started translating the book. He needed my help with the English text.
Does Pick himself reflect on the meaning of writing his memoirs and diary?
It seems to him that what happens in the ghetto must be remembered. It is important for him to speak to other generations. There are places in the diary where he begins to lose hope that the horrors will end, that they will not survive. He even utters the phrase that his diary paper will be used to wrap herring; nobody will read it.
I was a little surprised that the diary was written in Hebrew – I was convinced that Yiddish was a more popular language among the Jewish community between the wars.
Pick wrote his memoirs in both Hebrew and Yiddish. It seems that he may have recorded the same thing but in both languages. When we were translating the book, I did not know where the Yiddish diary was.
When I was in Vilnius this week, I met the staff at the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History and they showed me the Yiddish version of the diary. I was amazed.
Indeed, we do not know how this version of the diary survived. The diary bears a stamp from 1945 when a few Holocaust survivors decided to set up a Jewish museum.
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