Dies Kind soll leben : die Aufzeichnungen der Helene Holzman 1941-1944

A memoir, written immediately after the liberation of Kovno, describing life in the town and in the ghetto under Nazi occupation. Holzman, a German woman, moved to Kovno with her Jewish husband in 1922. Immediately after the German invasion, her husband was seized on the street; he was shot soon after. Later, her older daughter (aged 17) was arrested and executed as a "communist". Holzman and a younger daughter survived. She joined an informal network of women who tried to help Jewish acquaintances in the ghetto, to smuggle them out and hide them, or to intervene for them with the authorities. One of the latter cases was that of Edwin Geist, a German-Jewish composer who was married to a Lithuanian. The Nazis' condition for allowing him to live with his wife outside the ghetto was that she be sterilized. In the end he was shot and she committed suicide. Relates, also, tells the stories of Jews from other ghettos, especially Vilna. Pp. 319-342 relate the story of Tolja Szabszewicz of Łask in Poland; she was 13 years old when the Germans invaded. Describes the persecution of Jews in the ghetto; the massacre of most of the Jews of Łask, while Tolja was among those selected for work in Łódź; her deportation to Auschwitz, and then to Stutthof and to the labor camp Schippenbeil; and her escape from a death march. 1. Aufl. 384 pages : illustrations, maps ; 22 cm