Life Must Go On: The Remarkable Story of Sol Lurie, the Kovno Ghetto, and the Tragic Fate of Lithuania’s Jews

In this poignant account, Lurie and Holocaust scholar Jacobs (Antisemitism) retrace the steps of Lurie’s father Sol, who survived six different Nazi concentration camps. In 1941, at 11 years old, Sol and his family, along with the entire Jewish population of Kovno, Lithuania, were rounded up in a ghetto established by the Nazis. The Kovno ghetto’s residents would later be taken to the Stuffhof concentration camp, from which Sol was then moved through five others: Kaufering, Landsberg, Dachau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. He narrowly escaped death on multiple occasions, sometimes due to luck, but often, as Sol would stress later in life, due to the unexpected kindness of others (at one point, in a shocking inversion of reader expectation, a Nazi soldier whom Sol family’s met on the road advised them not to continue in the same direction because Lithuanians further down the path were killing all the Jews who passed by). Sol didn’t begin sharing his story until 2004, but when he did, he emphasized that he was not “leaving this world until I accomplish my mission... that people love and respect one another.” The book is somewhat unevenly paced, as the authors alternate between Sol’s experiences and drily academic chapters on the wider war and Jewish history in the region. Still, it makes for an informative contribution to Holocaust studies. (June)