It’s not easy finding books to represent Lithuania for Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge. Way back in 2013 I was lucky enough to discover Eliyahu Stern’s biography of Elijah ben Solomon The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism and in 2019 it was David E. Fishman’s The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis. Unfortunately, that’s been it. Until however, one day at my small town public library I came across a copy of Schoschana Rabinovici ‘s 1998 memoir Thanks to My Mother.
Rabinovici was born in Paris in 1932 to parents who were in France pursuing their studies. A few years later her family moved back to Wilno (Vilnius), then a Polish city with a significant Lithuanian, German and Jewish population. (A vibrant Mecca of Jewish life and Yiddish culture, until World War II the city was called the Jerusalem of Europe.) In 1939 the Soviet Union invaded the region as part of a secret pact with Nazi Germany to divide up Poland and the Baltic States. A short time later her family’s department store was nationalized by the Communists.
But as horrible as things were living under Soviet rule, it would get much worse under the Germans. In 1941 just two days after the Germans occupied the city they arrested and murdered her father. Just like Sara Zyskind’s family in Poland Rabinovici and her co-religionists were soon imprisoned in the local ghetto and subjected to malnutrition, disease and abuse at the hands of the Germans and their collaborators. After narrowing escaping being selected for execution, Rabinovici and her mother were eventually sent to the Kaiserwald concentration camp in nearby Latvia. As an 11 year old she was deemed too young for forced labor and therefore subject to extermination selection. Once again she narrowly avoided being selected, but this time not once but twice. Later, she would live through two additional concentration camps and an 11 day long death march in the dead of winter. Her health wrecked by the ordeal, she emerged from a week-long coma to learn she’d been liberated by the advancing Red Army. After the War her and her mother relocated to Poland before immigrating to the newly-founded State of Israel in 1950.
Memoirs like this can be grim and heartbreaking to read. But read them we must, lest we forget the horrors human beings are capable of inflicting upon each other. These books are both testimonies and warnings.
After returning Schoschana Rabinovici’s 
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