July 1 to August 15, 1941; The Jewish population, 29,000 of Kovno, Lithuania was forced into a small area of primitive dwellings without running water. The inmates were used as slave labor in factories outside the Ghetto.
Pregnant women faced death and policy dictated all Jewish infants be murdered. There was a network through which infants could be secretly placed with Lithuanian foster mothers. In January 1943 the Kovno Ghetto was converted to a concentration camp. Thousands, including in one episode, 2400 children, were shot by Lithuanians. As it became clear Germany might well lose, most of the residents were sent to larger concentration camps. There was organised resistance. A few days before the end of the war the camp was blown up in an effort to kill all left and hide what happened there.
There is currently an effort underway in Lithuania to make it a crime to suggest the government of the country during WW Two aided in the killing of Lithuanian Jews. This shameful action is the moral and intellectual equivalent of the United States making it illegal to suggest the government once supported slavery.
There are not a lot of translated Yiddish short stories online. The underlying works are often now in the public domain but the translations are not. My main reason for picking this story to post upon is that it can be read online.
This is an emotionally powerful story. Nothing tugs at the heart more than an infant murdered because of their biological heritage. The central character has been successful at hiding her pregnancy. She asks the doctor helping her to take the baby, rather than let the Nazi supporters kill him. She knows she cannot hope the baby will live but at least she does not surrender him.
The ending is heart warming.
Copyright © Estate of Shira Gorshman 2011. Translation copyright © Faith Jones 2011
Shira Gorshman (1906–2001) was born in Krakes, Lithuania. Raised partly by her grandparents due to her family’s poverty, she became self-supporting and independent at a young age. In 1924, she went with her first husband to Palestine to become part of a communal labour group which attempted to live out their socialist ideals through the Zionist movement. When this group splintered, Gorshman went with the more radical branch to Crimea, taking her young children with her. Living on a communal farm in Crimea for several years, she came into contact with official visitors including the artist Mendel Gorshman. They married and she and her children returned with him to Moscow. At that point, with encouragement from her husband’s circle of artistic and literary friends, she began to write. Her stories were published in Soviet and Polish Yiddish periodicals, and she had several collections and novels published. After the death of her husband, and her children’s emigration, she followed them to Israel. Arriving in Israel in 1990 in her mid-eighties, she nonetheless energetically produced new stories and books until her death in 2001, as well as republishing many of her Soviet-era stories, which were otherwise not available in Israel.
Faith Jones is a librarian in Vancouver, Canada, and a graduate student investigating Yiddish print culture in Winnipeg. Her writing has appeared in Canadian Jewish Studies, The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Publishing Research Quarterly, The Forward, and Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, where she also served as Yiddish editor.
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