For decades, pop­u­lar Holo­caust nar­ra­tives have often high­light­ed sur­vivor sto­ries: tragedy tem­pered by resilience and glimpses of human­i­ty amid hor­ror. These accounts, to be sure, are vital. It’s cru­cial to pre­serve the first­hand per­spec­tives of the few who survived. 

Late­ly, though, a shift has emerged. More recent works move beyond uplift­ing nar­ra­tives to por­tray the raw suf­fer­ing, emo­tion, and over­whelm­ing mor­tal­i­ty Jews faced. Grit­ti­er and less hope­ful than many well-known mem­oirs, these accounts reflect a more com­mon Holo­caust expe­ri­ence — one that end­ed in death.

Such is the case with Levi Shalit’s So We Died: A Mem­oir of Life and Death in the Ghet­to of Šiau­li­ai, Lithua­nia, recent­ly trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish by Veron­i­ca Belling, Ellen Cassedy, and Andrew Cam­my and pub­lished by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alaba­ma Press. Writ­ten in the imme­di­ate after­math of the war’s end, when mem­o­ries were fresh and emo­tions raw, Shalit chron­i­cled life in his Lithuan­ian vil­lage start­ing with the Ger­man occu­pa­tion and cre­ation of the Jew­ish ghet­to through its even­tu­al liq­ui­da­tion in 1943. 

As Belling explains in her excel­lent intro­duc­tion to the text, So We Died is not strict­ly chrono­log­i­cal, but arranged the­mat­i­cal­ly, mak­ing it sim­ple for read­ers and researchers to learn spe­cif­ic details about life — and death — like how food coop­er­a­tives worked, how the ghet­to admin­is­tra­tion was run, and how Jew­ish offi­cials tried to main­tain some sem­blance of schools for kids. While most read­ers can nev­er know what it was like to live in the ghet­tos, such pas­sages help illu­mi­nate inti­mate details of ghet­to life in a rich yet haunt­ing way. 

One of the most remark­able aspects of So We Died is the empha­sis that Shalit puts on large- and small-scale Jew­ish resis­tance. ​“The more time pass­es,” he writes in the open­ing chap­ter, ​“the more it becomes clear that in the esti­ma­tion of ​‘the world,’ our con­fine­ment in the ghet­tos and con­cen­tra­tion camps was due to our own egre­gious error … and under the pres­sure of the apa­thy of the world toward the vic­tims, and the grow­ing for­give­ness toward the mur­der­ers … the voic­es of accu­sa­tion become more and more muf­fled.” A sen­ti­ment that, per­haps, feels uncom­fort­ably rel­e­vant to our own world, Shalit’s writ­ing makes it clear that the Nazis and their (many) Lithuan­ian allies were the sole aggres­sors and, impor­tant­ly, that their Jew­ish vic­tims did what­ev­er they could to under­mine their pow­er. Whether it was the ghetto’s resis­tance group, Masa­da, procur­ing guns for what they hoped would be an armed rebel­lion, enslaved fac­to­ry work­ers who stole prod­ucts from their Nazi-run work­shops, or the small army of women and chil­dren who smug­gled food to feed the ghet­to, Shalit makes sure that their efforts are remem­bered by the world, even if those efforts, imper­fect and dif­fi­cult as they were, were not enough to stop the Nazis from deport­ing and killing most of their ghetto’s prisoners.

Shalit esti­mates that of the town’s 10,000-person Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, only about 600 indi­vid­u­als sur­vived, mean­ing a stag­ger­ing 94% of their town’s Jews were killed. In So We Died, Shalit and his trans­la­tors make sure that their voic­es, names, and expe­ri­ences are not forgotten.