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)

Survival and storytelling. As the last survivors of the Holocaust depart, their children continue to tell their stories. In this account of one survivor's life in the vanished world of Lithuanian Jewry, Sol Lurie's daughter and her collaborator tell of a young boy stripped of his childhood. Lurie is far from the most famous of survivors. Yet his personal tale gives hope to modern readers faced with political struggle and an increasing social intolerance. The heart of this book is a history of the Jews in Lithuania: how 19th- and early-20th-century cities such as Vilna and Kaunas became centers of religious learning. The schools and rabbis of those cities shaped modern Judaism--how the Torah and the Talmud are taught, how rabbinic authority gains its voice, and how men and women could live devotional lives in the modern world. The book presents a readable, capsule history of Jewish life in northern Europe, largely for the purpose of restoring Lithuanian traditions to a history long seen as moving largely between German-speaking urban secularism and Slavic shtetl devotion. The real impact of the work may not be its recap of history or its personal tale, but rather the way that it encourages everyone to tell a unique story of survival. At stake is less the detail of life in the camps (a story told and retold powerfully over the past several decades) than the afterlife of those who made it through. If the injunction "never forget" remains, remembering will always be about the story, whether it is mundane or magical. A moving tale of personal resilience, told through a history of Lithuanian Jewry. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.