The Jews of Birzai

“Dusk approached, yet the lingering sun stubbornly revealed the ruthless efficiency that primal evil has when armed with bullets, power, and blind obedience. The sun itself was soon ashamed of the images it was forced to show. As the sun set and the Sabbath arrived, there was nobody alive to celebrate it. Just as the last trace of smoke escaping from the barrel of the murderer’s rifle announced that the lives of the Biržai Jews had been extinguished, so did the final smolder from the Shabbat candles this night proclaim the end of a once vibrant Jewish community.” Excerpt, The Jews of Biržai: The Last Sabbath.

The Jews of Biržai launches the reader swiftly into the pre-World War II life of Biržai, a town in northeastern Lithuania where Jews and their neighbors share the same desires for living quiet lives. Amid the growing winds of war, the Jews of Biržai are increasingly faced with the sudden contrast from normalcy to anxiety and fear, and finally to the resignation of betrayal, and the hopelessness and horror of an inevitable fate.

The Jews of Biržai, memorializes not only the lives of its families murdered in the summer of 1941, but honors them with positive and hopeful stories recovered from both the Jews who suffered through this time and the righteous Lithuanians who helped and saved some of them. This book provides a legacy of the shtetl, memorializes the 2400 who died on August 8, 1941, and commemorates the millions of victims who were lost in the Holocaust.