Notes from the Valley of Slaughter: A Memoir from the Ghetto of Siauliai, Lithuania

Notes from the Valley of Slaughter is an eyewitness journal and diary of the Holocaust, written in the ghetto of Siauliai, Lithuania, by Dr. Aharon Pick (1872-1944). A physician, scholar, and community leader, Pick was a keen observer of the hardships of ghetto life, and his journal represents a detailed account of the tragic events he witnessed as well as a sensitive, almost poetic personal testament.

Pick’s journal covers the tumultuous late 1930s, the 1940-41 Soviet occupation of Lithuania, and the catastrophic German invasion and occupation, during which more than 90 percent of Lithuania’s Jews were murdered. Pick was among a handful of Siauliai Jewish physicians spared execution and allowed to work for the occupiers. Although Pick succumbed to illness in spring 1944, shortly before the ghetto was liquidated, his son Tedik buried the manuscript before fleeing the ghetto, retrieved it after liberation, and carried it with him to Israel.

Notes from the Valley of Slaughter isone of only a handful of diaries to survive the annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry. Translated for the first time into English and extensively annotated, it conveys Pick’s voice to a wider international audience for the first time.

Aharon Pick was born in Kedainiai, Lithuania, in 1872. After graduating from the Sorbonne, he practiced medicine in Siauliai, Lithuania. In 1941, along with his wife, Dvorah Tatz Pick, he was forced into the Siauliai ghetto, where he worked in the ghetto hospital. He died of illness in June 1944.

Gabriel Laufer, the son of two Holocaust survivors, was born in Budapest, grew up in Israel and currently lives in Charlottesville, VA. He earned a PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University and served as a professor at the Technion in Israel and at the University of Virginia until his retirement. He is the author of A Survivor’s Duty which describes the survival of the author’s father in the Holocaust and his own participation in Israeli wars.

Born in 1950 and raised near New York City, Andrew Cassel spent 35 years writing and editing for US newspapers, covering business, politics, and culture. A graduate of Dartmouth College, in retirement he earned a master of liberal arts degree at the University of Pennsylvania, also studying Yiddish in the US and Europe. He has translated a range of historical and biographical essays while curating a website devoted to Jewish history in Lithuania and elsewhere.