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 is one 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.