Until the age of fourteen, Zev Birger enjoyed an idyllic childhood growing up in Kaunas, a flourishing city of mostly progressive Jews in Lithuania. His father held a secure job as an engineer, his mother was warm and loving, and he remembers many blissful afternoons spent playing in the family’s garden after Hebrew school.
Inspired by Zionist writers, young Zev and his friends firmly believed in the need to establish a homeland for Jews. They could not have known at the time how urgent that need would become in their own lives. In 1940, the Russian army, then a year later the German Nazi machine, invaded Lithuania. The Birgers, along with all the other Jews in the area, were forced into the ghetto in nearby Slobidka.
In simple but powerful prose, Zev describes his family’s efforts to survive in this ghetto, including being discovered by the SS in a cellar hideaway as gunfire sounded from the approaching front. In 1944, the Birgers were deported to the Dachau/Kaufering concentration camp, where Zev was forced into heavy labor in an underground arms factory. He was the only member of his family to survive.
In this brief but moving story, many of the atrocities of ghetto and camp life as they were experienced by a teenaged boy come to light: the last moment he saw his mother’s face as she was taken away; the Children’s Atkion in 1944, during which more than two thousand children were rounded up and murdered; the rampant starvation and disease around him. But there were also moments of light: a compassionate doctor who spared the boy when he was sick, and numerous brushes with death that left him, astonishingly, alive.
Zev credits his stubborn nature, sheer will, and good luck for allowing him to outwit his oppressors on so many occasions and survive until liberation in 1945. The physical and mental strength that saw him through the terrible years would serve him years later when he became involved in the establishment of the State of Israel and a driving force behind the publishing and printing industry in his young country. As a man of books, of language and literature, of cinema and theater, Zev Birger has always supported diversity in Israel’s cultural life. His gift of bringing people together is a source of inspiration for young and old everywhere. His story is a testament to hope, survival, and accomplishment.
