Simchat Torah in two Holocaust-era diaries

Simchat Torah is a holiday associated with joy and new beginnings. It marks the completion of the annual cycle of Torah reading and its immediate renewal: The final verses of Deuteronomy are read, followed by the opening of Genesis. In synagogues, the holiday is traditionally celebrated with singing, dancing and processions with Torah scrolls.

While doing research, I came across two Holocaust-era diaries preserved by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, both of which recorded Simchat Torah.

One was written by Dr. Aharon Pick, a physician imprisoned in the Šiauliai ghetto in Lithuania. The other belonged to Ben Zion Kalb, who spent part of 1944 hiding with other Jews in a bunker in Kežmarok, Slovakia. Both diaries are quoted here from English translations provided by the Museum.

Pick had been a physician and an active participant in Jewish cultural life in Šiauliai before the war. After the Germans occupied Lithuania in 1941, he and his family were forced into the Šiauliai ghetto, where he continued to work as a physician.

When Simchat Torah arrived, Pick described it in just a few words:

“A day full of nostalgia and despair.”

The rest of the entry explains why. Pick wrote that the official food ration was “not enough even for a child.” Jews tried to bring potatoes and bread into the ghetto, while German authorities treated those efforts as smuggling and threatened severe punishment. Jewish policemen were ordered to search people returning to the ghetto for hidden food. Pick himself was searched, while his son, who served in the ghetto police, was expected to search others.

“We are all very hungry, starving for bread,” Pick wrote.

Later, writing about the holiday, he drew on the language of Isaiah: “Our light was darkened, and the mirth of the land was gone.”

A year later, Pick was still in the ghetto and still writing. His entry for Simchat Torah 5704 (1943) described his deteriorating health. He had been prohibited from going into town to work and was managing the ghetto clinic while suffering from severe illness.

He returned to his diary because, as he put it, events required him to “write it down.” Elsewhere, he described his desire to “leave a memory” of what people in the ghetto were experiencing.

Ben Zion Kalb’s diary records a different kind of confinement.

Kalb was born in Poland and fled to Slovakia after the German invasion. He later became involved with the Slovak Working Group, helping refugees cross the border between Hungary and Slovakia. By the fall of 1944, he was hiding with several other Jews in a bunker in Kežmarok.

His diary records the routines and tensions of underground life: fear of discovery, poor air, sickness, card games, arguments, news of the war and worry about family members.

On October 10, 1944, Kalb wrote, “Today was Simchat Torah. I don’t know who had the joy and who the Torah.”

The same entry records small changes that made life underground more bearable. Miklos Vrana, who was helping to hide the group, arranged a system that allowed them to communicate with the house above, sang songs to them and installed an electric ventilator.

Kalb called it “a very cheerful evening.”

The entry soon returns to uncertainty. Kalb wrote about tensions in the bunker and worried about his wife, Clara, who was hiding elsewhere. He ended: “May G-d have mercy and be on us.”

Elsewhere in the diary, Kalb wrote, “When they don’t let us live in the world then we’ll make a life there.”

For Pick, life in the ghetto still included medicine, communal responsibility, memory and Torah. He called Torah and service to the community “the two pillars of our existence” and imagined a future in which, as he wrote, “we will live again.”

For Kalb, life underground included prayer, worry, arguments, jokes, songs and the recognition that another holiday had arrived.

The diaries themselves are part of the history. After Pick’s death in June 1944, his son David buried the diary and recovered it after liberation. Kalb kept his diary from September 1944 through January 1945 while in hiding. Both were eventually preserved by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Neither account was written decades later with the outcome already known. Both were created during persecution, when their authors could not know what would survive.

Their value extends beyond documenting destruction. They also preserve Jewish life during the Holocaust.

Nazi Germany and its collaborators sought to destroy Europe’s Jews and Jewish communal life. Pick and Kalb recorded the people, obligations, worries, rituals and ordinary moments that remained part of life under persecution.

Their Simchat Torah entries preserve that complexity. Pick described the holiday as a day of “nostalgia and despair.” Kalb asked “who had the joy and who the Torah” and, in the same entry, remembered a cheerful evening.

When we teach and remember the Holocaust, those details matter. They help us understand the lives people continued to live, document and preserve.

LAURA AUKETAYEVA, Ph.D. is the director of education and programs at the Sandra Bornstein Holocaust Education Center.