Levi Shalit, Israel, biography

Summary

Levi Shalit was a Jewish writer born in 1916 in Kuibyshev, Russia, who spent his youth in Lithuania. During the German occupation he was sent to the ghetto, where he became an active member of an underground organization. On July 29, 1944 he was deported along with the remainder of the 120,000 Lithuanian Jews to Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig. Shortly afterwards, in August 1944, he was sent to Dachau and then to its external camp Kaufering No. 2 near Landsberg. His father, who was also sent to the same external camp, died there. Levi Shalit survived and, shortly before the liberation of the camp, was evacuated along with thousands of other prisoners in the so-called “death march.” He was liberated near Wolfratshausen in Bavaria. After his liberation he lived and worked as a journalist in South Africa and Israel. In his book Beyond Dachau, published in 1980 in Johannesburg, he describes his experiences in Dachau and its external camps. The following poem is taken from that work. Levi Shalit died in Israel in 1994.

In 1984 the author returned to the Dachau, Kaufering, and Landsberg camps and wrote about it in the article “A Look Back at Hell”: “I was torn between the craving to ‘visit’ the mass graves and my vow never again to tread on German soil….”

But his wish to see his father's and friends’ graves was stronger, and so he returned in 1984 and wrote:

I was at this pit last on the day before I left Germany. I came to take leave of my father and of friends buried here.

My father expired one winter's night while he lay on a plank near me. He was so starved and emaciated, that his bones peered through his skin. With the help of a friend I carried him out of the barrack. With our weakened hands we laid him beside the pile of the dead, already frozen stiff in the icy air. I wanted to go along with the burial squad…. But the camp guards drove me back with blows. So I washed my father with my tears and left him lying among the dead …

All the pits have become one pit. The earth has been flattened….