Book Review

摘要

A healthy baby girl was born one cold day in January 1941 in the Jewish ghetto of Shavli, a town in northern Lithuania. In ordinary circumstances, the birth of a baby would have been welcomed and celebrated by the family and the community, but these were no ordinary times. Shavli was under German occupation. The German Security Police forbade giving birth in the Jewish ghetto, and to disobey the rule meant severe punishment for the entire community and, possibly, death for the family and the physicians assisting at the birth. Newborns were killed by an injection of poison. On this occasion, however, it was decided that the quickest way to do it was to ‘drown the baby’ as ‘injections of potent poisonous drugs powerful enough to kill an adult had not produced quick results with newborns.’ Astonishingly, it took the physicians ‘a total of six minutes’ to carry out the dreadful act, ‘twice the amount of time necessary to kill an adult by suffocation’ (p. 170).