Sarah Shimonovitz

Sarah Shimonovitz was born in 1896 to a large, well-founded family in Vilna. She and her husband raised two children and the entire family was involved in the community in the city that was known as a hub of Jewish culture and was even dubbed “Lithuania’s Jerusalem”.

Vilna, the End of the Road is the incredible true story of her life after the Nazi invasion of Vilna in June 1941, during operation Barbarossa. Sarah was left alone after her husband was murdered by the Nazis, her son led a group of friends to join the partisans in the forest, and her daughter was sent to a labor camp near Riga.

This book is the unbelievable tale of her survival, from the daily struggle of the ghetto, through her daring leap from the train leading the ghetto’s Jews to the death camps, to her wanderings in the forests, attempt to join the partisans, and her eventual return to free Vilna following the defeat of the Nazis.

After the war, she was miraculously reunited with her daughter, who had escaped from a labor camp and found refuge with a Latvian family. Her son was tragically killed as a partisan during a battle against the Germans in White Russia.

In 1946, like many other Lithuanian Jews who survived the Holocaust, Sarah immigrated to Poland with her daughter and husband, a former academic student who had fought at the front for the Red Army. In 1949, the family came to Israel together with a new grandchild and settled in Tel Aviv. Shortly after their arrival in Israel, Sarah began to put her memories to paper. For long days and nights she persistently wrote, corrected, printed, and rewrote, painstakingly describing the events of her life. Her manuscript was written in Yiddish and was left unpublished for many years, except for small excerpts that were printed in a Yiddish newspaper in South America.

After she passed away in 1981, Sarah’s daughter decided to publish her mother’s memories. The manuscript was edited and translated into Hebrew by author Nathan Livneh, and the book was finally published in its first edition in 1989. In light of the interest and comments the book received, the family decided to publish the book in English as well for the whole world to read, and thus its English edition was born.