Today I finished reading your book. My congratulation to your research and collection of all testimonies, and names, which you have described, honoring the sacrifice so many inhabitants from Birzai and relatives suffered during this cruel times. With your book you have given to all those people a tremendous face in history, by not forgetting their sufferings and sacrifices. I was deeply moved from the different stories described, also sometimes smiling about the little tender spots and sentences about feelings from some people, which you have given a picture for remembering to all readers, as like descendants of these people. I furthermore will recommend it to my contacts/visitors to Landsberg memorial.

Intriguing, experienced the fear and inevitable march of evil
The Jews of Birzai is a remarkable memoir of life and death in one of the many small forgotten towns decimated by mindless hatred in Europe during WWII. I found it intriguing because after eighty years of silence in an ignoble grave, the author resurrects the Jews of Birzai and frees them to live again to tell their story. Using extensive research and adding narratives and dialogue throughout the book, the author equips the characters ably so I could see and feel who they were and how they lived. As the tension grew, I experienced the fear and inevitable evil they faced.

Intense portrait of life and death in WWII Lithuania
The book recreates the vibrant Jewish town of Birzai before WWII. As the story progresses, the sense of unease gives way to terror as the last days of the town are recounted. It’s an intense read, and a deeply personal account of Einsatzgruppen terror that gives color to the lives of ordinary people meeting a tragic fate.

Incredibly Moving Historical Narrative
The story of this book started with the author researching his family ancestry, but what he uncovered in his research has resulted in an incredibly intimate and moving account of an entire community destroyed in the Holocaust. Stories of pain and loss are intertwined with stories of immense bravery and survival. All the while, knowing that the people in this story were the great aunts, uncles, cousins, of the author, made it so much more real, personal, and emotional.

It was a remarkable accomplishment. It was especially gratifying to see how Berl Magid’s autobiography served as a connecting thread giving the work a “protagonist” and making the story to easier to follow. Of course it’s a horrible story to follow. You’ve written this very painful account to memorialize the vast majority of his landsmen who didn’t survive. I’ve never read anything that so carefully and in such gruesome detail walks the reader through the harrowing slaughter that killed the Jews in the Holocaust, and demonstrates the bestiality of those Lithuanians who so eagerly turned on their neighbors, murdering them and then stealing their stuff.

Your depiction of Lithuanian collaborators highlights their drunken savagery. I think though that many of them would have acted the same sober. Thank goodness there are handful of humane and courageous Litviners. You handled role of the communists and how they were treated unusually fairly. I’m also glad that you explained at the end what was historically fiction and what was imagined. For posterity’s sake it’s probably good that you made the book accessible to non-Jews by carefully defining all the Hebrew and Yiddish terms. For now, I don’t think that most of your readers will need all those definitions.

In 39 short, detailed, intense chapters followed by the informative Epilogue, End Notes & Yizkor List of Names and with a Bibliography & Index, the author has written a readable, comprehensively researched, beautifully moving book about the tragedy of the Jews of Birzai/Birzh, a town in northern Lithuania where they had lived for hundreds of years.

My eyes frequently filled with tears while reading. I often wished that my survivor father, who grew up there & always remembered his childhood town with affection, was still alive to read this book.

Highly recommended for learning about the cruel reality of the Holocaust in Lithuania. Recommended for ages 18 & older.

Okay, once again, I’ve wondered my usual genre of mysteries and thriller and into nonfiction. While traveling, I met Michael R. Bien, the author of The Jews of Birzai: The Last Sabbath. Not surprisingly, our conversation turned to books, and I choose to read his book. I should tell you that while it is difficult to read the close up look at the impact of the early WWII events on a small community in northern Lithuania, nonetheless, this is an important story. I’ve always found reading about the holocaust to be extremely painful. The level of inhumanity that manifested during that era and the failure of society to contain the monstrous behaviors of its leaders is a sad statement about our human species. Having a background in history, I have probably read much more about WWII than most people, but this book provided a different take. It looked at a small shtetl (a small Jewish village or town located in Eastern Europe) and particularly the individuals who lived there. Essentially, this was a microhistory of the holocaust. As Hitler began his aggression against other European countries and then signed a non-aggression back with Russia, the locals in Birzai debated what steps they needed to take. For most of the inhabitants of the shtetl, there could be no escape from murder, but a few fortunate people found a way out. Bien tracks them all in his book in what is a meaningful addition to the holocaust literature.