A few days later, forced from their home in Kaunas, Solly, his parents, and his sister, Fanny, were herded—along with about twenty-nine thousand other Jews—into the miserable confines of the Kovno ghetto, a jumble of small, mostly primitive houses with no running water in an area called Slobodka. There for more than two years they somehow managed to survive mass starvation, periodic outbreaks of disease, and the regular mass executions that the Germans called Aktions. In one of these, the Kinder Aktion of March 27 and 28, 1944, the SS systematically murdered twelve hundred children as police
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