History of Sorts

The history of the Holocaust is often defined by the scale of its industrial slaughter, yet some of its most profound horrors lie in the specific, targeted decrees designed to extinguish the very concept of a Jewish future. On May 7, 1942, the Nazi administration in occupied Lithuania issued a mandate that transformed the Kovno (Kaunas) Ghetto into a site of a unique biological war: a formal order stating that all Jewish pregnant women were to be executed. This decree was not merely a localized act of cruelty; it was a calculated step in the “Final Solution,” aiming to ensure that even if the current generation survived as forced labor, no future generation would follow.

On 7 May 1942 ,the Nazi regime decreed that all pregnant Jewish women in the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania would be executed unless their pregnancies were terminated by mid-September. The ghetto, established the previous June, initially held approximately 29,000 Jews; 10,000 were murdered in October alone. Those who remained were forced into slave labor for the German military, often outside the ghetto’s boundaries.

In response to the decree, Rabbi Ephraim Oshry ruled that abortion was permissible in order to save the lives of pregnant women. He argued that the mother’s life took precedence, especially since both fetuses and newborns were also condemned to death under Nazi policy. At the same time, the ghetto underground organized networks of women who smuggled children out of the ghetto using forged or borrowed documentation.

“One survivor later testified: ‘Great heroism was shown when children were taken outside the ghetto. Three-year-old Tamara Ratner was sedated with luminal so she would not make a sound. Ida Shater, together with the child’s father, carried the living parcel over the ghetto fence and left her on the doorstep of a Lithuanian children’s home. The director, Baublis, had been informed in advance, and trusted teachers received the children as “abandoned” or “deserted” children.’”

In 1943, more than 300 Jewish fighters escaped from the Kovno Ghetto to join partisan forces. Members of the Jewish Council and some Jewish police also cooperated with the resistance effort.

Leah Preiss later described the impossible conditions faced by women and medical workers inside the ghetto:

“Quite a few women refused to give in to the decree. They went underground in order to evade the prohibition, and with the help of the medical committee located near the ghetto labor department, they were released from work obligations until they delivered their babies in secret. Dr. Aharon Peretz, one of the gynecologists in the ghetto, said that because of the intensive abortion work and the shortage of proper hospitalization and treatment supplies, some operations were performed in the strangest and most dreadful conditions. Deliveries were carried out in secrecy mainly by specially trained midwives, while doctors were called only in cases of severe complications.”

sources

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kovno

https://www.holocausthistoricalsociety.org.uk/contents/balticstates/kovno.html

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/womens-health-in-ghettos-of-eastern-europe#pid-14441

https://jewishcurrents.org/may-7-pregnancy-as-a-death-sentence

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/403629467_The_Final_Final_Solution_The_War_Against_Jewish_Fetuses_in_Their_Mothers’_Wombs