In summer of 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis gradually occupied Estonia. Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and ethnic German collaborators played a significant role in killing Jews throughout eastern and southeastern Europe.
Site where members of Einsatzgruppe A and Estonian collaborators carried out a mass execution of Jews in September 1941. Kalevi-Liiva, Estonia, after September 1944.
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Site where members of Einsatzgruppe A and Estonian collaborators carried out a mass execution of Jews in September 1941. Kalevi-Liiva, Estonia, after September 1944.
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Deportation from the Kovno ghetto to forced-labor camps in Estonia. Kovno, Lithuania, October 1943.
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Corpses of inmates from the Klooga camp stacked for burning. Soviet troops discovered the bodies when they liberated the camp. Estonia, September 1944.
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Corpses of inmates from the Klooga camp stacked for burning. Soviet troops discovered the bodies when they liberated the camp. Estonia, September 1944.
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Soviet officials view stacked corpses of victims at the Klooga camp. Due to the rapid advance of Soviet forces, the Germans did not have time to burn the corpses. Klooga, Estonia, 1944.
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Corpses of inmates discovered by Soviet troops at the Klooga forced-labor camp. Nazi guards and Estonian collaborators had executed the prisoners and then stacked the bodies for burning. Estonia, September 1944.
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At the Klooga concentration camp, Soviet soldiers examine the bodies of victims left by the retreating Germans. Klooga, Estonia, September 1944.
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Aron was the second of six children born to Jewish parents in Vilna, a city known as a center of Jewish cultural life. He was called Arke by his friends and family. Aron's father supported his large family on the meager income of a chimney sweep.
1933-39: As a child Aron attended a Jewish day school, and then went on to attend a public secondary school. When he was 14 his father had an accident which rendered him blind, and Aron had to start working full-time to support the family. Aron belonged to an underground communist group because he saw communism as a way of combatting the antisemitism in Poland. Their life in Vilna was disrupted in fall 1939 when the Soviets occupied the city.
1940-45: The Germans occupied Vilna in June 1941. On September 6 that year Aron was forced into the Vilna ghetto for two years. Two weeks before the ghetto was liquidated in 1943, he was deported to a labor camp in Estonia. Over the next year he was transferred to six labor camps, and then for 9 months to the Dautmergen concentration camp in Bavaria. There were 1,000 people in a barn-like barracks. In the middle of the room was a pot-bellied stove where they would gather in the evening so that the lice which infested their bodies would die from the heat.
Aron survived life in the camps. He weighed 90 pounds when he was liberated in May 1945 on a transport from the Dachau concentration camp to the Alps. He emigrated to America in 1949.
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