Sol Lurie

Sol was born in Kovno, Lithuania on April 11, 1930. He was the son of Shimon and Basja Lurie. The family owned a successful lumber business. He was the youngest of four brothers.

Sol was just eleven years old when Germany attacked the Soviet Union and invaded Lithuania in June 1941. The Nazis eventually ordered Sol and his family to move into the newly created Kovno Ghetto. While the Nazi occupiers forced others in his family into slave labor, Sol spent the days hiding to avoid execution.

Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis incarcerated young Sol in six concentration camps –Stutthof, Kaufering-Landsberg, Dachau, Birkenau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He survived, barely escaping death on countless occasions. His mother was killed two days before the Allies liberated the Stutthof camp.

After being liberated in 1945, Sol was sent to an orphanage in France. In 1947, he moved to the United States to live with family members in Brooklyn, New York. After working different jobs in Brooklyn through his teenage years and early twenties, Sol joined the U.S. Army in 1952 and was deployed to serve in Germany. He rose to the rank of corporal and was honorably discharged from the Army in September 1954. Three months earlier, he became a U.S. citizen while stationed in Frankfurt.

In 1957, Sol married Evelyn Rebecca Perkal who had escaped from wartime Poland in 1939 and fled to Siberia with her family at age three. They eventually moved to the Canarsie neighborhood, bought a home there and raised two daughters – Beatrice (Bea) and Esther – and a son – Charles. After Evelyn’ death in 1993, Sol married the former Raja Binen.

Just over 20 years ago, Sol first began to tell the story of his resilience and survival. He spoke at Holocaust commemorations and at gatherings of young people with a simple message: to love, not to hate. Since speaking about his experience, he has received more than 10,000 letters from children across the country. In 2025, Pegasus Books published Life Must Go On: The Remarkable Story of Sol Lurie, the Kovno Ghetto, and the Tragic Fate of Lithuania’s Jews co-authored by his daughter Bea and Dr. Steven Leonard Jacobs.

Sol would tell others, “When you love, it makes you feel good, and it makes the other people feel good. We have a beautiful world to live in. But it's not the world that makes the people, it is the people that make the world."

Sol Lurie is survived by his two daughters and son, son-in-law David, granddaughter Emily and her husband Michael and the children, sons-in-law and grandchildren of his wife Raja. He was preceded in death by his wives Evelyn and Raja, his mother and father, his brothers, his grandson Seth and many other relatives and friends that he made in his long life.

May his memory be for a blessing as it most surely will be.