In the middle of the night on July 29, 1941, the Gestapo arrested Shalit at his home on 15 Pohulanka Street (now called Basanaviciaus Street in modern Vilnius, Lithuania), a street also home to novelist Romain Gary and YIVO founder Max Weinreich. Shalit was one of the victims of the Ponary massacre, which took place eight kilometres southwest of Vilna. The bodies of 70,000 executed Jews were thrown into ditches in the forest of Ponar. Shalit's wife Deborah and their youngest daughter Ita were killed several months later in Belorussia where they had fled. The Holocaust extended throughout Europe; Yiddishland was to be wiped out.