Author: Karen Sutton
Publisher: Gefen Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Reports on the Nazi genocide of Jews in Lithuania, dwelling on Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust or passive response to it. Describes the Holocaust in Vilnius, Kaunas, and some other places, and Jewish reactions to it, including attempts at resistance. Dismisses theories that the cause of Lithuanian collaboration was the widespread linkage of Jews with communism and the real or exaggerated Jewish role in the Sovietization of Lithuania in 1940-41. Although the traumatic experience of Sovietization exacerbated the ethnic conflict in Lithuania, those Lithuanians who murdered Jews in Kaunas, Vilnius, and elsewhere acted out of pre-existing hatred. The root of this hatred, which manifested itself in the prewar period as well, was economic competition with the Jews and religious and cultural distance from them. Argues that the Lithuanians showed an ability to resist Nazi policies in situations that were vital to them, e.g. concerning mobilization for work in Germany. They could have also resisted the Nazi genocide of Jews, but it was not regarded as vital.
Author: Ruta Vanagaite
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538133040
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
A famous Nazi hunter and a descendent of Nazi collaborators team up on a journey to uncover Lithuania’s Holocaust secrets. This remarkable book traces the quest for the truth about the Holocaust in Lithuania by two ostensible enemies: Rūta a descendant of the perpetrators, Efraim a descendant of the victims. Rūta Vanagaitė, a successful Lithuanian writer, was motivated by her recent discoveries that some of her relatives had played a role in the mass murder of Jews and that Lithuanian officials had tried to hide the complicity of local collaborators. Efraim Zuroff, a noted Israeli Nazi hunter, had both professional and personal motivations. He had worked for years to bring Lithuanian war criminals to justice and to compel local authorities to tell the truth about the Holocaust in their country. The facts that his maternal grandparents were born in Lithuania and that he was named for a great-uncle who was murdered with his family in Vilnius with the active help of Lithuanians made his search personal as well. Our People exposes the significant role in implementing the Final Solution played by local political leaders and the prewar Lithuanian administration that remained in place during the Nazi occupation. It also tackles the sensitive issue of the motivation of thousands of ordinary Lithuanians who were complicit in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. At the heart of the book, these are the issues that Rūta and Efraim discuss, debate, and analyze as they crisscross the country to visit dozens of Holocaust mass murder sites in Lithuania and neighboring Belarus. This book follows them on their remarkable journey as they search for neglected graves, interview eyewitnesses, and uncover hints of the rich life that had existed in hundreds of Jewish communities throughout Lithuania.
Author: Silvia Foti
Publisher: Regnery History
ISBN: 1684511089
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
Hero–or Nazi? Silvia Foti was raised on reverent stories about her hero grandfather, a martyr for Lithuanian independence and an unblemished patriot. Jonas Noreika, remembered as “General Storm,” had resisted his country’s German and Soviet occupiers in World War II, surviving two years in a Nazi concentration camp only to be executed in 1947 by the KGB. His granddaughter, growing up in Chicago, was treated like royalty in her tightly knit Lithuanian community. But in 2000, when Silvia traveled to Lithuania for a ceremony honoring her grandfather, she heard a very different story—a “rumor” that her grandfather had been a “Jew-killer.” The Nazi’s Granddaughter is Silvia’s account of her wrenching twenty-year quest for the truth, from a beautiful house confiscated from its Jewish owners, to familial confessions and the Holocaust tour guide who believed that her grandfather had murdered members of his family. A heartbreaking and dramatic story based on exhaustive documentary research and soul-baring interviews, The Nazi’s Granddaughter is an unforgettable journey into World War II history, intensely personal but filled with universal lessons about courage, faith, memory, and justice.
Author: Ellen Cassedy
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803240228
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Ellen Cassedy’s longing to recover the Yiddish she’d lost with her mother’s death eventually led her to Lithuania, once the “Jerusalem of the North.” As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years after he’d left Lithuania in a boxcar, made a shocking disclosure about his wartime experience, and an elderly man from her ancestral town made an unsettling request. Gradually, what had begun as a personal journey broadened into a larger exploration of how the people of this country, Jews and non-Jews alike, are confronting their past in order to move forward into the future. How does a nation—how do successor generations, moral beings—overcome a bloody past? How do we judge the bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators, rescuers, and ourselves? These are the questions Cassedy confronts in We Are Here, one woman’s exploration of Lithuania’s Jewish history combined with a personal exploration of her own family’s place in it. Digging through archives with the help of a local whose motives are puzzling to her; interviewing natives, including an old man who wants to “speak to a Jew” before he dies; discovering the complications encountered by a country that endured both Nazi and Soviet occupation—Cassedy finds that it’s not just the facts of history that matter, but what we choose to do with them.
Author: Riva Lozansky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166
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Book Description
Author: Grigoriĭ Kanovich
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780995560055
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Author: Leyb Koniuchowsky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780994619525
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
"More than five centuries of Jewish life in Lithuania was abruptly ended when Lithuanian Jews were slaughtered en masse in the second half of 1941. The testimonies published here tell of the destruction of Jewish life in Lithuania. Perpetrators of the massacre, most of them Lithuanians, acted with enthusiasm and in many cases without help or supervision from the invading Germans. The testimonies are not pleasant to read. They tell of the horrors and evils inflicted on Lithuanian Jews. Many echo the same pattern of degradation and slaughter: Lithuanians first attacked Jews morally and spiritually, imposing assorted humiliating labours, torture and other evils; then began their physical annihilation. Armed bands of self-described "partisans" took control of Lithuanian towns as soon as the occupying Soviets left. Often, even before the Germans arrived, these bands started to terrorise and abuse the Jewish population: Partisans and others broke into Jewish homes and brazenly looted Jewish property. Jailings, torture, and summary executions began shortly afterward. First to be killed were Jews with Soviet connections; later, any perceived or invented offence could mean execution, or a Jew could be killed for no reason at all. Jews' non-moveable possessions were claimed by their Lithuanian neighbors, particularly the partisans and their families. Eventually, the Jews were taken to pits dug in nearby forests to be shot. Amid the chaos of this organized slaughter, many were buried alive in the pits. At times partisans broke small children on their knees or bashed their heads on trees before throwing them, half dead, into a pit. From the 121 testimonies published here, it is clear that the slaughter of the Jews was widely known." -- From Amazon.com.
Author: Rita Gabis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620401290
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 484
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Book Description
In prose as beautiful as it is powerful, Rita Gabis follows the trail of her grandfather's collaboration with the Nazis; a trail riddled with secrets, slaughter, mystery, and discovery. Rita Gabis comes from a family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. She was close to her Catholic grandfather as a child and knew one version of his past: prior to immigration he had fought the Russians, whose brutal occupation of Lithuania destroyed thousands of lives before Hitler's army swept in. Five years ago, Gabis discovered an unthinkable dimension to her family story: from 1941 to 1943, her grandfather had been Chief of Security Police under the Gestapo in the Lithuanian town of Svencionys, near the killing field of Poligon, where 8,000 Jews were murdered over three days in the fall of 1941. In 1942, the local Polish population was also hunted down. Gabis felt compelled to find out the complicated truth of who her grandfather was and what he had done. Built around dramatic interviews in four countries, filled with original scholarship, and mesmerizing in its lyricism, A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet is a history and family memoir like no other, documenting “the holocaust by bullets” in a remarkable quest as Gabis returns again and again to the country of her grandfather's birth to learn all she can about the man she thought she knew.
Author: Jeffrey Veidlinger
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1250116260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD * SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE “The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research, clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book. As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can do.” —Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.
Author: Sigitas Parulskis
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
ISBN: 0720620341
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
Part of the Peter Owen World Series: BalticsLithuania, 1941, Vincentas has made a Faustian pact with an SS officer: in exchange for his own safety and that of his Jewish lover, Judita, he will take photographs - 'make art' - of the mass killings of Jews in the villages and forests of his occupied homeland. Learning of the pact that has kept her safe for so long, a disgusted Judita returns to her husband, surrendering herself to the ghetto, leaving Vincentas alone and trapped in his horrifying work. Through the metaphor of photography, Sigitas Parulskis lays bare the passivity and complicity of many of his countrymen during the Holocaust in which 94 per cent of Lithuania's Jewish population perished. Translated from the Lithuanian by Karla Gruodis
