Our People: Discovering Lithuania's Hidden Holocaust

by Ruta Vanagaite, Efraim Zuroff

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538133033
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	03/15/2020
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Rūta Vanagaitė, one of Lithuania’s most popular public personalities and the successful author of numerous best sellers, became persona non grata in her homeland after this book was originally published in Lithuania. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of the center’s Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs. A Holocaust historian, popular lecturer, and author, he lives in Jerusalem.

Table of Contents

Preface Introduction: Efraim Zuroff: Lithuania and the Holocaust Part I: Before the Journey 1 Efraim Zuroff: My Connection to Lithuania 2 Rūta Vanagaitė: My Connection to the Holocaust 3 Meeting the Enemy Part II: Preparation for the Journey 4 Lithuania, 1941: Getting Rid of the Jews 5 Lithuania Today: Minimizing the Crimes 6 Mission Impossible? Part III: Journey with the Enemy: Thirteen Destinations 7 Kaunas/Kovno 8 Linkmenys/Ligmiyan 9 Švenčionys/Shventzyan 10 Kavarskas/Kovarsk 11 Ukmergė/Vilkomir 12 Šeduva/Shadeve 13 Telšiai/Telz 14 Plungė/Plungyan 15 Plateliai/Plotel 16 Tauragė/Tavrig 17 Butrimonys/Butrimants 18 Panevėžys/Ponevezh 19 Belarus Part IV: The Hell of Vilnius/Vilna 20 Portraits of the Witnesses 21 Portrait of a Student 22 Portrait of a Postman 23 Dreams of a Killer 24 Portraits of the Victims 25 Portrait of a Corpse-Burner 26 The Fates of the Killers 27 The Last Day Part V: Conclusion 28 Human Faces of the Murderers 29 Lithuania Got Richer 30 The Farewell Afterword: Rūta Vanagaitė: Lithuania Is Angry, Lithuania Is Sad Index

Editorial Reviews

It is not memory, but history that helps the authors turn over a new leaf together. .. In Lithuania, the authors visited thirty-five of the 234 mass graves of Jews mainly murdered by Lithuanians and five such graves in Belarus where Jews had been annihilated by Lithuanians as well. With few exceptions, nearly all these sites are memorialized in some way, yet they are largely neglected to the point of rendering them practically inaccessible.. .. Whenever possible, they interviewed either very old locals or younger people, some of whom (even museum officials or guides) were totally unaware either of the events of 1941 or of the prominent Jewish presence in what was once called “the Jerusalem of the north.” Documents attesting to what actually happened are included in each chapter, often followed by a dialogue between the two authors.

Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs

Our People is an immensely valuable addition to our knowledge about the genocidal murder of Lithuanian Jews. The authors’ remarkable investigation has brought to light the active role played by Lithuanian citizens, often with minimal oversight by Nazi occupiers, at hundreds of killing sites. It will serve as a powerful wake-up call for grappling with the complicit legacy of World War II.

Yehuda Bauer

Our People is a harrowing, but important, book that must be read. Uncompromising in its descriptions of the people who committed mass murder, of the Jewish communities they wiped out, of those who helped, and of those who stood by, it is also suffused with the humanity of the two narrators as they painfully learn what happened here in 1941 and what it means for a nation to face the truth of its murderous history.

Philip Rubenstein

A powerful, poignant, and painful exploration of the ‘murder by bullets’ of Lithuanian Jews by their Lithuanian neighbors. Authors Rūta Vanagaitė, a prominent Lithuanian journalist, and Efraim Zuroff, the preeminent Nazi hunter, are forced to confront history and memory, shattering conventional understandings of both. A best-selling and controversial book when first published in Lithuania, Our People has challenged many convenient truths that Lithuanians have told themselves about their national heroes, offering a clear and unapologetic portrait of Lithuania’s ‘hidden Holocaust.’

Michael Berenbaum

This is a painful and important book—painful because so much of it consists of excruciating eyewitness accounts to the torment inflicted on Lithuanian Jews by their fellow citizens, and important because so little has appeared in English on not only this terrible dimension of the Holocaust but also the reluctance, even refusal, of the descendants of the killers to acknowledge their role in the murders all these years later. The account of the Lithuanian government’s vacillations in dealing with the nation’s past is particularly eye-opening.

Peter Hayes

There are, fortunately, useful updates and additions in this English version. The authors tell us more about their relationship to each other, to Lithuania and to the Holocaust. The bitterest additions are two new chapters, one, ‘Lithuania Today: Minimizing the Crimes’, on the treatment of the Holocaust in school textbooks and official museums, the other, ‘Mission Impossible?’, on trying to trace all the graves, victims and perpetrators.

Literary Review

A powerful, poignant and painful exploration of the murder by bullets of Lithuanian Jews by Lithuanian nationalists — not Germans. The unusual team of writers consists of the granddaughter and grandniece of perpetrators, and the great nephew of a murdered Jew.. .. Our People is a rare combination of meticulous scholarship and skilled interviewing presented as a sensitive, nuanced, well-rounded and historically grounded portrait not only of the perpetrators, but of the ongoing efforts to rehabilitate them and honor the Lithuanian nationals who killed Jews.. .. Vanagaite and Zuroff began their journey deeply skeptical of each other. They end their journey having shared the deepest of dialogues, transformed, shattered yet strengthened. The reader will be privileged to share that pilgrimage and their rare openness with each other.

From the Publisher