Our People

Our People
Author: Ruta Vanagaite
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2020-03-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1538133040

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.

Lithuanians in Michigan

Lithuanians in Michigan
Author: Marius K. Grazulis
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 108
Release: 2009-03-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0870139207

In Lithuanians in Michigan Marius Grazulis recounts the history of an immigrant group that has struggled to maintain its identity. Grazulis estimates that about 20 percent of the 1.6 million Lithuanians who immigrated to the United States arrived on American shores between 1860 and 1918. While first-wave immigrants stayed mostly on the east coast, by 1920 about one-third of newly immigrated Lithuanians lived in Michigan, working in heavy industry and mining. With remarkable detail, Grazulis traces the ways these groups have maintained their ethnic identity in Michigan in the face of changing demographics in their neighborhoods and changing interests among their children, along with the challenges posed by newly arriving "modern" Lithuanian immigrants, who did not read the same books, sing the same songs, celebrate the same holidays, or even speak the same language that previous waves of Lithuanian immigrants had preserved in America. Anyone interested in immigrant history will find Lithuanians in Michigan simultaneously familiar, fascinating, and moving.

The Nazi's Granddaughter

The Nazi's Granddaughter
Author: Silvia Foti
Publisher: Regnery History
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684511089

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.

A Pragmatic Alliance

A Pragmatic Alliance
Author: Vladas Sirutavičius
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2011-06-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 6155053189

Discusses the political cooperation between Jews and Lithuanians in the Tsarist Empire from the last decades of the 19th century until the early 1920s. These years saw the transformation of both Jewish and Lithuanian political life. Within the Jewish community, the previously dominant integrationists were now challenged both by those who believed that the Jews were not a religious but an ethnic or proto-nationalist group and those who believed that only with the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist state would Jewish integration be possible. Among the Lithuanians, the emergence of a modern national identity became increasingly prevalent.

The Lithuanians in America, 1651-1975

The Lithuanians in America, 1651-1975
Author: Algirdas M. Budreckis
Publisher: Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. : Oceana Publications
Total Pages: 188
Release: 1976
Genre: History
ISBN:

A chronology of Lithuanians in America from the 17th century to the present accompanied by pertinent documents.

The Lithuanians

The Lithuanians
Author: Audrey Adams Hill
Publisher: Author House
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2013-09-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1491803762

The Lithuanians is a story of two brothers, Mikael a Roman Catholic priest, and Erik an officer in the Third Reich, and the extraordinary journey to find each other. It is also a love story between Mikael and Sophie a beautiful resistance fighter and Erik and Sara who find love on Half Way Island during the days of World War II and his commitment to find Sara after the war ended. As the war ends Sophie moves to England to begin a life without Mikael. She eventually marries a man much older then she is, and they immigrate to the United States where she meets Lukas, the handsome son (a doctor) of her wealthy husband. Their torrid love affair is brief and ends tragically. Michael, a Roman Catholic priest adopted by a couple in Lithuanian, and Erik, an officer in the Third Reich raised by a German couple, finally celebrate the reunion that had been denied to them for three decades.

1939

1939
Author: Šarūnas Liekis
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 9042027622

"This gripping and well-documented account of the history of the town of Vilnius and its surrounding region from the Polish ultimatum of March 1938, which forced Lithuania to open diplomatic relations with Poland, to the incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union in June 1940 is set against the evolution of Lithuania's relations with her neighbours during this crucial period. It is a major contribution to the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the subsequent evolution of Nazi Soviet relations. Prof. Liekis presents a remarkable history based on archival sources never before utilized in any English-language study. In revealing the geopolitical, ideological, economic, social and ethnic dimensions of an immense tragedy in the heart of Europe, the author provides a new perspective on the unraveling of a society and nation during the initial days of World War II as prelude to the most violent period in European history."--Publisher's description.

Lithuania Ascending

Lithuania Ascending
Author: S. C. Rowell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2014-03-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107658764

This book, first published in 1994, studies the rise of a pagan state in late medieval Christendom against a background of crises in Europe.