“Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust” is 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.
Prominent Lithuanian writer Ruta Vanagaite and preeminent Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff visited 35 killing fields throughout Lithuania — 234 mass Holocaust graves in that country — and five in Belarus, where Lithuanian police murdered 15,000 to 20,000 Jews in 1941-42 in that country alone. The authors personally were linked to many of these sites through family history. At each site they visited, they encountered the old men and women who, as young children, witnessed mass murders; the authors are forced to confront history and memory, and shatter conventional understandings of both. Continue reading “Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust and the Writers Who Revealed It”
