Download or read book Crisis War and the Holocaust in Lithuania written by Saulius Suziedelis and published by Academic Studies Press. This book was released on 2024-06-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania examines the Holocaust with a new perspective based on previously inaccessible sources. The book relates the history of the crises which preceded the Shoah, describes in detail the process of destruction, and concludes by addressing Lithuanian society's struggles to confront the legacy of unprecedented violence.

Download or read book The Nazi s Granddaughter written by Silvia Foti and published by Regnery History. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Shadow of Death written by Harry Gordon and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2013-07-24 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " Holocaust survivor Harry Gordon recalls in brutal detail the anguished years of his youth, a youth spent struggling to survive in a Lithuanian concentration camp. A memoir about hope and resilience, The Shadow of Death describes the invasion of Kovno by the Red Army and the impact of Soviet occupation from the perspective of the ghetto's weakest and poorest class. It also serves as a reminder that the Germans were not alone responsible for the persecution and extermination of Jews.

Download or read book Undigested Past written by Robert van Voren and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Acknowledgements -- Lithuanian Historical Background -- Origins of Anti-Semitism -- Jewish Life in Lithuania between World Wars -- The Holocaust in Lithuania -- Issues of Compliance and Collaboration -- The Human Dimension -- Why Did it Happen? -- From Black and White to Shades of Grey -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index of Names -- About the Author.

Download or read book Our People written by Rūta Vanagaitė and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2020-03-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling 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. Focusing on the central role played by ordinary Lithuanians, they expose the efforts of past and current Lithuanian governments to hide these crimes.

Download or read book The Holocaust in Lithuania Between 1941 and 1944 written by Arūnas Bubnys and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A booklet presenting a brief account of the events of the Holocaust in Lithuania, divided into three periods: June-November 1941, when, through pogroms and Nazi mass shootings, 80% of Lithuanian Jews were murdered; December 1941-March 1943 - a period in which the Nazis exploited the Jewish work force; and April 1943-July 1944, when the remnants of the Lithuanian Jews were killed. Focuses on the ghettos in Kaunas and Vilnius, and mentions Jewish resistance as well as help rendered to Jews by some Lithuanians. Includes photographs.

Download or read book The Golden Age of the Lithuanian Yeshivas written by Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Golden Age of the Lithuanian Yeshivas tells the story of the last chapter of Jewish rabbinical schools in Eastern Europe, from the eve of World War I to the outbreak of World War II. The Lithuanian yeshiva established a rigorous standard for religious education in the early 1800s that persisted for over a century and continues to this day. Although dramatically reduced and forced into exile in Russia and Ukraine during World War I, the yeshivas survived the war, with yeshiva heads and older students forming the nucleus of the institutions. These scholars rehabilitated the yeshivas in their original locations and quickly returned to their regular activities. Moreover, they soon began to expand into areas now empty of yeshivas in lands occupied by Hasidic populations in Poland and even into the lands that would soon become Israel. During the economic depression of the 1930s, students struggled for food and their leaders journeyed abroad in search for funding, but their determination and commitment to the yeshiva system continued. Despite the material difficulties that prevailed in the yeshivas, there was consistently a full occupancy of students, most of them in their twenties. Young men from all over the free world joined these yeshivas, which were considered the best training programs for the religious professions and rabbinical ordination. The outbreak of World War II and the Soviet occupation of first eastern Poland and then Lithuania marked the beginning of the end of the Yeshivas, however, and the Holocaust ensured the final destruction of the venerable institution. The Golden Age of the Lithuanian Yeshivas is the first book-length work on the modern history of the Lithuanian yeshivas published in English. Through exhaustive historical research of every yeshiva, Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky brings to light for the first time the stories, lives, and inner workings of this long-lost world.

Download or read book The Lithuanian Slaughter of Its Jews The Testimonies of 121 Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust in Lithuanian Recorded by Leyb Koniuchowsky in Displa written by Leyb Koniuchowsky and published by . This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Townsfolk saw Jews being confined, tortured, abused and taken away. Peasants with wagons at times helped to transport Jews and their property.Besides that portion of the population that actively participated in the slaughter of the Jews, or engaged in torture or rape, many local people appropriated or "inherited" Jews' houses. The same happened with household property, including the clothes Jews had to remove at the pits before they were murdered. Money and jewellery not taken by the Germans or by those in charge was extorted by townsfolk or rural people.It was common for Jews to entrust their property to Lithuanian friends or neighbors, "until after the war." The mass slaughter meant that most often, this property was never reclaimed. In some cases Lithuanians later betrayed Jews who tried to recover their property.On the other side, there were Lithuanians who were honest, and who risked their own lives and the lives of their family members to help Jews. Today we salute, honour, and thank them. Moreover, it is important to recognize that contemporary Lithuanians are not guilty of the crimes of earlier generations.Yet the current Lithuanian government, unlike the German government, is reluctant to take full responsibility for genocide committed on its territory. Indeed, some of the perpetrators have been honoured as heroes for resisting the Soviet occupation. They have commemorative plaques and streets named after them. None of these "heroes" were prosecuted when alive.The extent of participation in the genocide of Jews and collaboration with Nazis is still downplayed in Lithuania and the current Lithuanian government is seeking to legislate their responsibility away. We hope that this attitude and honouring of criminals will change.David Solly Sandler [email protected]

Download or read book 1939 written by Šarūnas Liekis and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2010 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.

Download or read book The Book Smugglers written by David E. Fishman and published by University Press of New England. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts-first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets-by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion-including the readiness to risk one's life-to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author's interviews with several of the story's participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi "expert" on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city's great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed "the Paper Brigade," and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group's worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto's secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet "liberation" of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved-only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR. Thoroughly researched by the foremost scholar of the Vilna Ghetto-a writer of exceptional daring, style, and reach-The Book Smugglers is an epic story of human heroism, a little-known tale from the blackest days of the war.

Download or read book A Pragmatic Alliance written by Vladas Sirutavičius and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Rescue the Surviving Souls written by Adam Teller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The mid-seventeenth century witnessed an enormous wave of Jewish refugees and forced migrants from the wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who spread across the Jewish communities of Europe and Asia. A series of wars that hit the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth-the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648; the Muscovite invasion that begin in 1654; and the Swedish incursion from 1655 to 1660-all together forced many Jews out of their homes. Though not the direct targets of the combatants, within a short time many were deeply involved in the conflicts, some becoming victims of violence and some becoming arms-bearing participants. But most became refugees and forced migrants. These refugees posed a huge social, economic and ethical challenge to the Jewish world. In an unprecedented manner, the Jewish centers around Europe answered this challenge and, both individually and jointly, organized relief for the Polish-Lithuanian Jews in all the different places they now found themselves. The need for concerted action on behalf of the Polish Jewish refugees strengthened ties between communities across Europe, and significantly increased the range of communal co-operation. The book moves through the three different environments the refugees found themselves in. The first part looks at the refugees who remained within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, probing the local and regional policies of relief that would eventually prove so successful in helping them overcome the traumas of their past. The second examines the Jews who were brought to the slave markets of Constantinople, and then redeemed there by newly developed philanthropic systems that had raised the money to do so. The third examines the fate of the Jews who fled to Central and Western Europe, examining tensions that developed within the local Jewish populations between the need to help the refugees and a basic antipathy born of cultural difference. In each case, a web of inter-communal connections was created to help support the refugees-bringing different parts of the Jewish world into an extraordinary level of purposeful contact, and paving the way for similar organization in the future. As a result, the seventeenth century communities set in motion processes of change that would eventually be refashioned into the globalized Jewish world we know today"--

Download or read book Flight and Rescue written by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of more than 2,000 Polish Jewish refugees who fled across the Soviet Union to Japan, where they awaited entrance visas to the United States and elsewhere.

Download or read book Bloodlands written by Timothy Snyder and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.

Download or read book Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism written by Kata Bohus and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-26 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reined into the service of the Cold War confrontation, antifascist ideology overshadowed the narrative about the Holocaust in the communist states of Eastern Europe. This led to the Western notion that in the Soviet Bloc there was a systematic suppression of the memory of the mass murder of European Jews. Going beyond disputing the mistaken opposition between “communist falsification” of history and the “repressed authentic” interpretation of the Jewish catastrophe, this work presents and analyzes the ways as the Holocaust was conceptualized in the Soviet-ruled parts of Europe. The authors provide various interpretations of the relationship between antifascism and Holocaust memory in the communist countries, arguing that the predominance of an antifascist agenda and the acknowledgment of the Jewish catastrophe were far from mutually exclusive. The interactions included acts of negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing. Detailed case studies describe how both individuals and institutions were able to use anti-fascism as a framework to test and widen the boundaries for discussion of the Nazi genocide. The studies build on the new historiography of communism, focusing on everyday life and individual agency, revealing the formation of a great variety of concrete, local memory practices.

Download or read book The Litvaks written by Dov Levin and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lithuania was home to the great yeshivot of Jewish learning, as well as nationalistic movements such as Hovevei Zion, the Bund, and the Mizrachi. The 20th century saw the establishment of a modern Hebrew Zionist educational system in the period between the two world wars.This volume includes special features such as a bibliography in seven languages, a lexicon of place names in both official modern transcription and the traditional spelling used by Jewish residents; statistical tables; facsimiles of documents, and unique photographs many of which appear in print for the first time.

Download or read book Hitler and the Holocaust written by Robert S. Wistrich and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2001-11-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hitler and the Holocaust is the product of a lifetime’s work by one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of anti-Semitism and modern Jewry. Robert S. Wistrich begins by reckoning with Europe’s long history of violence against the Jews, and how that tradition manifested itself in Germany and Austria in the early twentieth century. He looks at the forces that shaped Hitler’s belief in a "Jewish menace" that must be eradicated, and the process by which, once Hitler gained power, the Nazi regime tightened the noose around Germany’s Jews. He deals with many crucial questions, such as when Hitler’s plans for mass genocide were finalized, the relationship between the Holocaust and the larger war, and the mechanism of authority by which power–and guilt–flowed out from the Nazi inner circle to "ordinary Germans," and other Europeans. He explains the infernal workings of the death machine, the nature of Jewish and other resistance, and the sad story of collaboration and indifference across Europe and America, and in the Church. Finally, Wistrich discusses the abiding legacy of the Nazi genocide, and the lessons that must be drawn from it. A work of commanding authority and insight, Hitler and the Holocaust is an indelible contribution to the literature of history.