ugh the material, I came across a document with his signature from 1941 and everything changed. The story of my grandfather was much darker than I had known.
I learned that the man I had believed was a savior who did all he could to rescue Jews during World War II had, in reality, ordered all Jews in his region of Lithuania to be rounded up and sent to a ghetto where they were beaten, starved, tortured, raped and then murdered. More than 95 percent of Lithuania’s Jews died during World War II, many of them killed with the eager collaboration of their neighbors. […]
Lithuania is like many other countries that spent 50 years under Soviet occupation. During this time, there was a deep freeze on the truth: Lithuanians were only allowed to talk about how many Soviet citizens were killed during World War II. References to Jewish victims were scrubbed away by the occupiers. I would like to think that if Lithuania had been a free and independent nation after World War II, it might have acknowledged its own role in the Holocaust.
Correcting historical memory turned out to be dangerous. When I publicly questioned the official story of my grandfather’s life, I was vilified by the Lithuanian community in Chicago and in Lithuania. I was called an agent of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Lithuanian leaders still believe their country’s identity depends on holding onto its heroes, even at the cost of the truth. […]/p>
Transforming a Nazi collaborator into a national hero requires four steps of manipulation. One step shifts all the blame to the Nazis, even though my grandfather, like many Lithuanians, willingly participated in slaughtering Jews. The second step creates a victim narrative, asking how a Jew killer could be sent to a Nazi concentration camp. The third step discredits counternarratives by labeling them as Communist propaganda told by enemies of the state. The final step refuses to accept that two seemingly contradictory truths can coexist: Noreika bravely fought against the Communists and shamefully participated in killing Jews.
Silvia Foti's book The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Learned My Grandfather Was a War Criminal is due out this spring.
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