Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 240
•
Trim: 6½ x 9¼
978-1-5381-3303-3 • Hardback • March 2020 • $24.95 • (£18.95)
978-1-5381-3304-0 • eBook • March 2020 • $23.50 • (£17.95)
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. She now lives in Jerusalem.
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.
Preface Introduction: Efraim Zuroff: Lithuania and the Holocaust Part I: Before the Journey1 Efraim Zuroff: My Connection to Lithuania 2 Rūta Vanagaitė: My Connection to the Holocaust 3 Meeting the Enemy Part II: Preparation for the Journey4 Lithuania, 1941: Getting Rid of the Jews 5 Lithuania Today: Minimizing the Crimes 6 Mission Impossible? Part III: Journey with the Enemy: Thirteen Destinations7 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/Vilna20 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: Conclusion28 Human Faces of the Murderers 29 Lithuania Got Richer 30 The Farewell Afterword: Rūta Vanagaitė: Lithuania Is Angry, Lithuania Is Sad Index
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.— Jewish Journal
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
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
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, author of Why? Explaining the Holocaust
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, Holocaust historian, academic advisor, Yad Vashem
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, director, Sigi Ziering Institute, American Jewish University