Lithuania’s Holocaust skeletons come to light in Rita Gabis’s book, which explores the 220,000 Lithuanian Jews killed during WWII — and the people who let it happen
Five years ago, Rita Gabis, a poet and teacher based in New York, discovered a family secret: from 1941 to 1943 her grandfather had been the chief of security police under the Gestapo in the Lithuanian town of Švenčionys. The town was located near the killing fields of Poligon, where 8,000 Jews were murdered over three days in the autumn of 1941.
Backed up by an impressive amount of scholarly research and interviews with family members, war crimes investigators, Holocaust victims and numerous historians, Gabis, who comes from an interfaith family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics, has recently published a book that attempts to unveil this culture of silence in Lithuania’s dark history. Her work, part memoir, part history, is an incredibly honest and moving account of searching for the truth at all costs, even at the expense of breaking familial loyalties.
“There is always someone in a family who pushes against silence,” Gabis explains when we begin chatting. “And in my family, I have been that person.”
Gabis says writing the book “A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet: My Grandfather’s SS Past, My Jewish Family, A Search for the Truth” gave her an opportunity to think long and hard about her own family history, while also giving her the opportunity to ask several questions about human morality. The narrative is an interesting mix of daily journalistic diary entries, memoir and painstaking family soul-searching.
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