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<\/h2>\n<\/h2>\nFive 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 \u0160ven\u010dionys. The town was located near the killing fields of Poligon, where 8,000 Jews were murdered over three days in the autumn of 1941.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is always someone in a family who pushes against silence,\u201d Gabis explains when we begin chatting. \u201cAnd in my family, I have been that person.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gabis says writing the book \u201cA Guest at the Shooters\u2019 Banquet: My Grandfather\u2019s SS Past, My Jewish Family, A Search for the Truth\u201d 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.<\/p>\n