The Lithuanian Slaughter Of Its Jews

Author : Leyb Koniuchowsky
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780994619525
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Lithuanian Slaughter of Its Jews written by Leyb Koniuchowsky and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 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." -- From Amazon.com.

Author : Leyb Koniuchowsky
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780994619518
Total Pages : 570 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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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]

Author : Karen Sutton
Publisher : Gefen Books
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Massacre of the Jews of Lithuania written by Karen Sutton and published by Gefen Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reports on the Nazi genocide of Jews in Lithuania, dwelling on Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust or passive response to it. Describes the Holocaust in Vilnius, Kaunas, and some other places, and Jewish reactions to it, including attempts at resistance. Dismisses theories that the cause of Lithuanian collaboration was the widespread linkage of Jews with communism and the real or exaggerated Jewish role in the Sovietization of Lithuania in 1940-41. Although the traumatic experience of Sovietization exacerbated the ethnic conflict in Lithuania, those Lithuanians who murdered Jews in Kaunas, Vilnius, and elsewhere acted out of pre-existing hatred. The root of this hatred, which manifested itself in the prewar period as well, was economic competition with the Jews and religious and cultural distance from them. Argues that the Lithuanians showed an ability to resist Nazi policies in situations that were vital to them, e.g. concerning mobilization for work in Germany. They could have also resisted the Nazi genocide of Jews, but it was not regarded as vital.

Author : Ellen Cassedy
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 0803240228
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book We Are Here written by Ellen Cassedy and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ellen Cassedy’s longing to recover the Yiddish she’d lost with her mother’s death eventually led her to Lithuania, once the “Jerusalem of the North.” As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years after he’d left Lithuania in a boxcar, made a shocking disclosure about his wartime experience, and an elderly man from her ancestral town made an unsettling request. Gradually, what had begun as a personal journey broadened into a larger exploration of how the people of this country, Jews and non-Jews alike, are confronting their past in order to move forward into the future. How does a nation—how do successor generations, moral beings—overcome a bloody past? How do we judge the bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators, rescuers, and ourselves? These are the questions Cassedy confronts in We Are Here, one woman’s exploration of Lithuania’s Jewish history combined with a personal exploration of her own family’s place in it. Digging through archives with the help of a local whose motives are puzzling to her; interviewing natives, including an old man who wants to “speak to a Jew” before he dies; discovering the complications encountered by a country that endured both Nazi and Soviet occupation—Cassedy finds that it’s not just the facts of history that matter, but what we choose to do with them.

Author : Dov Levin
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1571812644
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Litvaks written by Dov Levin and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses some aspects of antisemitism in Lithuania, especially in socioeconomic terms, in the Middle Ages and under the Russian tsars. The 20th-century interwar period saw the introduction of anti-Jewish laws that negatively impacted on Jewish political involvement, economic activity, and physical security, and the situation worsened with a right-wing coup, at which time Nazi influence grew among the German minority. The peak of antisemitism is treated in pt. 4 (pp. 187-247), "World War II, the Holocaust, and the Jewish Survivors". Although Soviet rule in 1940-41 ended many restrictions, it harmed Jews culturally and economically; many were arrested or exiled. The Nazi occupation which followed led to the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. Even before the arrival of the German army, ca. 10,000 Jews were murdered by Lithuanians. German troops brought the Final Solution, in which Lithuanian collaboration was massive. Discusses ghettos, forced labor, and concentration camps, as well as Jewish partisan resistance. 96% of Lithuanian Jews were killed. Popular antisemitism was revived in postwar Lithuania. The issues of Lithuanian-Nazi collaboration and the Lithuanian association of Jews with communists to justify the massacre of Jews during World War II remained problems in the postwar and even post-communist periods.

Author : Silvia Foti
Publisher : Regnery History
ISBN 13 : 1684511089
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Alvydas Nikžentaitis
Publisher : Rodopi
ISBN 13 : 9789042008502
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews written by Alvydas Nikžentaitis and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2004 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lithuanian Jews, Litvaks, played an important and unique role not only within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but in a wider context of Jewish life and culture in Eastern Europe, too. The changing world around them at the end of the nineteenth century and during the first decades of the twentieth had a profound impact not only on the Jewish communities, but also on a parallel world of the "others," that is, those who lived with them side by side. Exploring and demonstrating this development from various angles is one of the themes and objectives of this book. Another is the analysis of the Shoah, which ended the centuries of Jewish culture in Lithuania: a world of its own had vanished within months. This book, therefore, "recalls" that vanished world. In doing so, it sheds new light on what has been lost. The papers presented in this collection were delivered at the international conferences in Nida (1997) and Telsiai (2001), Lithuania. Participants came from Israel, the USA, Great Britain, Poland, Russia, Belarus, Germany, and Lithuania.

Author : Jeffrey Veidlinger
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
ISBN 13 : 1250116260
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book In the Midst of Civilized Europe written by Jeffrey Veidlinger and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD * SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE “The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research, clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book. As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can do.” —Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.

Author : Arūnas Bubnys
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 64 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Riva Lozansky
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 166 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book If I Forget Thee-- written by Riva Lozansky and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: