My grandfather, the Nazi war hero, pens Lithuanian author

Silvia Foti grew up believing her grandfather was a war hero but a deathbed promise to her mother to write a book about his life unearthed a buried history. Instead, as the title of her newly-launched book reveals, she discovered that Jonas Noreika was a notorious Lithuanian war criminal and, she was, as summed up by the book’s title, The Nazi’s Granddaughter.

The literary excavation she undertook meant sifting through not just a family denialism and cover-up but also exposing how Lithuania still struggles to face the truth of its Holocaust complicity.

“My grandfather gave the order to kill all the Jews in the town of Plungė,” says Foti who later also discovered that “my grandfather, grandmother, aunt, and mother took over the house of a Jewish family” living in the area throughout the massacres.

At the same time, she discovered, that “Lithuanians pretended to be completely blind to what was happening to the Jews. To me, this was also astounding: half the town is missing, and you don’t notice?” Foti, an investigative journalist and teacher, was speaking at an online discussion hosted by the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre, Jacob Gitlin Library, and Jewish Literary Festival earlier in May.

She was born in Chicago within an expat Lithuanian community so insular, Foti recounts her mother’s pride when she arrived in kindergarten fluent in Lithuanian but unable to speak English yet. She was nurtured on stories of her grandfather as a “wonderful hero from World War II”, one who died in the KGB (Committee for State Security) prison in 1947 at the age of 36, tortured, and then shot “because he was trying to lead a revolt against the communists in 1945”.

“Before that, I heard he was in a Nazi concentration camp for almost two years, and this was because he tried to save Jews.” His legacy was so potent politically that in 1997, the Lithuanian government presented the family with the highest posthumous award possible – the Order of the Cross of Vytis. Within their family, Foti watched her mother spend decades collecting bookshelves of material about him for a book which she was always planning to write.

However, in 2000, Foti’s mother, at the age of only 60, became ill. “I went to visit her in hospital and she called me to her bedside and said, ‘Sylvia, you have to write the book.’” Although Foti found it painful to agree to the task as it meant acceptance of her mother’s dying, she agreed, knowing it meant so much to her. “Then she died, and here I was left with the deathbed promise. I started bringing over all the material to my house and very, very slowly going through things.”

However, a few months later, Foti’s maternal grandmother had a heart attack. “Now I was at her death bed, and she asked me how the book was going. I said, ‘Grandmother, everything is fine, I will get it done.’ I thought I was giving her great words of comfort. But then she said, ‘Don’t write the book; just let history lie.’” At the time, Foti thought that perhaps her grandmother was trying to prevent putting her under pressure. “And I said, ‘No, no, I’m going to do it; I promised mom.’ My grandmother didn’t like that answer. She rolled over and faced the wall, and that was the end of the conversation.”

Foti’s grandmother died shortly afterwards. Both she and Foti’s mother wanted to be laid to rest in Lithuania. Little did Foti know that the trip she then took in October 2000 with her brother to bury their remains would lead to the first exhumation of the truth.

During the trip, they “were invited as honorary guests to visit the school named after our grandfather. The school children greeted us grandly with flowers and Lithuanian songs.” While in conversation with the school’s director, who praised her for taking on the writing of the book about her grandfather, saying that the country needed “heroes”, they moved to discussing how the school came to be named after her grandfather. The director confessed that while they were thrilled to be able to rename it “after such a magnificent hero”, he had “got a lot of grief” for the choice.

“I said, ‘Grief from whom?’ and he said, ‘From the Jews.’ I said, ‘What could the Jews possibly say about my wonderful grandfather?’ He looked at me like it was strange that I didn’t know this, and said, ‘Your grandfather was accused of killing Jews.’ That was the first time I had ever heard anything – just anything – like that. I was completely blindsided.”

So overcome was Foti, she had to sit down to compose herself. The director comforted her by telling her the allegations were simply communist propaganda. This remains a frequent narrative in Lithuania, says Foti, with the idea being that the Jews killed were part of the communist threat.

However, as Foti then began going through the documentation which her mother had acquired, irrefutable and incriminating proof emerged. She discovered that in addition to her grandfather giving the orders to massacre the Jews of Plungė, as governor of the Šiauliai district, a position held during Nazi rule, he had drafted documentation for the rounding up of all the Jews in the area as well as for the creation of a ghetto.

“I shortly found out that the Jews were murdered within six weeks. They chose the date of Yom Kippur to start murdering them.” All in all, he signed about a hundred documents related to the Holocaust.

“It was devastating. I really did go into a state of depression, of wanting to drop the whole project. I kept asking myself, ‘Why me? I’m just the granddaughter. I’m not a PhD in history.’ Yet it was like a magnet that pulled me back in.”

In completing the book, Foti has learnt to sit with many unanswered questions about her mother and grandmother’s awareness of the truth. In one of the books in her mother’s collection, she found that her grandmother had underlined a passage which mentioned her grandfather’s order to kill Jews. “So, she knew this. She had read it, and my final conclusion is that she just went into denial like all the Lithuanians do.”

With her mother, “we talked for hours and hours about this project and her father, and she never once brought this side of it up”. She imagines that perhaps her mother asked her to carry on with the project hoping either that Foti would ignore the evidence, or even find a way to exonerate her grandfather. Ultimately though, “I just don’t know,” Foti muses.

The book has received widespread attention worldwide, and Foti’s bravery in uncovering the darkness in her own family story has been heralded. On a personal level, it has caused rifts with some family members, with one even threatening to sue her for defamation of character.

It’s reflective of the struggle Lithuanians have in accepting their collaboration with Nazis, suggests Foti. “It’s like there’s a glass wall between what happened and what Lithuanians think happened, and they just can’t cross over and look at the horror of it.”