[The Nazi's granddaughter: how I discovered my grandfather was a war criminal. Silvia Foti] ; [Vėtra Lietaus šalyje: Jono Noreikos anūkės pasakojimas. Silvia Foti] : recenzija

ENThe content of the book under review and its dominant emotion is ideally conveyed in its English title: it is a story of disenchantment, and a narrative about how the faults of oneʼs own family were felt. The book is about the authorʼs grandfather Jonas Noreika, a Lithuanian hero who participated in the resistance against two occupying powers. Noreika participated in the anti-Soviet uprising of 1941, and afterwards was appointed chairman of the Šiauliai region. Then he participated in the anti-Nazi resistance, and in 1943, due to the universal boycott of the formation of a SS legion in Lithuania, he and a group of other famous Lithuanian activists were arrested by the Nazis and imprisoned in the Stutthof concentration camp. After his release, by that time in Soviet-occupied Lithuania, he founded and led the National Council of Lithuania, an anti-Soviet underground organisation, was arrested, sentenced to death, and shot in 1946. However, on sitting down to write her grandfatherʼs biography, Foti discovered his darker side. The book is just as controversial as its subject, history and its memory. Readers may often be angered simply by the frequent errors and false interpretations, with nothing to do with the historical past; and yet the story is interesting and absorbing. From the outset, it should be stated that the book is not a historical study about Jonas Noreika and his participation in the massacre of the Jews, even though its narrative also reads almost like a detective story, one where the culprit, incidentally, is known from the beginning. The author tries to work out what kind of person her grandfather was, collecting information from various sources, always finding more and more biographical facts that had been withheld. After the 1941 uprising, obeying Nazi orders, he set up a Jewish ghetto; and other facts come to light suggesting his participation in the Holocaust. [...]. [Extract, p. 218]