“Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust” In Discussion with Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Ruta Vanagaite and Dr. Michael Berenbaum

Classrooms Without Borders in partnership with Rodef Shalom Congregation and the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage is honored to welcome Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Rūta Vanagaitė and Holocaust scholar Dr. Michael Berenbaum to convene a discussion about the role played by ordinary Lithuanians in collaborating with the Nazis during the Holocaust, and the compelling quest for truth undertaken by the authors, Dr. Zuroff, a descendant of the victims, and journalist Ruta Vanagaite, a descendant of the perpetrators.
About the Book:
Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust authored by RŪTA VANAGAITĖ AND EFRAIM ZUROFF

A famous Nazi hunter and a descendent of Nazi collaborators team up on a journey to uncover Lithuania’s Holocaust secrets.

This remarkable book traces the quest for the truth about the Holocaust in Lithuania by two ostensible enemies: Rūta a descendant of the perpetrators, Efraim a descendant of the victims. Rūta Vanagaitė, a successful Lithuanian writer, was motivated by her recent discoveries that some of her relatives had played a role in the mass murder of Jews and that Lithuanian officials had tried to hide the complicity of local collaborators. Efraim Zuroff, a noted Israeli Nazi hunter, had both professional and personal motivations. He had worked for years to bring Lithuanian war criminals to justice and to compel local authorities to tell the truth about the Holocaust in their country. The facts that his maternal grandparents were born in Lithuania and that he was named for a great-uncle who was murdered with his family in Vilnius with the active help of Lithuanians made his search personal as well.

Our People exposes the significant role in implementing the Final Solution played by local political leaders and the prewar Lithuanian administration that remained in place during the Nazi occupation. It also tackles the sensitive issue of the motivation of thousands of ordinary Lithuanians who were complicit in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. At the heart of the book, these are the issues that Rūta and Efraim discuss, debate, and analyze as they crisscross the country to visit dozens of Holocaust mass murder sites in Lithuania and neighboring Belarus. This book follows them on their remarkable journey as they search for neglected graves, interview eyewitnesses, and uncover hints of the rich life that had existed in hundreds of Jewish communities throughout Lithuania.

Dr. Efraim Zuroff

Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the director of the Center’s Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs. For four decades, he has played a major role in facilitating the prosecution of many Nazi war criminals all over the world. He is the author of four books (translated into 15 languages) and numerous articles on Holocaust-related issues and their impact on the Jewish world. A recipient of many honors, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008.

Rūta Vanagaitė

Rūta Vanagaitė is an award-winning Lithuanian producer, journalist and author. Her third best-selling book, “Our People”, co-authored with Israeli historian and Nazi-hunter Dr. Efraim Zuroff, deals with the complicity of Lithuanians in Holocaust crimes. The book has been translated into 5 languages and recently came out in English.

In October 2017, all of Vanagaitė’s books (6 titles, 27 000 copies altogether) were removed from the book shelves in Lithuania after she said a critical comment about one of Lithuania’s national heroes.

In June 2020, Ruta self-published another book on the Shoa in Lithuania, written together with a top German historian, Dr. Christoph Dieckmann. The book “How Did It Happen?” will come out in English in Spring 2021. After living in Israel for 3 years, Ruta has recently returned to Lithuania.

Dr. Michael Berenbaum

Dr. Michael Berenbaum is a writer, lecturer, and teacher consulting in the conceptual development of museums and historical films. He is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust at the American Jewish University, where he is also a Professor of Jewish Studies.

He was the Executive Editor of the Second Edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica that reworked, transformed, improved, broadened and deepened, the now classic 1972 work and consists of 22 volumes, sixteen million words with 25,000 individual contributions to Jewish knowledge. For three years, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. He was the Director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Hymen Goldman Adjunct Professor of Theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. From 1988–93 he served as Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, overseeing its creation. He also served as Deputy Director of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, where he authored its Report to the President.

Berenbaum is the author and editor of twenty books, scores of scholarly articles, and hundreds of journalistic pieces. His most recent books include: Not Your Father’s Antisemitism, A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors and After the Passion Has Passed: American Religious Consequences, a collection of essays on Jews, Judaism and Christianity, Religious Tolerance and Pluralism occasioned by the controversy that swirled around Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion. He was the conceptual developer on the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Educational Center and played a similar function as conceptual developer and chief curator of the Belzec Memorial at the site of the Death Camp. He is currently at work on the Memorial Museum to Macedonian Jewry in Skopje, the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, and the Holocaust and Humanity Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.