We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust

ISBN-13: 9780803230125 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 288 str.

Ellen Cassedy

Opis

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."