A commemorative drawing handed to me by one of my grandfather’s most devoted defenders placed him in command of the 1941 uprising in western Lithuania—and revealed what that defender chose to remember, and what he left out.

In June 2013, I sat in a one-room apartment in Aukštieji Šančiai, on the eastern edge of Kaunas, across from a man of eighty-nine. He was the last living participant in the five-day Lithuanian uprising of June 1941. His friends called him the Computer, because he could still produce any date or name you asked him for.

His name was Damijonas Riauka. He had served with my grandfather, Jonas Noreika, in the Lithuanian Activist Front, and he had spent more than twenty years assembling documents and broadcasts and leaflets to keep my grandfather’s memory clean. He translated roughly three thousand pages of my grandfather’s KGB interrogation transcripts from Russian into Lithuanian for my mother. Where the Soviet text said bandits, he wrote partisans.

He told me that what he called “the campaign by the Jews” against my grandfather was getting worse, and that it was more important than ever that I finish the book my mother had made me promise to write. The one that would clear the family name.

The Evidence He Handed Me

Then he gave me a drawing.

One sheet, hand-lettered in ink and washed with colored pencil. A banner across the bottom reads 1941 m. Sukilimas Lietuvoje, the 1941 Uprising in Lithuania. Cartoons run down the left margin inside barbed wire strung with drops of blood. A laurel wreath runs down the right. In the center, in ruled boxes, is the command structure of the uprising.[1]

He gave it to me as evidence for the defense.

The Six Districts Under Noreika

The center of the sheet branches from Kaunas into four regional commands. The third is labeled Žemaitija. Inside it Riauka listed six districts: Šiauliai, Telšiai, Mažeikiai, Kretinga, Tauragė, Raseiniai. Beneath the districts, in smaller letters, he wrote four words.

Vadas kpt. Jonas Noreika.

Commander, Captain Jonas Noreika. He gave my grandfather the rank and the command, over six western districts, in the summer of 1941, inside a document drawn to honor him. In Riauka’s world, command was the honor.

There is a second line, easy to miss, higher on the sheet. Riauka wrote that in the spring of 1941, at German order, the insurgents were told what they would be called, and the name given was TDA, Tautinė darbo apsauga. Not that the Germans approved a name. That the Germans issued one. And of all the names available, that one: Tautinio darbo apsaugos batalionas is the Kaunas formation whose men shot Jews at the Seventh Fort that summer and which was folded into the German police battalion system before the year was out. The standard chronology dates the TDA battalion to the final week of June 1941. Riauka placed the German naming in the spring. A commemorative drawing made decades later........

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