Uncovering my grandfather’s role shattered my family’s past—and Lithuania’s national myth

I grew up in a Lithuanian household in Chicago where my grandfather’s photograph hung on the dining room wall. My mother and grandmother told me he was a hero — he fought the Soviets, he was tortured in a KGB prison, he died for Lithuania’s independence. That was the story. It was told with love and certainty by people who needed their suffering to mean something noble. I believed every word.

The Discovery that Changed Everything

It took me twenty years of research to understand that my grandfather, Jonas Noreika, administered the murder of thousands of Jews as head of Šiauliai district in 1941. I published that finding in Storm in the Land of Rain. The discovery cost me my community, many of my relationships, and the version of my family I had carried since childhood. But the deepest loss was not the hero. It was the story behind the hero — that Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust was reluctant, coerced, a tragic chapter forced on an unwilling nation. That story is the foundation of Lithuanian national memory. It is also a lie.

What the Jewish Witnesses Record

Avraham Tory began his Kaunas diary on June 22, 1941, the day of the German invasion. He was writing from inside the event, before postwar alibis had time to harden. What he recorded was plain: “The Lithuanians did not conceal their joy at the outbreak of the war: they saw their place on the side of the swastika........

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