I recently ran across an article about a book called The Nazi's Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather Was a War Criminal. The author is Sylvia Foti, a Lithuanian-American with a background very similar to mine.

The backstory:

https://silviafoti.com/who-is-jonas-noreika/

edit to add couple of other links:
https://www.chicagotribune.com...uq5ubzkru-story.html

https://news.yahoo.com/chicago...y-war-090010809.html

I put a hold on the book at the library, and while I was waiting for it to become available I decided to poke around the internet to read more about the story and the controversy. I ran across Foti's maiden name and it looked familiar. So did the story of her mother dying of cancer in 2000. And then a bunch of pieces fell into place.

Long story short....my grandparents were friends with Foti's grandmother and her mother, General Noreika's wife and daughter.

I remember asking my Mom once what had happened to Mrs Noreika's husband, and she said "The Russians shot him."

I don't know whether the friendship went back to Lithuania and they actually knew General Noreika. My family might have met Mrs Noreika and her daughter Dalia in the displaced persons camp in Germany, or maybe they met here in Chicago.

My family never talked much about what happened during the war in Lithuania, just snippets and passing recollections which would trail off pretty quickly. Reading about Sylvia's family history made me wonder about my own. Was it good? Or was it bad?

They're all gone now, so I guess I'll never know.

Sobering.

That's fascinating, wtg!

One more.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.co...daughters-nightmare/

Finished the book. Tough read in a lot of ways.

I'm relatively certain that my grandparents knew Noreika and his wife in Lithuania. My mother's family lived in the district where he was the commander during the Nazi occupation.

Have to admit I've never delved into Lithuanian history until recently. From Silvia's descriptions and some other reading I've done since stumbling across her book, it also seems impossible that the general population was unaware of what was happening to the Jews.

I'm remembering bits and pieces of conversations I've had with family and other members of the Lithuanian-American community over the years, and I find myself re-arranging those snippets into a new picture. I'm thinking there is no way my family members didn't know what was happening around them. Whether any of them actively participated in the killing, I don't think I will ever know. But they were there. And they knew the Jews were being rounded up and killed.

As I said, sobering.

I guess it's nit picking about what was a horror everywhere, but the book ("A Daughter's Nightmare") speaks of Lithuania as having killed the highest percentage of Jews in WWII, while other sources have quite different figures.

Poland seems to "win" overall (Wikipedia says 98% of Polish Jews were killed in the war - and I think it's widely known that the Poles were highly complicit.)

Here is a comprehensive list of countries and both # and % of Jews killed, where Poland also comes out on top though a lower percentage (still Lithuania is still lower).

Every number is approximate however much Holocaust historians have tried to be as precise as possible. There's a certain drive to identify the basically unfathomable number of Jews murdered to make them back into individuals instead of a kind of empty statistic (as per Stalin's alleged remark about the difference between an individual death and a statistic" - for example of a million).

Number of Jews Killed in the Final Solution, by country

FWIW little Macedonia and Montenegro ranked highest, either tied with Poland or higher.