Host let me be clear as the name of the book. Katie keeper is the author. This is book tv on cspan2. Book tv is on instagram, follow us for publishing news, schedule updates, behind the scenes pictures and videos. Instagram. Com book underscore tv. We have the privilege of welcoming historian rita davis today to discuss her book, my grandfathers pass, my jewish family, search for the truth. She will share her journey as a daughter of a lithuanian catholic mother and a russian jewish father. In a mission to unravel the truth about her beloved grandfather from 19411943. She discovered he was the Security Police under the gestapo bow where lithuanian town where a thousand jews were murdered in the fall of 18 her awards include residencies that got on the Fine Arts Work Center and provincetown, as as well as grants from the connecticut state Art Foundation and new York Foundation for the art. Her publication list list includes harvard reviews, massachusetts review, poetry and more. She is also the anthology from inside 40 years of portrait from alice janes. She teaches creative writing at Hunter College and she is speaking about the guest at the lectures throughout the country. From the 92nd street wide to the jcc of washington d. C. Please help me welcome rita davis. [applause]. Thank you so much for that beautiful introduction. I just want to say that i love author miller, he is one of the first playwrights i have ever read. Im thrilled to hear about the upcoming production. Ill take a quick sip of water. I am delighted to be speaking here, the westpark Public Library has wonderful authors program. I want to thank all of you for coming and also thanks cspan for being here as well to cover this event. Im just going to begin by reiterating what has already been said, come from from a blended family, my mother is firstgeneration lithuanian catholic and my father, who passed away a little over ten years ago, was a russian jewish dissent. Im going to tell you a bit bit about my book, and because my book contains upwards of 70 images im going to share a few photographs with you as i talk about my book. For me as a writer gathering the images, archival material that ended up in pictorial form in my book was a way of anchoring myself through a long sixyear journey that involved many trips to Eastern Europe, to israel, many surprises. My hope is that youll come out way from our gathering wanting to know more about my book but also perhaps you will leave thinking of the stories in your own lives that are yet untold, or questions perhaps that her family members that you have not asked yet. If i have learned anything in the process of this journey, it is that particularly now as so many survivors are passing on it is crucial that we asked the question that perhaps we have not yet asked. So in a sense what im talking about his opening those stores that have not been opened yet in our lives. The first pitch i want to share with you is a door. This is the doorway to the Police Station and present in lithuania. At the time i took the photograph the new Police Station was being built right next door to it and i could see the bars of the old prison cells on the windows of the first floor. When i opened the door, which i was not supposed to do but i did anyway, it let up one flight of stairs to my lithuanian catholic grandfathers office when he was chief of the cell dumas, or Security Police, one of the deadliest collaboration of forces in lithuania during world war ii. My grandfather was one of three lithuanian commanders for the entire region. I should say that since eunice is the name of a town where his office was based, it was also an entire regent that contain many different towns and many different areas. It was a region prior to the russian occupation, which many which many of you know predated the German Occupation, had actually been part of poland. The russians came in, they delivered part of the territory to the belarusians and when the germans came in they delivered it to the lithuanians. It it remains part of lithuania today. Though many polls still live in the area. How did i come to open this jailhouse door . The answer is as simple and complex as a question i asked my mother in a cafe over six years ago. I knew about and so now it is just a lithuanian word for grandfather, i knew about about his hair was in before the war be when he fought as a partisan in the woods in lithuania against the russians. I i had been told many times about his bravery at the end of the war when he rode a horse and buggy that held his older sister and three children over mind bridges, through bombings and fires, and ultimately to safety. But in the cafe on the Upper West Side of new york, i finally set before my lithuanian mother whose war story had very gradually run with compassion and sympathy with my jewish grandmother, who is the matriarch of our family. Her story was a dominant war story in our life. We didnt talk about the people who visited my jewish grandmother with numbers tattooed on their arms. We did not talk about extended jewish family members who ended up in the victims database or simply vanished off the face of the earth or from memory and conversation. In the cafe i asked asked my mother the stunningly obvious and i always say, it is my great embarrassment that it took me so many years to ask the question. Which was, what did my grandfather actually do during the war . My mother said, he was in the police. I said, do you mean under the ss . And she said yes. I had no my grandfather well and i loved him. My own father was a reader, philosopher, a quiet man, quiet absentminded professor. My lithuania grandmother was loud, he pitch, he hunted, i was a tomboy, he took me with him, i adored him and he adored me. When my mother told me that my grandfather had been a collaborator and at that time ice really knew nothing about this door, or the fact that he had been actually given a position of some importance. Two visceral feelings ran through me. The first which is stayed with me to this day was that i had to find out if he had brought harm to anyone. It was an overwhelming feeling and has compelled me continually and even with the publication of this book it has not ended. The secondly, i thought of my jewish grandmother, rachel davis here she is, she is on the right side here is the young beauty that she was. This was taken some years after her family left the ukraine first reminded them for the United States. Here she is in her eighties, she lived to 104, keeping her own house until two weeks before she died. She was my favorite family member. The second feeling i had upon my mothers delivery delivery of this information was that i was grateful that my grandmother was no longer living. If she had known this information, i felt it would have destroyed her. With my grandmother actually who, although i came from a blended family and for me of how i was to think of myself. Im going to read but a very small passage, one of two very small passages from the book today that illustrate that particular moment. So ill begin. I was raised in a secular household, we went to mass without my father on the holidays without lenny waning catholic side of my family and celebrated the jewish holidays with my father side of the family. Yet when asked what i was, i always responded, jewish. Technically i. Technically i was not. My father had married a nonjew, however my jewish grandmother rachel davis believed her will and wishes superseded rabbinical law and conveyed to me her notion of how i was to think of myself. She made her pronouncement the summer i was 12 on Marthas Vineyard where she lived the last half of her life, and where along with my parents, various ants and uncles spent part of each summer. It was a hot day and i was hanging hanging out by the side of the local Movie Theater on the corner of an avenue. The new new poster was up advertising a movie i wanted to see, what was it jaws comes to mind but it was probably a different movie. The sun was bright with that salty white glare that only happens near the ocean. I was wearing a tiny goldplated crosser on mina that i bought at the town drugstore because my summer girlfriends, namely polish catholic daughters the plumbers and grooming house owners all wore them. Absorbed in the movie poster, first i did not see my grandmother drive up and hurt used gold in paula. Ignoring the traffic she put her car in park, through open her door, made it to the curb where i stood before i stood before i could completely registered the fact of her. She reached for me, toward the little necklace with the cross off my not and threw it on the sidewalk. I never want to see such a thing on your again she said. I looked down at mira necklace send them back up at her red face. She was always a fiery, loving, dominating, but i had never seen her so angry before. Youre jewish she spat. In turn jump backed into the impala and sped away. That was my grandmother. I know in the cafe with my mother that over 95 of the jews of lithuania had been killed primarily by lithuanians. I knew that my paternal jewish relatives live just over the border, the question, did mike grandfather harmony one which perhaps my silent knife to some of you turns inside of me the first year my research about him was intensely private. I want to say, i had no idea of writing a book at the beginning. This was a personal search. The notion of a book came later. I felt somehow that if i do not learn what mike grandfather did or did not do it would destroy me, or at the very least i would would never understand who i was in the world. More importantly, never be able to make amends to a possible victim or relative. I didnt expect to do a paper trail on my grandfather, i didnt expect to spend five years traveling and i certainly didnt expect a beautiful redheaded woman in a small apartment in lithuania whose father had been killed personally upon my grandmothers order to to say, when i tried to apologize, what is your crime . I found out my grandfather had work for the gestapo, who by the way with many other lithuanians he hated. The lithuanians largely saw the germans initially, the first first few weeks of the German Occupation as a ticket to lithuanian autonomy which is what the germans promised them. As soon as they reneged on their promise, many of the lithuanian collaborators, including my grandmother began working underground against the germans. This is not the same as working on behalf of the Jewish Population. It is very important to make that distinction. So in addition to that, the germans were allies with the lithuanians and their hatred of what they called the bolshevik jews. Im sure many of you have heard of this. It was a conflation of communism in judaism that the statistics in lithuania proof were utterly untrue. In fact, right before the beginning of the war statistically on paper, the number of nonjewish lithuanians were members of the communist party is far greater than the number of jews who were in the communist party. So as one of the survivors of the ghetto i interviewed over several years said to me, even as a child child growing up she was familiar with the phrase, tillage use save russia. The myth of the communists won not complete fiction was kind of a deadly rationale if you will. For ridding the Jewish Population once and for all. My grandfather, as it turns out certainly shared the view that all jews were communists, in the words of one of his daughters his scapegoat. But lets take a brief look at the place right was many times over five years and where he worked from 1941 to 1943. Here is the beautiful town as it exists today. It is a place that used to be full of jewish life, place of synagogue, now it is lovely but it is empty. You cannot see it but the Catholic Church that my mother went to when she was a child living there is just out of view of this beautiful scene. Here is the Village Green as it used to look like at a time when there is still jewish shops that line the square. Traders, 3000 members of the Jewish Population still alive there, still running their businesses, still raising their children, one of my interviewees remember being very and at the markets and remembered the smell of fish and horses. The overwhelming crowds, the noise of people, selling and trading, smoke, and the scent of bread. I love those particular details. Here, oops, somehow that got mixed up, the next map i wanted to show you is out of order here so i will skip it. The the next map shows the vision of the region by the german administration. Im probably singing to the choir but let me just say that the germans were tremendous administrators, they were constantly updating their maps, cause really updated their kill list. Constantly list. Constantly sending out memos and then destroying the typewriter ribbon that secretaries typed on so no one can steal the ribbon and form the imprint of the letters they would understand what had been sent in secret. However, in addition to than Administration Skill if you will, in these regions where my grandmother is one of three commanders they had two german commanders present, neither of which spoke lithuanian, polish, or yiddish. This meant they. This meant they were entirely dependent on the lithuanian command to carry out their orders and this of course influenced the wartime betrayal. Bribery was an Assessment Part of wartime life and really all over lithuania and we could sail over Eastern Europe. Particularly. Particularly where there is so little germans present and the command was basically handed over to those who knew the local language. So this now is the right image. This is a pitcher my of my grandfather is young man in early 1920s when he was accepted into the lithuanian terry academy for officer training. He was first of his family to go to secondary school. He grew up in a two room dirt floor shack. His mother barbara, from whom i whom i inherent my middle name, was a midwife and spellcaster. Nonjewish lithuanians were initially all pagan, her spell of choice was a cure for snakebite as it turned out. I mention this not to revoke pity for him but to say that as i began my research, it was very important for me to understand as well as i could who my grandfather was before i knew him. Even before the war. What were his aspirations growing up . Who . Who did he want to be . I want to show you another image now. This is closer closer to how i remember him. This photo was taken just around the time that he emigrated, this is is how he would have looked to a passerby in the town during the time of his work there. He began his military career really is chief of Border Police and it town on the border. There, in 1941 when the russians came in they arrested his wife, my lithuanian grandmother, she she was taken to a prison in the soviet union, she was tortured, she was asked to give information about where my grandfather was, about where my mother and her siblings were. She was put she was put in a death sell numerous times. A standing room only dank place where you were told if you do not confess you will be shut the next morning, ultimately she was sent to various camps in siberia, hard labor, prison for 15 years. This information is important not only because it is part of my blended family story but because the germans were very astute in the way they cherry picked the lithuanians they put in power. They pick those people who had been damaged in some way by the russians. They pick the people who had the largest grudges. The people who wanted revenge. Certainly, my grandfather fell into that category. So, i treasure and in particular the photo of my grandfather is a young man. He wrote about his military aspirations early in his life. I treasure it as i treasure this photo because the work collaborator to me is a very inadequate word. He certainly was a collaborator collaborator but what does that mean . It is an umbrella term, i say in that that that word erases the moment of yes, when someone says yes i will do that, and the terms of know, when some of perhaps refuses. And says i will not do this. So every collaborator story was different and if we lump them all together the singularity of moral choice begins to get lost, personally i feel that is something for all of us that is tremendously important. I also, in my research avoided words such as monsters, beasts, and animals in relation to the actions of accomplishes or initiators of the horrible crimes of the holocaust, particularly in lithuania because those words to me to abstract the fact of the Human Capacity for violence and complicity. Certainly we know there were psychopaths and sadists who use the opportunity of the holocaust to enact their pet biology. There were many people who are people like us, are somewhat like us who made choices. I am not implying that would make the same choices but that it is important to remember the spectrum of humanity, at least for me. In terms of my grandfather and also in terms of all people who are players in genocide around the world. So in the region two major actions took place, the first one took place september, and of 1941. All of the jews, aside from those who were declared useful jews, those were perhaps bribed their way into the relative safety of the ghetto and often those who bribed were sent immediately back to what became a killing ground. 8000 jews were rounded up, they were taken in carts, they were marched to a place about 7 kilometers outside of sent you own us. It was called a polygon, which simply means shooters range. When the area was an polish controller was the placer polish officers went to practice their shooting and to house their horses. There are taken there, there are shoved into makeshift barracks, there were tucked there for a period of days and then they were taken first the man, then the women and children, and they were shot. This next image is an image of the covered pit of polygon. It is difficult to get a sense sense of the size of it. Just to say that this heap of ground stretches as far as you can see and beyond into the woods, this next picture is what i call the killing tree. This was a tree where the park was carved out so that infants and Young Children could be smashed against the tree. That was in order to save bullets. The shooters were part of the lithuanian squad that traveled recruiting locals at each stopping point. The the germans on hand were few, this next photo is a very rare photo that came from one of my interviewees. It is actually postwar of young men who came back after the war, many many of them had been serving the soviet union on france as far away as japan and came home to find their entire family killed. Theyre holding a box of remains in trying to, with some dignity re bury them. The first man on the left was the husband of my interviewee. A very brave brave woman who gave me this photograph for the book. So, of course i was desperate desperate to learn of my grandfather had a role in this massacre. You might say, well of course he did, he is chief of Security Police, he is 7 kilometers away from this, how could he not. One thing i was very careful of it in my research was to double and triple source every piece of information so proximity for me was never enough. In order to really substantiate the narrative of his wartime life. Im going to read a small passage, the last one i will read, the second to last one ill refer the book. Which illustrates the first bit of documentation i found that connected my grandfather directly to polygon i do not know if any of you have heard of lee, he was a survivor, he was an engineer by trade. As soon as the war was over he travel through all the displaced persons camps where lithuanian jews were waiting to. That collection. The librarian brings the lead in and the 297 pages will end up serving all the towns that make up the region and i have to say i put them in a binder, a white binder and with many books they travel with me all over Eastern Europe and pulling and i always carry an extra piece of luggage just for all of this material. I thought i had to have it with me at all times even if i wasnt using it. Sometimes repetitious when he summarizes to offer this scope. Each time i opened a binder of pages more of life appears. Loan societies bring up, teenagers back float in lakes and they had an iron business and boot factory. The employees worked the not so good will and the pressing and sizing that the region was famous for. Whatever yarn goods came his way can he saved the best for his granddaughters dresses. I was a spoiled girl she wanted tommy in israel shrugging one shoulder leaning slightly to the side as if she was listening to those that loved her as if she was alive out of sight in the other room. I read the pages first skimming and skipping and going back again looking for the name. Not there, not here or there. They mentioned. My copy will be ready to take home but i stay and suddenly theres a girl, suddenly theres my grandfather. The girl is the cousin of selma high at one of those testimonies is recorded on april 48 at the cab the same region in germany where in the remote Hilltop Village my grandfather and his children having left lithuania waited for the war to end and watched the allied bombers head for munich using the church steeple. She spoke lithuanian perfectly which was very rare for the young Jewish Population. Shes rounded up and has taken the roughly 30 miles from her village town with her family with everyone she knows. On wednesday october 8 in the shooting begins, the lithuanian policemen she could plead to in this language perhaps remembers her lovely features and hes seen her maybe even knows her name covers her with branches and a pit and the earth different from the mass pic prepared with the work of the 300 shovelers. All day they watched as groups of men and women and children were taken out of the compound to be shot with the help of the policemen she makes her way to what is now belarus. When the ghetto is liquidated and the jews transferred into the crowded ghetto is stated for exactly two weeks and there she describes the sound when the children were screaming at a slaughterhouse. 15 or 16 determined to live she leaves the relative safety of the ghetto and goes to see the wife of a lithuanian policemen who promised to obtain papers from her. The head of the Security Police my grandfather some end up ahead of the ghetto and other elders and members of the Jewish Council he demands the girl be brought to him that beautiful girl who speaks perfect. I could see him spending his fist on the table. She wont be put in the cell and a cell and sent out on the dalia work detailed. She will be shot as 1941. The third day of the time of joy and delivered when the homemade hot. It reminded me of the fields is. She finds out shes been betrayed and takes off another ghetto and is killed when it is liquidated. I write her name in a small notebook and close the file and leave it behind the table today and i to me if i dont stop to think the archivist and i dont ask about the pickup time its already dark when i leave. I think im weeping but i cant tell. I cant feel anything. Only late fall and when into when i look up, brain so that was the first detail of my grandfathers involvement about polygon. The second major massacre just so you know we are going to be winding up. The massacre in the area there were killings all the way through but just to say that this happened in the spring of 1942 and it was an action against noncombatant holes of the region. The lithuanians hated at the polls the polls and the german commander was ambushed. They have nothing to do with it. And the price will action, the germans gave lithuanians free reign. First they said a week but that the killing was so intense they shortened it to three days and bailout of the lithuanians to go out, round up many of the elderly and hunt them down and shoot them and we dont know about this massacre here but in poland aside from the killing it is considered one of the major war crimes against the noncombatant so i extended a term and its amount of energy researching my grandfathers involvement in this war crime as well. I want to end with one more quick reading and just to preface it i want to say that i did many interviews in this book and ended up i track three survivors but become very dear to me. One is the incredible historian who was the chairman for 25 years and im thrilled that it nnovember i will in november i will be able to go to tel aviv and do a talk with him and its also the peak of his 89th birthday so im quite delighted about that but i was told by people that have a vested interest in finding the same eyewitnesses i wanted to find that there was no one left and i was too late but after four years through a route through moscow, israel, poland, lithuania, new york that poland i was told that there were four people in the town living and that they would talk to me and i immediately booked my flight from new york and went over to meet with them and im going to end now with a very short transcription of an interview i did with an amazing man and aside from giving information, his narrative also provided me with the title of my book. Its from a chapter called doubles option. We sit on a side porch with buses from the ceiling. But with 91yearsold old holds a notebook and behind him a grand jury name to the august afternoon. To his left they moderate and his father was lithuanian and his mother, polish. I asked about the green notebook and i could see pages of handwriting some smaller and some larger. Hes writing all of the wars of the world. All of the millions of people, the ones who were suffering, those who didnt want to fight, the war of north america, from ancient times, and then he starts talking about this direct transcription. We have friends that they were forced, young man can he do it already. He told how it was. It was the cries of the movements. We were afraid, too. They were absolutely innocent. The ones that were shooters had the son of a school and everything was organized before hand. Local people were forced to dig in the evening before. People in the town knew. The ones told their family they explain it to everybody and they knew that the jews were over there. The local people who were covering the ditches the function like some people were bringing the dirt and others were putting in corpses like a conveyor and they were putting line on. I was born in january 1923, 1900 were over with shooting all the shooters went and they were singing a lithuanian songs. They were very joyful. They were drunk before hand and there was a long table and the open air with food at a holiday the mood was supported by the orchestra. Over here there were two witnesses that were used as warehouses and all of the belongings were put over there afterwards there was a sale, an and auction. Who would give these marks . Im a partisan, im not standing in line. It was like euphoria. People were very excited. Everyone knew and later they figured out the best things. Villagers found suitcases were hiding them. I do not know. I do not care. When the jews were killed some people would go into big. They were both fame and a scrappy and when they talk about the options held key gestures beyond the screen for the field between small houses and some scrubs and working the land, wooden synagogues. I can see it expresses the crowd for a pair of socks with different souls flopping open. When i rise to believe they offer me the notebook and the record of harm come his list of what it is to be human. Something is lost in translation and since im writing the book it seems he think i can take the list into the world with me. I dont take it and im not sure if he didnt want me to just sit with it for a while and go through the pages separated by the wind pressed hard into the paper his project, his burden. Thank you. [applause] i think i will take the picture off. Questions . Im reading your book with great interest and fascination. I can tell you are a poet or beauty. Coke many beautiful passages. I admire your passion for going back and forth as you get. My question is did you find after all this time in the communities that you visited any change in their attitude and is that an ingrained antisemitism that we instinctively associate is it still true or is there perhaps a change . Thats an excellent question. I wouldnt say that its got change. Im very close and they have begun a kind of reciprocity with the archives in lithuania to share archival material. There is just now beginning of an effort to put the proper signage. For end instance when i was there is simply said the place of the mass murder and to get to the actual pit which has a memorial comic you drive through so many twists and turns that you get lost and was actually someone from britain who paid to have the signpost up to market the way and the young people of the region were continually knocking it down. This movement for the dialogue has begun. I will say though this is my subjective opinion because there are others who are much more politics than i am that things have not changed that much. The great hope is the youngest generation and they are the ones who are seeking to have an open society where the truth is told and theyve done remarkable things for instance theyve created something called a the lithuanian holocaust atlas which is now online so that you can go online and you can see exactly where all of these shooting sites are. Another friend of mine in lithuania has now gained access to finally what would have been the library. Its architecturally unsound but shes trying to raise the funds so that it can become the remarkable memorial that it should be. I dont know how many of you are familiar but i think 600,000 books have been read and the Favorite Book that was checked out the most often. So now that is beginning to expand. In terms of the older generation, i miss my four family groups and i have to say they were very open and they were very loving. They were not overtly antisemitic as my lithuanian grandfather was, but theres another generation of collaborators who hold on to the old notions and do not want their role exposed. When you went to lithuania what was your method for the organization how did you find people . Let me start by saying that i began this in total ignorance. So the first thing i did. I said i need a translator to do some archival work for me before i come visit and i found a wonderful person whos actually now living with me for three months she just got her green card. She sent me an email and said i have wonderful news i have pages of information about your grandfather. Heres the bad news. Its in russian and its handwritten, so that was my introduction to what the research was going to be like. I went under my own, and what i did is assigned a team wherever i went in i was lucky because i found amazing people to work with me. Thankfully, my husband works the New York Times and was through him that i initially found what the journalists call it fixed or a wonderful woman in lithuania who was a genealogist by trade but who is a holocaust scholar and became like a sister to me and worked with me on every trip but i basically asked around who can help me with this and the times was a great asset actually a for my work but no i didnt have any organizations working with me. When was your grandfather born and what happened to her grandmother . My grandfather im going to forget, im really bad with i will show you, one second they have to look at the family tree. He was born in 1899. So im giving away a little bit of the book. I hope you will still buy it because authors have to be supportive and i want to do another research project, so good just to say that my grandmother was considered to be dead. Her older daughter never gave up hope that she was alive and continually petitioned the United States government for information about her and one day she was standing in her kitchen and she received a phone call from someone in the community in the town where she lived who have gotten a had gotten a letter and a nice letter from lithuania someone casually mentioned that they had seen my grandmother walking down the street. She was released, she had done her sentence and survived it and she said that had she known what was in store for her she would have split her throat and she ended up emigrating to the United States although it was a decision she later regretted. She wished she had that she had stayed in lithuania that she was found and she survived. You acknowledged your grandfather was openly antisemitic so given that first of all, what was the introduction or the interaction or the relationship like between him and your father and her your fathers mother and the second part you said it would have told your grandmother if she knew about given the fact that he was a police officer, dont you think it is possible to suspect the atrocities that were committed . Let me address some of that here. When i said he was openly antisemitic i should qualify that by saying up to everyone, certainly not my jewish grandmother and certainly not in front of my father. One day he took me aside and said dont be like your father and when he was a little drunk his english always got worse. I was about ten or 11 at the time and it took me a long time to understand what he was saying was dont be jewish and in that conversation, i promised him i would go to Catholic Church which i never did. And i also knew i was younger i had the sense of what he was saying was very hurtful and i decided never to tell my father that decision that i regret. I have a wonderful jewish and shirley and theres a chapter in my book called word gets around, and when i first got this information from my mother i called her and she said everyone knew he wasnt not see and i said what do you mean . We never talked about it, we all just knew. And i say in the book that in some ways we could say that every memoir written in that time should be called we never talked about it in every memoir written now should be called we talk too much about it. But let me just say that my mothers story was embellished and it was told over and over again. She was a beautiful, young damaged woman and my jewish grandmother was extremely compassionate and she embraced her and embraced her story and the intelligence of the story and it didnt happen overnight but it happened. Also the two sides of the family didnt come together with any frequency and what my lithuanian grandfather when he was in the presence of my jewish family he was on his best behavior and it was not known or discussed with his occupation was ever. And its interesting and i will say one more word about this he was devoted to my mother and the last couple of years of his life before he was diagnosed he kept pressing the history on me and i say in my book there is no snob like an ignorant snob because it was written by a british gentile historians and i sat if youre going to give me something finally which was becoming more and are important as he grew older, can at least be written by a jew . And i finally took the book from him which i treasure now. Every chapter was annotated which was my fathers way except for the chapter in the holocaust so make from that what you will. Very complicit. She asked how complicit with the local Catholic Church in the massacres in the area. In that particular area let me say there were other areas where actually the priests were speaking out against the killing of the jews and that particular area the local priest was in fact active in the incarceration and later the killing of the polls and that was very well documented in my research. My grandmothers family were all in the warsaw ghetto and my grandmother and my great aunts they got to america earlier. But the remainder somehow i dont know that part of the story but they ended up not in warsaw but in lithuania and we had the red cross checked by the never been able to figure out from the warsaw ghetto how on earth i hope you find out. One of so many Amazing Stories that just to say it again we dont want these to be lost and i just wanted to share the museum in dc is going to collect all of my hours of video because of course my entire transcriptions of hours and hours of tapes made it into the book but theres going to be an archive so that other researchers can access it that these stories are so important even with the gas that they contain. I wondered if you could have the map that you were not able to show during the slideshow. The area that you said was outside the town. If i climb up here i welcome flip. These are all these areas that are demarcated by the germans that represent different towns into different beverages and they each have their own local commander. But my grandfather was in charge of those. You are welcome to come up after. Your title seems the title seems to be very timely in light of the piece with a french priest who has gone from town to town to interview people and finding out that what the local people came out to see the shooting and he determined that if you know that youre not going to be coming you would come and see other people and im assuming. The title first let me say shes been around for years and just now somehow he has hit the mass media and im so glad because he has been doing this work for a long time and it is extraordinary and also at one point i wanted to volunteer but the work of my own book was too demanding and i couldnt. I will give it all away but the title of my book comes so first of all let me say when they told me about this banquet i thought hes a poet i couldnt imagine that this could be true