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. T