Julija Sukys

Julija Šukys is a Canadian of Lithuanian descent. The story of her family and her country were "tattooed on her skin," told and retold by family members and by the close-knit Lithuanian émigré population. Of these stories, she was particularly drawn to the story of her paternal grandmother, Ona. She always knew that someday she would write Ona's story and that is what she set out to do when writing this book.

Lithuania's history during WWII is complicated. They were invaded by the Russians, then the Germans, then the Russians again. Some citizens welcomed the Germans as saving them from the Russians, some welcomed the Russians for saving them from the Germans, some worked secretly against both. In 1941 Ona was taken from her apartment in the middle of the night by Soviet KGB officers and put on a cattle car for Siberia. Her crime? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or so the family said. One thing was for certain, her grandmother spent the next seventeen years in Siberia in a special settlement. It would be twenty-four years before she saw her husband or three children again.

This was the story Julija wanted to write: one of persecution overcome through tenacity and inner strength. Her grandmother's experience and survival was a story she wanted to pass on to her own son. But when she began researching her family's history, she found different story. One that included a perpetrator of violence, a collaborator with the Nazis. How to reconcile this long-hidden, incomprehensible reality with the stories she had been told and the family members she had known? What should she do with this knowledge? "Some always pays," she writes. "The question is who. And the question is how." Was she herself somehow tainted and culpable through association, through heredity? Was she somehow paying, now, with this new unwanted knowledge? Could she atone? Should she?

I found all of these questions fascinating and, for me, they were as compelling as the story of Julija's grandparents. Their experiences in Lithuania and Siberia were unique, and yet representative of the complexities of the region dubbed by Timothy Snyder as "the Bloodlands." And Julija's struggles, as a writer and a member of a family and close community, to make sense of these experiences is again both uniquely her own and representative of an entire country's struggle to understand collaboration, violence, and the desire to put the past in the past.

Julija Šukys lays open her family's history as a testament to the value of truth and as an act of redemption. The tone is rough and captures the sense of pain tightly controlled, but at the same time it is not unrelenting darkness. The story of Ona still shines through as the family history that Julija had always wanted to write.… (más)

Ona Simaite (pronounced Ah-na Shi-may-teh), a Righteous Gentile who saved the lives of many Lithuanian Jewish people during the Holocaust, really ought to be a lot better known than she is. The problem, as Sukys notes in this biography, is that most of the primary sources about Simaite and most of her own writings (she was an astonishingly prolific letter-writer, sometimes composing more than twenty a day) are in Lithuanian, and only about three million people can speak/read the language.

If you're looking for thrilling tales of Ona Simaite's heroic Jew-saving actions during World War II, you will probably feel disappointed by this book. Sukys chose to focus on Simaite's entire life rather than those few years, and there was never a lot of information about her lifesaving efforts to begin with. For her own safety and for those she helped, Simaite would deliberately forget names and faces. The exact number of Jews she saved isn't known, other than that it was a large one.

I see this book being in the "woman's studies" subject as in the history and Holocaust/World War II subjects. As Sukys points out, Simaite did not have a very happy life, particularly in her old age (she was in exile in France, very lonely and living in great poverty; she died in a nursing home that sounded like a dump), and a large part of that was because of the limitations imposed on her due to her gender and her unmarried status. But her being a woman probably helped when it came to saving Jewish people during the war.

This book could interest a lot of people, if they are of a scholarly bent. I would recommend it alongside Simaite's own 88-page memoir of the Holocaust, “And I Burned With Shame”.… (más)