The Story I Was Told Was a Lie

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

The Hero on the Wall

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 and expressed this sentiment openly.”

The war that would destroy Lithuanian Jewry was greeted by many Lithuanians joyfully. That I was never told — not in my mother’s kitchen, not in Lithuanian Saturday school, not in any of the commemorations I attended in the diaspora community.

Slaughter the Jews and Take Their Property

After Soviet power vanished in 1941, Jews were left as “fair game,” because their homes and courtyards were full of property. Tory recorded one of the most devastating lines in Lithuanian Holocaust literature: “Slaughter the Jews and take their property — this was the first slogan of the restored Lithuanian rule.” Not defend Lithuania. Not save civilization. Slaughter the Jews and take their property.

Violence in the Streets

Tory wrote that Lithuanian partisans roamed the streets of Kaunas “like a pack of bloodthirsty dogs,” dragging Jews from hiding places, beating them, spitting on them, robbing them, murdering some in their apartments, raping women while the looting continued.” Tory adds: “Other Lithuanians stood on the sides of the street and mocked the Jewish tragedy.”

Aharon Pick’s memoir from Šiauliai — the district my grandfather administered during the Nazi occupation, shows that “The majority of the Lithuanian people, even the educated, are now hostile toward all Jews,” that the slightest hint was sufficient to trigger a predatory attack. He describes the slaughter as “a horrible cruelty without precedent, carried out coldly, indifferently, as one kills flies.”

Grant Gochin has written about what that indifference meant for the most vulnerable — the Jewish children Lithuania will not discuss.

Celebration After Murder

I found the same pattern of joy in my own research. In Plungė, after the Jews of the town were murdered, an enormous party was held two weeks later. How do you hold a party in a place where the streets are still empty of the people who lived on them two weeks ago, where the houses are still full of their belongings, where the ground has not yet settled over the pits?

The removal of the Jews was not a tragedy. It was an achievement. The party was held because of it.

A Society Prepared

Pick records that the slogan “Lithuania for the Lithuanians” emerged first as insinuation and then as open speech among educated Lithuanians. Jews were pushed from state life, from opportunity, from belonging before the Nazis arrived. By the time the Germans arrived, Jews had already been reclassified from citizens into outsiders.

Grant Gochin has documented that trajectory.

Tory wrote, “The Lithuanians hated Jews and rejoiced at their troubles. . . this Lithuania, which with its own hands has exterminated Lithuanian Jewry.”

Even after the first massacres, Tory records that Lithuanians wanted to feed on Jewish suffering while complaining that Jews were still buying things in the city.

Spectacle of Suffering

At the Seventh Fort in Kaunas, couples in their good clothes embraced on a hilltop while watching Jews being murdered. They called the spectacle “the zoo.” In Telzh, townspeople ran to applaud what they called the “Demon’s Dance.” “Demon’s Dance” (velniu šokis) refers to horrific public scenes, particularly in Lithuania, where local collaborators and spectators forced Jewish victims to dance, perform, or humiliate themselves before murder. These sadistic acts often involved spectators cheering, applauding, and robbing victims, highlighting widespread complicity in the persecution of Jews beyond just German actions. In Marčinkonis, peasants laughed “as at a circus.”

Town after town, the same pattern: Jewish suffering was Lithuanian entertainment.

The Myth that Remains

I was taught that Lithuania, trapped between totalitarian powers, was forced into complicity. The Jewish record tells a different story: anti-Jewish sentiment ran through the educated classes, through policy, through the street, and through ordinary moral life.

Lithuania’s institutions still sustain the story I grew up with. Survivor testimonies remain untranslated and unassigned in schools. Not a single honor has been revoked from a documented perpetrator.

Why I Broke the Story

I broke the story about my grandfather because I am a journalist, a Catholic, and a Lithuanian, and because I could not live inside a lie once I knew it was a lie.

Lithuania deserves better than the myth it has chosen to protect.

Wishing you truth and peace in the storms of your life,