#10 "And I burned with shame": The Testimony of Ona Simaite, Righteous Among the Nations (A Letter to Isaac Nachman Steinberg) / An English version of a letter sent by Šimaitė in 1945 from Lyon, France, to New York, to the leftist political activist and author Isaac Steinberg. The letter is a testimony of events of the Holocaust in Lithuania. It describes the first days of the Nazi occupation of Vilna, forced labor, wanton murders of Jews and, later, the ghettoization of Vilna's Jews and the mass murders. Šimaitė, a librarian at Vilnius University, was able, under the pretext of collecting unreturned books, to visit the ghetto. She also travelled to occupied Kovno in the summer of 1941, where she visited the Jewish neighborhood of Slobodka. In September 1941, Šimaitė joined an illegal leftist organization which aimed to help Jews. She deplores the behavior of Lithuanians, some of whom took part in murdering Jews and many of whom appropriated Jewish property. At the same time, many Lithuanian intellectuals tried to defend Jews vis-à-vis the authorities or rescued them. Dwells on the fate of some Jewish individuals and families under the occupation, including the Lichtensteins, Gershon Malakiewicz, and the Trupianskis. Pp. 7-16 contain an introduction by Šukys. Šimaitė (1894-1970) was born in Akmenė to a Catholic family. During the Nazi occupation she rescued a number of Jews and helped many others. Šimaitė was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau and then to a camp in France. After the war she settled in Paris. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism)
