In this compelling book, Lithuanian writer Ruta Vanagaite holds a frank conversation with noted historian Christoph Dieckmann.. Her searching exchanges with Dieckmann illuminate the most profound questions we have as we struggle to understand the causes and consequences of the Holocaust.

By Christoph Dieckmann and Ruta Vanagaite

Prologue

Ruta Vanagaite

1 Why This Book?

2 People Had a Choice

3 Germany's Trauma

4 Lithuania's Trauma

5 The Jew Is the Devil

6 Small and Radical

7 Plans for Mass Murder

8 "Blitzkrieg": Local Helpers Needed!

9 Lithuania's Dream of Independence

10 An Easy Occupation

11 Controversies of the Uprising

12 Enter the SS

13 Jews in Panic

14 Lithuanian Border Strip: The First Shootings

15 Pogroms

16 The First Mass Shooting of Jews in Kaunas

17 The Road to Ponar

18 Vigilante Lithuanian Courts

19 Ghettoization in the Provinces

20 Robbing the Living

21 Lithuanian Fascists Take Over

22 "Kill Them All!"

23 The "Final Solution" in the Provinces

24 The Oral Orders

25 The Lithuanian Road Killers

26 100,000 Trapped City Jews

27 Life in the Ghettos: Hunger, Poetry, Death

28 Choiceless Choices

29 The Accidental Death of European Jews

30 Forgotten Victims: Soviet POWs

31 Forgotten Victims: The Soviet Evacuees

31 Slavery

33 No to the SS Legion

34 To Die as Free Fighters

35 Survival and Terror

36 The End: Vilnius

37 The End: Šiauliai

38 The End: Kaunas

39 The Murdered "Others"

40 Burning the Bodies

41 To Save a Jew

42 The Silence of the Church

43 The Brief Story of Lithuanian Resistance

Epilogue

Selected Bibliography

About the Authors