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“Rita Gabis comes from a family of
Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. She was close to her Catholic
grandfather as a child and knew one version of his past: prior to immigration
he had fought the Russians, whose brutal occupation of Lithuania destroyed
thousands of lives before Hitler's army swept in. Three years ago, Gabis
discovered an unthinkable dimension to her family story: from 1941 to 1943, her
grandfather had been Chief of Security Police under the Gestapo in the
Lithuanian town of Svencionys, near the killing field of Poligon, where 8,000
Jews were murdered over three days in the fall of 1941. In 1942, the local
Polish population was also hunted down. Gabis felt compelled to find out the
complicated truth of who her grandfather was and what he had done. Built around
dramatic interviews in four countries, filled with original scholarship,
mesmerizing in its lyricism, A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet is a history and
family memoir like no other, documenting "the holocaust by bullets"
in a remarkable quest as Gabis returns again and again to the country of her
grandfather's birth to learn all she can about the man she thought she knew.” This was not bad. A little dense so I wouldn’t recommend it to
the casual reader. However, an
interesting account.
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