It has been 85 years since Nazi Germany invaded Lithuania and began exterminating its Jewish population. The Nazis were welcomed by a sympathetic public – a pool of sizable hit force for the Holocaust, says historian Saulius Sužiedėlis, professor emeritus at Millersville University in Pennsylvania.
“For this reason, Jews feel a deep sense of resentment, because they saw that it was mostly Lithuanians who shot them at the pit. These were not just a handful of outcasts or deviants,” he says in an interview with LRT.lt.
Sužiedėlis sits on the advisory board of The Lost Shtetl, a new museum in Šeduva dedicated to the Jewish history in Lithuania. He contributed significantly to the creation of the museum’s Holocaust gallery and has now travelled from the US to Šeduva for the first time to see the fruits of his labour.
The Šeduva shtetl was destroyed on August 25–26, 1941, when nearly 700 men, women, and children were herded into a forest and murdered.
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