Interview with Saulius Sužiedėlis, author of "Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania"

Saulius Sužiedėlis. https://www.bernardinai.lt/2012-01-02-prof-saulius-suziedelis-svarbu-ne-svari-o-teisinga-istorija/ Photo by Vytautas Juozėnas. "Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania," Academic Studies Press,,March 2025,

I first met Professor Sužiedėlis a number of years ago at a lecture he gave at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. My interest in his latest book is what led me to ask for an email interview. But first: his credentials:

Born 1945 in Germany, Saulius is a prominent Lithuanian-American scientist, historian, and Professor Emeritus of History at Pennsylvania's Millersville University. He is a member of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), American Historical Association, and the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS), which he managed from 2002-04. From 1994-98, Sužiedėlis worked as Chief Editor of the Journal of Baltic Studies. Since 1998, Sužiedėlis has been the member of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania. From 2006-10, he hosted Millersville University’s annual Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide.

His awards in Lithuania:

• 2011: a prize for international achievements in science and collaboration with Lithuania from Lithuania's Ministry of Education and Science

• 2013: an honorary doctorate from Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, in recognition of his work in furthering the study of humanities in Lithuania and for contributions to Holocaust research.

• 2023: the Order of the President of Lithuania for Service to the Study of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and Lithuanian History.

My Questions, and his answers:

1. Simas Sužiedėlis, your late father, was born in 1903 in St. Petersburg. In 1929 he married Antanina Kliorevičiūtė, born 1904 in Žeimiai, a small town just north of Jonava. How did your paternal grandparents happen to be in St. Petersburg, and when did your father move to Lithuania? What did he do there in the interwar period? I know that your mother was a secondary school teacher in Kaunas. At what point did they leave Lithuania and wind up in Gotha -- before the first Russian occupation, or in mid-1944 as the Red Army was approaching for the second and final occupation?

My grandfather Laurynas Sužiedėlis was one of thousands of villagers who chose “internal emigration.” Instead of the New World, opting for factory work in one of Russia’s urban centers. There was an active Lithuanian community in St. Petersburg in the years before the Great War. Family lore has it that my father returned to Lithuania with my grandmother as a toddler while Laurynas came back sometime before the Revolution and bought a small plot of land. The farm provided enough income for my father to attend the newly established Lithuanian gymnasium in Vilnius in 1918. In 1920 after the Polish seizure of Vilnius he fled to Kaunas. My grandparents and the rest of the family stayed on the Polish side of the border. In the 1920s my parents attended the University of Kaunas. In 1928-1935 they lived in Riga where my father taught at the Lithuanian gymnasium. He began his doctoral studies in history at the University of Latvia. After returning to Lithuania in 1935 my parents briefly taught in Kėdainiai.  In 1939 my father obtained a teaching position at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas where my family lived until the summer of 1944. In 1940, soon after the first Soviet occupation, my father was appointed to the newly established Lithuanian SSR Academy of Sciences in Vilnius where he administered the Academy’s Library, and eventually became the institution’s general secretary, a position he held until the Germans closed the Academy in 1942. He stayed in a small apartment in Vilnius and commuted often to Kaunas to be with family. In July 1944, my family left Kaunas and fled west to avoid the Red Army with the hope of reaching areas controlled by the Western allies. Like most Lithuanian refugees, they hoped that they would return soon after the war.

2. You were born May 13, 1945 in Gotha, five days after VE Day, and a little more than a month after the US 4th Armored Division and 89th Infantry Division discovered the Ohrdruf Buchenwald subcamp, one of the first liberated by Allied forces, and visited by Generals Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton, who saw piles of corpses. On April 13, American troops occupied Gotha without a fight, finding it in ruins, and turned it over to the Red Army the same day. So, you were born in what became the Soviet Occupation Zone. When and how did you and your parents leave Gotha, and to what DP Camp(s)?

I was the youngest of five sons. Fortunately for us, Americans arrived in Gotha ahead of the Soviet forces. I was told that some of the American GI’s helped the local Lithuanian refugees in the area to evacuate westwards a few weeks before the Red Army took administrative control of Thuringia, which had been assigned to the Soviet Occupation Zone. Eventually, we were settled in the American Zone’s Hanau DP Camp near Frankfurt where we lived for three years under the UNRRA.

3. Was your adult focus on the Holocaust influenced in any way by what happened to your family and to the Jews in the Gotha area (Jews forced to work in the nearby quarries were all murdered by Nazis just before Allied troops arrived)?

I wasn’t aware of what happened to the Jews in Thuringia. Much of my interest in the Holocaust was influenced by films and books (such as "Exodus") which I saw/read while in high school. As with most DP families, there was little talk about Lithuania’s Jews. As a child I knew that they existed, of course, and I remember reading Vincas Krėvė’s short story “Silkės” (The Herring) which described Lithuanian interaction with a Jewish itinerant trader in the villages. But discussions about the Jews and the Holocaust came much later.

4. What was life like in the DP camp(s) for you and your family?

I was obviously too young to remember much of life in Germany. But family photos and stories make clear that things were difficult at first. For a while, our family of seven shared one room with a group of young men. Living conditions improved considerably as time went on, because my father headed many of the camp’s cultural activities (for example, the choir) and was thus assigned better quarters. My older brothers continued their schooling in Hanau.

5. When did you all come to America? Where did your guarantors arrange for you all to live, and for your parents to start work? Is that where you grew up? Or did your parents move? Did you attend supplementary classes in Lithuanian? Did you become a Lithuanian scout or participate in a folk dance group?

We arrived in New York on December 21, 1948, aboard the SS Marine Flasher. The family settled in Brockton, Massachusetts, where several thousand Lithuanians had arrived before WWI, and now housed hundreds of postwar DP families. I finished high school there in 1963. My father got a job as editor of Darbininkas (The Worker), a Catholic weekly newspaper which later moved to New York, but we stayed in Brockton since it was decided that moving was too costly. So, my father would come home on weekends whenever he was able. My family was actively involved in Lithuanian community activities, especially the Catholic organization Ateitis of which my father was a long-time leader. Almost all my close friends were local Lithuanian kids. We never spoke English at home. As a result, I did not interact much with “real (non-immigrant) American” friends until I went away to college. But even there much of my social life involved Lithuanians in Washington and Baltimore.

6. What were your early aspirations? Why did you choose to go to Catholic University of America, where you got your AB in 1967?

I was lucky enough to receive a scholarship to attend CUA. I always enjoyed reading history books in my father’s library, so I chose the modern European history option as my major. I very much enjoyed learning languages, so this area of studies was a perfect fit for me.

7. Two years later, in 1969, you completed Peace Corps training, and the study of Amharic and Ethiopian studies at the University of Utah. What led you to make that career choice, and was it influenced in any way by your feelings about the Viet-Nam war? Was your time in Ethiopia fulfilling?

The summer training program in Utah in 1967 was my first experience away from the East Coast, and the first time I was in a vastly different “non-ethnic” social milieu. I loved learning Amharic, a Semitic language utterly different from the other languages I had studied. Ethiopia (1967-1969) was a life-changing experience. It changed my views of so-called developing countries and international geopolitics, including a critical view of what we were doing in Vietnam. I am an unabashed admirer of Ethiopian culture and civilization and was able to visit again in 2012 and connect with former students and friends. Unfortunately, not all of them survived the revolution and Marxist dictatorship of the 1970s. Sadly, the Peace Corps program was terminated this year because of safety concerns. I fear what may be happening to the Ethiopia amidst the current national/ethnic conflicts.

8. It appears that, not long after, you made a fateful decision to focus on the history of your family's ancestral homeland. What led to that pivot away from the Peace Corps? In 1972 you achieved an M.A. at the University of Maryland in College Park, focusing on Russian history, your thesis being "The Lithuanian National Movement and the Tsarist Administration in Russian Lithuania, 1861-1905." From 1973-75 you studied the Polish language, and Polish and Russian history in Polish universities. Coming back to the US, you worked as a history teacher at Oklahoma City Community College from 1976-82, also getting a Ph.D in 1977 from the University of Kansas, majoring in Russian and East European History, and having your first of dozens of scholarly articles, this one in Lithuanian, published in 1979: (“Užnemunės miestų ir miestelių socialekonominės problemos XIX amžiaus pirmojoje pusėje (iki 1864 m. reformos") (Socio-economic Problems of the Towns and Small Urban Settlements in Southwestern Lithuania before the Reform of 1864). How did you manage to juggle all those responsibilities and efforts?

For a brief time, I considered African history as a possible field of graduate studies. In the end, I chose Russian and Eastern European history and Slavic Studies as the main focus. At Maryland I learned to read Russian and was lucky enough to land one of the last National Defense Foreign Language Fellowships to study history and Slavic literature at the University of Kansas (1972-1977). The program included courses and research at the Universities of Poznan and Warsaw. My dissertation focused on the history of the Lithuanian-speaking peasantry of southwestern Lithuania (Suvalkija, Užnemunė) which was part of the autonomous Kingdom of Poland before 1867. This was the first time I was able to peruse documents on Lithuanian-Jewish relations in the region’s towns and villages, particularly social and economic interactions. It opened my eyes to an aspect of Lithuanian social history that I had not previously considered.  I utilized a small part of this work in Chapter 1 of my new book: "Crisis, War and the Holocaust in Lithuania."

9. In another major pivot, in 1982 you began a five-year job working for the US DOJ, Office of Special Investigations, in Washington, DC, as a Research Historian, focusing on WWII and its aftermath, East European emigration, as well as recent Soviet and East European history. Given that focus, did you look for and discover new details about your and your family's experiences in Europe?

Working at the DOJ was the second most important formative experience of my life (after the Peace Corps). Aside from the obvious learning curve of concentrating on 20^th-century history, I was forced to face the emotional, political and moral dimensions which are unavoidable when confronting the mass murder of Lithuania’s Jews, the most violent event in the country’s history. It also meant delving into certain aspects of World War II which are not well-appreciated within the commemorative framework in which most Americans view this past: for example, in the “Greatest Generation” narratives, Spielberg’s films, the story of Anne Frank, and in other venues of popular culture. There is nothing wrong with any of these, but it is also true that these American and Western narratives are largely irrelevant to the daily experience of the war of annihilation on the Eastern Front as lived by the people of the region which Timothy Snyder aptly describes as the “Bloodlands.” The wars in the East and West were two different realities. My father once recounted the terrible view from the window of his apartment in September 1941 as Lithuanian police drove the Jews of Vilnius into the ghetto. Two of my older brothers were old enough to see the yellow stars in Kaunas and still clearly remember the bodies of slain people they passed as they fled west in the summer of 1944. My mother recalled and never quite got over the images of the young starving, stumbling Soviet POW’s convoyed through the streets.

From the researcher’s point of view, working in this historical space was quite different from my previous study of 19^th-century social history. The issues were vexing. Is it disrespectful to critically evaluate the testimonies of survivors as historical sources when the victims faced almost unimaginable trauma? How do you describe the mass killing on such a scale and in what detail? How do you examine the expressed motivations of the perpetrators and collaborators? There are no easy answers to these and many other questions which inevitably arise when writing the history of genocides and crimes against humanity which involve millions of victims.

My work at OSI, which led to denaturalization and deportation cases against a number of Lithuanian DP’s, proved controversial in the Lithuanian diaspora in the US and Canada. A relative of mine took the time to collect dozens of pages of articles in the ethnic press which characterized my work as that of a KGB stooge and as a kind of betrayal. But the condemnations were by no means universal and I will always remember gratefully the support of many friends.

10. You left government service for a year in 1988 (and came back to the US Information Agency's Voice of America in 1989-90) to work as an Instructor of History at the University of Illinois in Chicago -- which at the time, and still today, has a departmental focus on Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies. That same year, your first book was published: "The Sword and the Cross: A History of the Church in Lithuania." Your primary focus at the time was ethnic Lithuanian history? 

My course at UIC was a short and rather uneventful period of my academic career. "The Sword and the Cross" was a brief history of the Church intended for a wider audience, and I do not consider it a scholarly work. During the late 1980s I was only beginning to collect and review primary and secondary sources which I later included in books and articles on Lithuanian-Jewish relations and the Holocaust.

11. Your first book (your current book being the second) focussing on the Holocaust in Lithuania was "The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews during Summer and Fall of 1941," with Christoph Dieckmann, published in 2006. Was there a point in your studies when your focus changed to the history of Jews in Lithuania, especially before, during, and after WWII? If so, was there a specific event or piece of information that led to that change? Or was it gradual? What was the response by Lithuanians -- and Jews -- to the publication of your 2006 book? Has the response to your new book, published this past March, by both Lithuanians and the Jewish community, been any different?

The aforementioned study with Christoph Dieckmann published almost two decades ago was more in the nature of a report commissioned by the International Historical Commission (The International Commission for the Evaluation of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania) established in 1998. It was an initial overview of the Nazi and collaborationist structures most responsible for the campaign of annihilation of Lithuania’s Jewish communities during the summer and fall of 1941, particularly in the countryside. The focus on this period of what constituted the destruction of the majority of the country’s Litvaks was clearly necessary, but it was, of course, incomplete as a history of the Holocaust in Lithuania.

As I point out in the preface to my current book, the scholars of the Commission’s Nazi crimes panel later concluded that a more comprehensive study was needed, which would go beyond the Persecution and Mass Murder volume. I should emphasize that my most recent book is NOT a study of the history of Lithuania’s Jews. There are currently dozens of Lithuanian scholars far more qualified for that task than I. The book is, rather, a story of the destruction of that community during a period of crisis and war, and also addressed the legacy of the genocide in terms of its impact on Lithuanian society. Sometimes, I overhear people say that the Holocaust was something that “happened to the Jews,” and thus less interesting to “others” -- their history, not ours. I feel strongly that as a Lithuanian citizen, I must consider the Holocaust as part of our national history.

Naturally, a thick skin can be useful when venturing into this period of Lithuanian history. It would be naïve to expect universal acclaim or consensus for any book which addresses the history of World War II and the Holocaust, topics which inevitably evoke strong opinions, even emotional reactions (not unlike what often follows discussions of Israel-Palestine in 1948 or the American Civil War). Social scientists of all stripes make errors—both minor and significant. Some people seize on these all too human failings to encourage a generalized mistrust of “experts.” I believe that this phenomenon can also lead to the rejection of academic history as it evolves on the basis of new research and analysis of long-accepted narratives which have constituencies of commemoration and shared suffering. I assume that some, if not many, Lithuanians will find the emphasis on indigenous collaboration upsetting and might even reject this historical reality altogether. Most killers were not, as is sometimes claimed, an "undisciplined rabble.” There were people who claimed to fight for Lithuania’s freedom who murdered Jews.

I also expect that people who say that the Holocaust in Lithuania began on June 23, 1941, will find it hard to accept that the policy of the annihilation of Lithuania’s Jewish communities (with two exceptions) began later, more than a month after the Nazi invasion. I see the Shoah as a quantum leap in history, radically different from the persecution, pogroms and deadly communal conflicts which had marked earlier periods of mass anti-Jewish violence throughout the centuries. Thus, for me, the wave of killings which commenced in early August 1941 marked the real beginning of the Holocaust in Lithuania. For me, the Holocaust acquires meaning only as the policy of mass premeditated first-degree murder with the intent to annihilate an entire community. But I can understand why Holocaust survivors who lived through this suffering might think differently than historians who write decades after the fact.

A concluding comment here on a somewhat discordant note. Commemoration and history coexist, but not always easily. (Timothy Snyder makes this point in an insightful essay published in 2013 entitled “Commemorative Causality.”) This thought came to mind when the publishers sent me a “review” (not from a historian) of "Crisis, War and the Holocaust" on a website of a group: “Defending History,” which described the book as a suspiciously “subtle rewriting” of the past. Of course, I plead guilty but don’t quite understand the “subtle” part. If scholars and researchers did not engage in the process of rewriting, there would be no need for history departments at universities (the demise of which some populist politicians would doubtless welcome). As I point out in the preface, the book relies in large part on sources restricted during the Soviet period so, of course, the narrative presents different perspectives than those of scholarly works which have not utilized what is now available.

Call it rewriting, if you will. In 1989 the late giant of Holocaust studies Yehuda Bauer declared the once universally accepted figure of four million Auschwitz victims obsolete (emblazoned in stone at the Museum when I visited in 1973) and then proposed a new estimate of 1.1 million based on his own meticulous analysis of the records. Erstwhile “defenders of history” excoriated Bauer for “minimizing” the Shoa (one of the kinder criticisms at the time). The controversy abated after most Holocaust scholars confirmed the new number as more closely reflecting the scale of death at the site rather than the earlier “rhetorical statistic.” There is now a more feasible counting of the demographics and scale of deaths at Ponary/Ponar/Paneriai. At least 90% (not the earlier estimate of 70%) of the victims were Jews and the number of dead was somewhat less than the 100,000 declared in 1944. Of course, this in no way diminishes the horror which we must commemorate, so as never to forget.

Thank you, Professor Sužiedėlis.

On November 5, 2025, the Consulate General of the Republic of Lithuania in New York will co-sponsor, along with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, a free ZOOM book talk with Jonathan Brent, YIVO's Executive Director, and Saulius Sužiedėlis. More information and a link to register: https://www.yivo.org/Crisis