anti-faschismus:“Jews did not join the partisans as a normal act of choice. We were forced to fight
anti-faschismus:“Jews did not join the partisans as a normal act of choice. We were forced to fight the Nazis to save ourselves from extermination. We took the gun in our hands in a desperate situation, when our parents, brothers and sisters were murdered, when children were grabbed from their mothers and sent to their gruesome death. We fought in order to survive; we fought against fascism, which was our enemy, the enemy of all democratic forces and the enemy of Lithuania.The activity of the Jewish partisans was self-defense — in the face of the most overwhelming instance of genocide in human history. In contrast to Lithuanian collaborators, who volunteered to put to death their unarmed civilian Jewish neighbors, and Soviet collaborators, who also volunteered to kill and oppress the Lithuanians, the Jewish partisans’ aim was not to kill anyone, not to ‘inherit’ the property of a murdered people, but to fight our common enemy.”-Sara Ginaite, a native of Kaunas, was incarcerated in the Kovno (Kaunas) Ghetto and lost almost her entire family in the Holocaust. She escaped into the forests and joined the anti-Nazi partisans. After the war, she was a professor of political economy at Vilnius University for almost twenty-five years before emigrating to Canada in 1983. She published ten books in Vilnius and another two in Toronto,where she taught social science at York University. She was instrumental in arranging for Yad Vashem to honor a Lithuanian family that saved a Jewish child during the Holocaust and has recently negotiated exchange student agreements between Vilnius and Toronto Universities. Her best-known work on the Holocaust is Resistance and Survival: The Jewish Community of Kaunas, 1941-1944 (2005). -- source link
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