A powerful, poignant and painful exploration of the murder by bullets of Lithuanian Jews by Lithuanian nationalists — not Germans. The unusual team of writers consists of the granddaughter and grandniece of perpetrators, and the great nephew of a murdered Jew. . . . Our People is a rare combination of meticulous scholarship and skilled interviewing presented as a sensitive, nuanced, well-rounded and historically grounded portrait not only of the perpetrators, but of the ongoing efforts to rehabilitate them and honor the Lithuanian nationals who killed Jews. . . . Vanagaite and Zuroff began their journey deeply skeptical of each other. They end their journey having shared the deepest of dialogues, transformed, shattered yet strengthened. The reader will be privileged to share that pilgrimage and their rare openness with each other.

Jewish Journal

There are, fortunately, useful updates and additions in this English version. The authors tell us more about their relationship to each other, to Lithuania and to the Holocaust. The bitterest additions are two new chapters, one, ‘Lithuania Today: Minimizing the Crimes’, on the treatment of the Holocaust in school textbooks and official museums, the other, ‘Mission Impossible?’, on trying to trace all the graves, victims and perpetrators.

Literary Review

It is not memory, but history that helps the authors turn over a new leaf together . . . In Lithuania, the authors visited thirty-five of the 234 mass graves of Jews mainly murdered by Lithuanians and five such graves in Belarus where Jews had been annihilated by Lithuanians as well. With few exceptions, nearly all these sites are memorialized in some way, yet they are largely neglected to the point of rendering them practically inaccessible. . . . Whenever possible, they interviewed either very old locals or younger people, some of whom (even museum officials or guides) were totally unaware either of the events of 1941 or of the prominent Jewish presence in what was once called “the Jerusalem of the north.” Documents attesting to what actually happened are included in each chapter, often followed by a dialogue between the two authors.

Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs

This is a painful and important book—painful because so much of it consists of excruciating eyewitness accounts to the torment inflicted on Lithuanian Jews by their fellow citizens, and important because so little has appeared in English on not only this terrible dimension of the Holocaust but also the reluctance, even refusal, of the descendants of the killers to acknowledge their role in the murders all these years later. The account of the Lithuanian government’s vacillations in dealing with the nation’s past is particularly eye-opening.

Peter Hayes, author of Why? Explaining the Holocaust

Our People is an immensely valuable addition to our knowledge about the genocidal murder of Lithuanian Jews. The authors’ remarkable investigation has brought to light the active role played by Lithuanian citizens, often with minimal oversight by Nazi occupiers, at hundreds of killing sites. It will serve as a powerful wake-up call for grappling with the complicit legacy of World War II.

Yehuda Bauer, Holocaust historian, academic advisor, Yad Vashem

A powerful, poignant, and painful exploration of the ‘murder by bullets’ of Lithuanian Jews by their Lithuanian neighbors. Authors Ruta Vanagaite, a prominent Lithuanian journalist, and Efraim Zuroff, the preeminent Nazi hunter, are forced to confront history and memory, shattering conventional understandings of both. A best-selling and controversial book when first published in Lithuania, Our People has challenged many convenient truths that Lithuanians have told themselves about their national heroes, offering a clear and unapologetic portrait of Lithuania’s ‘hidden Holocaust.’

Michael Berenbaum, director, Sigi Ziering Institute, American Jewish University