This is the 24th instalment of #deanehistory.

This is the story of Jonas Noreika – and of his granddaughter, Silvia Foti. It is a story of the past, and of the present.

Jonas Noreika led the Lithuanian postwar revolt against the USSR, 1945-1946. The Russians executed him. His name rings out; in some ways, he has served as the embodiment of that proud country’s postwar national story. Streets bear his name. There is a Jonas Noreika school.

Foti is his granddaughter. Brought up in the United States, she was raised to revere the memory of the man whose portrait hung in her home. The Lithuanian expatriate community around her must have thought this little girl blessed to be descended from such a man.

On her deathbed, Foti’s mother turned to her daughter– a journalist – & asked her to take up the great family project– a book about her grandfather that would tell his story, authenticate the legend & serve to preserve it forevermore. What an honour she must have felt this to be.

So we can picture the moment in the archives Foti turned from one page to another, and turned her family’s life over with it. The moment she turned to the page from 1941 upon which her grandfather’s signature was written under the order to round up the Jews.

By his order, the Lithuanian Jews in his region were sent to the ghettoes and thence to the camps. Between those two hells, we now know, almost all of them died.

Yes, the Nazis drove this scheme of human slaughter. But some Lithuanians had been complicit - Foti’s grandfather foremost amongst them. Not just complicit, either. He didn’t “just” sign a form or two (as if such signatures alone don’t kill).

As she read on and dug deeper, Foti saw the extent to which her grandfather was an anti-Semite himself, who greatly benefited from his closeness to the occupying regime.

Pause to imagine the moment in Foti’s life this must have been – the bifurcation; everything before it, and everything after it. To think that some say that history doesn’t matter.

A dark moment of the soul must have been had. The temptation to put her research in a drawer must have been very strong.

That we know all this tells you what she determined to do – as does the existence of her forthcoming book, “The Nazi’s Granddaughter.”

She has been castigated by the Lithuanian émigré world in which she was raised, and by her ancestral homeland too.

Without yet having reading it, I already know it to be one of the bravest publications of our time.