Silvia Foti: When truth trumps family loyalty
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2021
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Stephen Sackur interviews Silvia Foti, an American writer whose grandfather was a Lithuanian man hailed as heroic patriot who paid with his life resisting the Soviets. But according to his granddaughter, Jonas Noreika was no hero - he had the blood of thousands of Jews on his hands. She’s chosen to speak out, angering many in Lithuania. What happens when truth trumps family loyalty?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the BBC World Service. |
| 0:02.9 | These attackers have no fear. They would have killed me had they found out. It was really intense. I just saw the entire financial markets grinding to a halt. This is what they've stolen. So many millions of dollars. Oh, it's got to be North Korea. There was chaos. What do you mean they've disappeared? It was almost like a perfect crime. Where did they get them on? How in the world did this happen? The Lazarus Heights from the BBC World Service, coming soon. |
| 0:29.4 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today made a promise to her dying mother in the United States, which |
| 0:38.7 | transformed her life and challenged every element of her own identity. Sylvia Foti's mother |
| 0:45.6 | asked Sylvia to complete an unfinished biography of her grandfather, a Lithuanian who had been |
| 0:52.1 | executed by the Soviets after World War II. |
| 0:55.3 | Jonas Nureka is to this day hailed as a patriotic hero by many in Lithuania. |
| 1:01.0 | He has schools and roads named after him. |
| 1:03.8 | But when Sylvia started to investigate her grandfather's story, she uncovered a terrible truth. |
| 1:10.7 | In 1941, as a 30-year-old member of the anti-Soviet |
| 1:14.8 | resistance, he had colluded with the Nazis. He directed a purge of Jews from their homes, |
| 1:22.0 | forcing them into ghettos. Worst of all, in the summer of 1941, powerful evidence suggests he supervised the round-up and mass murder of close to 2,000 Jews, a heinous crime which represents a grim milestone on the road to the mass extermination of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe. |
| 1:43.8 | Sylvia Foti has written a book about her grandfather |
| 1:46.2 | and joined a campaign by the descendants of the Lithuanian Jewish community to have Yunus Nareka |
| 1:52.6 | removed from the country's pantheon of heroes. The result, anger, denial and division in Lithuania. |
| 2:00.3 | So has the price of truth-telling been worth paying? |
| 2:05.2 | Well, Sylvia Foti joins me now on the line from Chicago. Welcome to Hard Talk. |
| 2:11.2 | Hello, thank you. Yours is an extraordinary story to tell. Let's begin by establishing why you chose to dig so deep into the |
| 2:24.0 | life of your grandfather, who of course was a man you had never met because he was executed by the |
| 2:31.3 | Soviets in 1947. So why did you go so deep into his life? I sort of stumbled |
| 2:38.6 | into it, to be honest. I got the story from my mother on her deathbed. I thought I was going to |
| 2:47.0 | write about a hero when I started this. I had no idea about his dark past. It really |
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