Life Should Be Transparent: Conversations about Lithuania and Europe in the Twentieth Century and Today Aurimas Švedas and Irena Veisaitė, trans. Karla Guodis

Abstract

In Life Should be Transparent: Conversations about Lithuania and Europe in the Twentieth Century and Today, Irena Veisaitė, a noted theater critic and an outstanding scholar of modern Lithuanian culture (who passed away on December 11, 2019 at the age of ninety-two due to COVID-19), shares her compelling recollections of her life in Kaunas, Lithuania before, during and after the Second World War. In thirteen separate conversations (chapters) with Aurimas Švedas, a Lithuania historian, Veisaitė provides an in-depth personal history of life in twentieth-century Lithuania beginning as a young child through old age. She provides truly extraordinary insight into three distinct periods of twentieth century Lithuanian history through which she lived: the Soviet occupation (June 1940 to June 1941), the Nazi occupation (June 1941 to 1945) and the later Soviet occupation (1945 to 1990). Born in 1928, Veisaitė was part of a secular Jewish family. She was thirteen years old when the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States began in 1940. When the Nazis arrived one year later, the German occupation authorities imposed various anti-Jewish restrictions, culminating in her family’s forced relocation to the Kaunas ghetto. After the Nazis murdered her mother, Veisaitė was smuggled out of the ghetto and lived with two non-Jewish families until the end of the war.1 (Her parents had divorced in 1938 and her father emigrated to the United States; they finally met again thirty years later in 1968.)