Postmemory as historical reckoning: coming to terms with a grandfather’s complicity in the Holocaust in Lithuania – Rita Gabis, A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet, and Julija Šukys, Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines how the invisible emotional and psychological shadow of an ancestor’s complicity in war crimes is passed on to descendants and expressed as postmemory writing in two rite of return memoirs: A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet by Rita Gabis and Siberian Exile by Julija Šukys. Both writers transform informal family knowledge about a grandfather’s complicity in Nazi war crimes during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, archival research, and travel into a long-term process of working through the inter-generational transfer of trauma. Writing serves as a memory space for their own unhealed historical and familial trauma.