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The Life of a Vilna Ghetto Rescuer: Reading, Writing, Remembering

Julija Šukys, author of Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė, carefully collected, preserved, and archived the written record of the life of Ona Šimaitė. Šimaitė, a librarian at Vilnius University, used her position to aid and rescue Jews in the Vilna Ghetto.

Date & Time

Monday
Nov. 26, 2012
2:30pm – 3:30pm ET

Location

4th Floor, Woodrow Wilson Center
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Overview

Julija Šukys carefully collected, preserved, and archived the written record of the life of Ona Šimaitė, which included thousands of letters and scores of diaries.  Šimaitė, a librarian at Vilnius University, used her position to aid and rescue Jews in the Vilna Ghetto. Epistolophilia brings back to life this quiet and unassuming heroine who was a giant of Holocaust history, one of Yad Vashem's honored Righteous Among the Nations, and yet is so little known.

Julija Šukys (PhD 2001, Univeristy of Toronto) is the author of two books, Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (Nebraska 2012) and Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (Nebraska, 2007). She has held fellowships with the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois), the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem (Jerusalem), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, and  has been a fellow at the Banff Centre’s Literary Journalism Program. Her honors include writers’ grants from the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. Epistolophilia has been shortlisted for the 2012 Mavis Gallant Prize in Nonfiction.

 

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Speaker

Julija Sukys

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Hosted By

Global Europe Program

The Global Europe Program addresses vital issues affecting the European continent, US-European relations, and Europe’s ties with the rest of the world. We investigate European approaches to critical global issues: digital transformation, climate, migration, global governance. We also examine Europe’s relations with Russia and Eurasia, China and the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Our program activities cover a wide range of topics, from the role of NATO, the European Union and the OSCE to European energy security, trade disputes, challenges to democracy, and counter-terrorism. The Global Europe Program’s staff, scholars-in-residence, and Global Fellows participate in seminars, policy study groups, and international conferences to provide analytical recommendations to policy makers and the media.  Read more

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