my grandfather's SS past, my Jewish family, a search for the truth
Rita Gabis comes from a family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. As a child, she was close to her Catholic grandfather. She knew he fought to end the Russian occupation of Lithuania before Hitler's Nazis came, but she did not know her grandfather's history from 1941-1943. She found out he was the chief of security police under the Gestapo in a Lithuanian town near the killing fields of Poligon where eight thousand Jews were murdered in three days in the fall of 1941. In 1942 the local Polish population was also killed. As Gabis continued to research her grandfather's life, she knew she needed closure. No matter what she learned she had to know the complicated truth about the man she thought she knew.
