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Guest: Rita Gabis
Host: Violeta Davoliūtė

In this episode of the EUROPAST podcast, Violeta Davoliūtė holds a conversation with author and poet Rita Gabis to mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of her critically acclaimed memoir: A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet: My Grandfather’s SS Past, My Jewish Family, A Search for the Truth. Gabis was the first of several third-generation authors to explore the traumas of the Holocaust and the Second World War in the Baltic States through the lens of her family’s experience, including Julija Šukys, Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017), Silvia Foti, Storm in the Land of Rain: A Mother’s Dying Wish Becomes Her Daughter’s Nightmare (2022) and Linda Kinstler, Come to this Court and Cry. How the Holocaust Ends (2023).

In this conversation, Rita Gabis recounts her deeply personal journey into the silenced histories of her Lithuanian- Catholic and Jewish heritage, uncovering her grandfather’s complicity in genocide. Through extensive archival research, field trips and interviews in several different countries, Gabis brings to light the intimate tensions between memory and erasure, victimhood and guilt, personal affect and historical responsibility.

What is the role of family narratives in shaping historical consciousness? How are second and third generation descendants implicated in traumatic events of the past? Join us in this reflection on public history, intergenerational responsibility, and the ongoing search for truth and justice. 

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In the EUROPAST Podcast, we explore Europe’s most pressing challenges of public history. We investigate the complex and contested spaces of public memory, memory activism and best practices for engaging the public in a dialogue about the past. The podcast series is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union under the WIDERA programme (EUROPAST project, Grant Agreement No. 101079466). More: www.europast.vu.lt Music: Istok Zapad, Whiteheads. ℗ Croatia Records, 2021.