She thought her grandfather was a hero. Then she learned he was a Nazi

Photos: Silvia Foti archives

Growing up in the 1960s in Chicago’s Marquette Park neighborhood, which boasted the largest population of ex-pat Lithuanians outside their homeland,

Silvia Foti was raised on the story of her heroic grandfather, a warrior for Lithuania’s freedom during World War II who died a martyr’s death at the hands of the country's Soviet conquerors. According to family and local lore — and even the Lithuanian government, who honored him with plaques, street names and a school — Jonas Norieka was a hero who paid the highest price for his ideals. He fought the Nazis when they occupied the country early in the war, was sent to a concentration camp, rebelled against the subsequent Communist occupation, and was then thrown into a prison of the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB) for treason, where, at age 36, he was tortured and murdered in 1947.

Silvia, a 61-year-old high school literature teacher in Chicago and a former journalist, says she felt like the coddled princess of the tight-knit community, growing up as the granddaughter of a hero who had resisted the Nazis, had paid with his life for bravely battling the Communists.

For years, Silvia’s Lithuanian-born mother, who was just seven years old when her venerated father was tortured and killed by the NKVD, had devoted herself to gathering material for what was to be a national tribute to him. She’d collected thousands of pages of NKVD and KGB transcripts, letters he wrote to her mother (Norieka’s young wife), and hundreds of other related articles and documents. She even went back to university at age 55 and got a doctorate in literature in order to be better qualified to write her book. But she fell ill, and five years later, in February of 2000, she was on her deathbed.

“My mom was dying, she could barely talk, yet she pulled me close, took my hand and whispered, ‘Silvia, you have to write the book, you must write the story — everyone expects it.’ It was more like a command, and I knew I’d have to take it on, even though I didn’t believe I had the skills to master such a project. I was a journalist, but I’d never attempted anything like this. The sheer volume of the material she had amassed made it seem insurmountable,” Silvia tells Mishpacha.

Little did she know that honoring her mother’s dying wish would upend her life and shake the foundations of everything she knew to be true. Because over the next two decades, she would discover that although her grandfather was indeed a devoted Lithuanian patriot who wanted to see his beloved country independent, Jonas Norieka — whose nom de guerre was “General Storm” during the anti-Communist revolt — was also a rabid Jew-hater and Nazi collaborator who was directly responsible for the murder of close to 15,000 Lithuanian Jews in three towns that he’d personally made Junenrein as a district commander, in advance of the Nazi takeover.