The Holocaust by Bullets: A Family’s Story

Before World War II, Lithuania was a great center of Jewish life and learning, and yet Americans today know very little about the destruction of the Jewish community in Lithuania or what Patrick Desbois has called “the Holocaust by Bullets.” Dr. Melinda Menzer of Furman University, will be recounting her family’s story. In 1941, the German army invaded Jurburg, Lithuania the town where Dr. Menzer’s grandfather and his family lived. Over the course of four months, the 2,000 Jewish Lithuanians of Jurburg, including her grandfather’s family, were violently murdered by a Nazi mobile death squad and Lithuanian collaborators, and their community destroyed. Dr. Menzer will also discuss how the U.S immigration quota system of the early 20th century affected her family, making it possible for her grandfather to come to the United States while denying entry to his relatives and so many other Eastern European Jews.