Please join Montreal writer Julija Šukys on Tuesday, January 22, for a reading and discussion of her new book
Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė in the Alden Trust Auditorium. The reading will begin at 4:30 pm and is free and open to the public.
Šimaitė (1894-1970), a university librarian, carefully collected, preserved, and archived the written record of her life, including thousands of letters and scores of diaries. Again and again she slipped into the Jewish ghetto of German-occupied Vilnius to carry food, clothes, medicine, money, and counterfeit documents to its prisoners. Often she left with letters to deliver, manuscripts to hide, and even sedated children swathed in sacks. In 1944 she was captured by the Gestapo, tortured for twelve days, and deported to Dachau.
Epistolophilia beckons back to life this quiet and worldly heroine, a giant of Holocaust history (one of Yad Vashem's honored Righteous Among the Nations) and yet so little known.
For more information, contact Irina Mukhina at
imukhina@assumption.edu. Sponsored by Women’s Studies and supported by the History Department.