“I had two mothers,” recalls Irena Veisaitė: “One was murdered during the Holocaust, the other suffered in a Soviet gulag.” Her biological mother was killed by the Germans in 1941 because she was Jewish. Irena herself managed to escape the Kaunas Ghetto as a young girl with the help of a Lithuanian family and fled to Vilnius. There, she was taken in by Stefanija Ladigienė, a courageous Christian woman who already had six children of her own and put herself in great danger to save Irena.
Irena Veisaitė recounted her life story in a lengthy interview with the Holocaust Museum in Washington in 2004. Filmmaker Giedrė Žickytė draws on this and other conversations for her compelling portrait of Irena, who, after the war, went on to study, of all things, German literature in Moscow and completed her doctorate in Leningrad on the poetry of Heinrich Heine. In her homage, Žickytė celebrates a Jewish intellectual, cultural mediator, and polyglot, whom we hear in the film speaking not only her native Lithuanian but also fluent English, German, and Russian. In one particularly moving scene, she speaks in Russian with her friend, the world-renowned Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, recalling a performance of his famous piano piece “For Alina.”
Text: Jörg Taszman