It was during the making of the film The English Version of the film [NEMT]: a language without a people for a people without language that the author learned from Rafael Genys how 500 girls and woman from Telsiai (Telz in Yiddish) and its surroundings were kept in a ghetto for a few months, and then shot by the Lithuanian collaborators of the Nazis just before Christmas 1941.
The slaughter of these Jewish girls and women followed that of the men committed in July, and of women with the younger children in August and September 1941. These events are not exceptional in the long list of massacres perpetrated in Lithuania.
After a few years of work centered on Lithuania, including the translation and rewriting of her father’s memoirs, the author has been drawn to telling the story of the girls and women from the perspective of their awakening lives. Their faces were haunting her through the recollections of her mother.