Darkness and Company

Part of the Peter Owen World Series: Baltics

Lithuania, 1941

Vincentas has made a Faustian pact with an SS officer: in exchange for his own safety and that of his Jewish lover, Judita, he will take photographs - make art - of the mass killings of Jews in the villages and forests of his occupied homeland. Learning of the pact that has kept her safe for so long, a disgusted Judita returns to her husband, surrendering herself to the ghetto, leaving Vincentas alone and trapped in his horrifying work.

Through the metaphor of photography, Sigitas Parulskis lays bare the passivity and complicity of many of his countrymen during the Holocaust in which 94 per cent of Lithuania's Jewish population perished.

Translated from the Lithuanian by Karla Gruodis