On 10 June 1959, Elena Spirgeviтienњ, 2 a resident of Kaunas in Lithuania, lodged a complaint with the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. She was enraged that the title of Hero of the Soviet Union had been posthumously awarded to a certain Alfonsas сeponis, a Soviet partisan killed in 19ėė during a Gestapo operation. Yet, according to Elena Spirgeviтienњ, this man did not deserve the title: he was part of a criminal gang who had raped her, murdered her sister, and had attempted to rape and then killed her daughter, Elena Spirgeviтiūtњ. This story, which remains controversial to this day, embodies the complexity of the situation in a territory occupied by the German army during the Second World War and in which Soviet partisans waged a long guerrilla war until the 1 We wish to thank Masha Cerovic, Thomas Chopard, Juliette Denis, Emilia Koustova, Vanessa Voisin and two anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback, which greatly contributed to this article. We also wish to thank Arturas Jagoleviтius and сeslovas Spirgeviтius, who kindly granted us an extended interview. 2 Note about names: the majority of names mentioned in these documents are Lithuanian. When the source language is Russian, the name has been transliterated into Cyrillic. For our part, we use Lithuanian spelling: сeponis (transliterated into Cyrillic as) or Spirgeviтiūtњ (transliterated as). Readers should also note that Lithuanian surnames contain a suffix reflecting a person's status: a man's surname does not change when he marries, and often ends in "is" or "as". An unmarried woman, however, will generally take her father's surname with the suffix changed to "tњ", while a married woman takes her husband's surname, with the suffix changed to "nњ". Thus, Elena Spirgeviтienњ is the wife of Stasys Spirgeviтius; their daughters are Elena Spirgeviтiūtњ and Sabina Spirgeviтiūtњ-Šultienњ (married to a man named Šultis), and their son, сeslovas Spirgeviтius.
