Baston, who is also a librarian at the Jewish Community Library, had been researching her past for years. Several months ago, her work paid off. She received a thick packet of 36 names and records from the Lithuanian State Historical Archives in Vilnius. Baston had no idea what her efforts would yield when she completed the necessary forms and sent them to Lithuanian archivist Laima Tautvaisaite, whom she had heard speak at a Jewish genealogy seminar in Washington, D.C., last summer. The past was a place her father had never taken her.
Nobody knows anything.
It's all destroyed,' recalls Baston, whose father died in 1978. Baston's search for the past began 10 years ago when she happened to catch a documentary about the Holocaust on cable TV that profiled the Eishishok massacre. The program included the testimony of survivor Leon Kahn. Baston instantly recognized the name. Kahn was a long-lost cousin who had settled in Canada.