Irena Veisaitė

Who is Irena Veisaitė?

Irena Veisaitė is a Lithuanian theatre scholar, intellectual and human rights activist.

Veisaitė is a Lithuanian Jew and survived the Holocaust. She earned a doctorate in Leningrad in 1963 with a dissertation on the poetry of Heinrich Heine, and was a lecturer at the teacher's college in Vilnius from 1953 to 1997. She has also been head of the Thomas Mann Cultural Centre in Nida, Lithuania. She was awarded the Goethe Medal in 2012 for her contribution to the cultural exchange between Germany and Lithuania.

She is the long-term President of the Open Society in Lithuania Foundation.

She is also known for addressing communism in her work, and has said in an interview with Deutsche Welle that "the Soviets were very, very bad. Different from the Nazis, but not better."