Irena Veisaitė
- Birth Date:
- 09.01.1928
- Death date:
- 11.12.2020
- Length of life:
- 92
- Days since birth:
- 35401
- Years since birth:
- 96
- Days since death:
- 1461
- Years since death:
- 3
- Extra names:
- Ирена Вейсайте
- Categories:
- COVID-19 , Linguist, Litterateur
- Nationality:
- lithuanian, jew
- Cemetery:
- Set cemetery
Irena Veisaitė (9 January 1928, Kaunas – 11 December 2020, Vilnius) was a Lithuanian theatre scholar, intellectual and human rights activist.
Veisaitė was 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 was the long-term President of the Open Society in Lithuania Foundation.
She was 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."
Veisaite died in December 2020 from coronavirus
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