History Shadows

History Shadows is a history podcast by historian Dr. Simonas Strelcovas, who has spent over two decades tracing stories of war, resistance and survival across Europe and Asia.

The first series, Visas for Life, runs from the Évian Conference of 1938, where the world closed its doors to refugees, to the fall of Lithuania in 1940: the small republic that kept its border open, the refugees, intelligence officers and soldiers who filled Vilnius in autumn 1939, and the Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara, whose transit visas opened a way out. Strelcovas is the author of a Japanese-language monograph on the refugees in Lithuania and Sugihara (Tokyo, 2020).

Each episode is built from archival research and eyewitness accounts, and told as a story. In English, for listeners anywhere.