Holder for the Sabbath candles, brass cooking post, and blankets to ward off the cold – those three things were key elements in the luggage of many of the families that left Lithuania to make the long journey to Cape Town. They were unsure what kind of country or weather awaited them there. But two pieces of information had been circulating through Lithuania’s shtetls since the 1880s – new arrivals in South Africa could live free of persecution, and gold had been discovered there. A snowball effect took hold and by the 1920s, some 40,000 Lithuanian Jews had emigrated. In South Africa, the “Litvaks” became part of the middle classes – they were, after all, white. Ieva Balsiūnaitė met many of their descendants. They tell moving family stories of relatives left behind, of protesting against apartheid – and of the variety of life in Lithuania before the Holocaust.