Her grandfather helped murder a little girl.
Shot her in the back of the head. Like it was nothing.
That is the truth that shattered Kerrie Taber’s world.
The respected academic and author had always known her grandfather as a stern but loving man—a Lithuanian refugee who fled World War II and built a quiet life in Cleveland, Ohio.
Then came the email. Then came the facts. He wasn’t just a refugee. He was a Nazi collaborator who helped murder over 14,000 Jews.
Taber’s deeply personal discovery is the heart of her award-winning book, Quarantining Hate, a genre-defying blend of memoir, history, and moral reckoning. The former engineering student turned organizational leadership professor at the University of Arkansas peels back the layers of silence and denial passed down through generations.
“I loved him,” Taber said in an emotional interview with The Black Wall Street Times. “I was special to him. Then I found out he was this monster.”
Growing up, she believed he was simply a quiet man shaped by war. It wasn’t until after his death that she began uncovering hidden documents and records. A chance article, a changed search term, and a reply from a historian confirmed the horrifying truth: Anatolijus Dagys, her grandfather, was second-in-command in Kaunas, Lithuania, during the Nazi occupation. He participated in mass executions, not gas chambers, but bullets to the back of the head.
One detail devastated her most: he shot a little girl in the back of the head.
“I was a little girl too,” Taber recalled. “How could he love me and do that to her? What made me different?”
“There’s no word to describe how that felt,” she said. “Everything I thought I knew—I didn’t.”
Uncovering the Virus of Hate
Rather than bury the past, Taber chose to expose it.
Her book explores how hate metastasizes—in families, in institutions, in nations. Using her academic background, she connects her family’s story to broader systems of hate, drawing parallels from the Holocaust to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Taber argues that hate is a virus, spreading when left unchecked.
“Just like COVID-19, hate thrives in silence,” she explained. “We have to quarantine it. Expose it. Isolate it.”
In her interviews and book, she emphasizes how silence enables complicity. Her own mother was discouraged from asking questions as a child. Family members hid the truth to avoid deportation. Generations lived in denial.
But Taber broke the silence.
Turning Truth Into Action
Quarantining Hate has earned critical acclaim, winning the 2023 TAZ Award for Non-Fiction. Reviewers praise it as brave and unflinching.
“She doesn’t let family myths shield ugly truths,” one reviewer wrote. “She chooses truth, transparency, and ultimately, healing.”
The book doesn’t just recount horrors. It shows how ordinary people can push back against extremism. Taber urges readers to speak up, even in small ways.
“You don’t have to poke someone in the chest,” she said. “Just stand beside someone who’s being targeted. Let them know they’re not alone.”
She sees echoes of history in today’s political climate—delegitimizing communities, demonizing immigrants, silencing dissent.
“We’ve seen this before,” Taber warns. “And we know how it ends.”
From Lithuania to Tulsa: A Shared History of Silence
Her appearance at Greenwood Rising in Tulsa drew strong parallels between Europe’s Holocaust and America’s racial violence.
“If we had told the truth about Tulsa in 1921,” Kerrie Taber said, “maybe it wouldn’t have taken 100 years to start healing.”
In writing Quarantining Hate, Taber confronts the most painful part of her identity—not to destroy it, but to transform it.
“I don’t celebrate what he did,” she said. “But I won’t hide it. We can’t move forward by pretending the past never happened.”
Her story is a warning, a reckoning, and a call to action.
“Hate is loud,” she said. “But the silent majority? It’s time we raise our voices.”
Taber’s journey shows that the truth—no matter how painful—can still be the beginning of healing.
A Return to Greenwood: Sharing Truth, Confronting Hate
On Thursday, October 2, 2025, at 6 p.m., author and professor Kerrie Taber will return to Greenwood Rising for a special Books for Thought event featuring her award-winning book, Quarantining Hate.
Taber will read from her work and lead a thought-provoking conversation on confronting intergenerational trauma, historical denial, and how communities can stop hate from spreading.
You can reserve your spot here.
