She thought her grandfather was a Lithuanian hero. Research leads her to ask, was he a patriot or a Nazi?

CHICAGO _ To this day, Silvia Foti is not sure if she was supposed to expose or exonerate her grandfather Jonas Noreika.

In Lithuania, he is remembered as General Storm, his nom de guerre when he led an underground resistance to the Soviet army's invasion of his homeland during World War II. There are statues and streets named for him. His daughter, Foti's mother, spent decades assembling myriad documents for a biography of Noreika. At 55, Foti's mother got a doctorate in literature to prepare herself to write a book about his life. But she fell ill, and never wrote it.

"In the hospital on her deathbed, she pulled me close and whispered: 'You must write the story,'" Foti recalled her mother saying.

Yet when Foti told that to Noreika's widow, she replied: "Just let history lay."

As Foti began working her way through the documents, she found troubling hints that there was more to her grandfather's story than the heroic legend she was raised on. Because of Noreika's fame, Foti felt like a princess as a child in Chicago's Lithuanian community, the largest outside the homeland. But eventually she uncovered a pamphlet her grandfather wrote in 1933. It was filled with rants against the Jews as economic exploiters of Lithuania and urged: "We won't buy any products from Jews!"

"I wonder if my mother was wrestling with her father's anti-Semitism," Foti said. "Did she want me to tell or suppress that part of the story?"

Tuesday, a court in Vilnius, the country's capital, will be asked to decide whether Noreika was, in fact, a hero or an accomplice in the Nazi Holocaust. The plaintiff is Grant Gochin, an American of Lithuanian descent whose Jewish relatives were murdered in Lithuania during World War II. He wants state-funded institutions there to cease honoring Nazi collaborators, like it is alleged Foti's grandfather was.

Until last year, neither Foti nor Gochin knew that the other one was on Noreika's trail.

But while it was emotionally wrenching for her, he went at it with an uncompromising sense of purpose. Gochin grew up palpably sensing the pain felt by his grandfather who got out of Lithuania in time _ a look on his face suggesting he was recalling relatives he left behind who perished.

"We cannot give our families justice," Gochin said. "We can only ensure the truth is told."