What is History Shadows?

History Shadows is a documentary-style podcast on military history, everyday life and resistance – told with the archival rigor of academic history and the pacing of a thriller. Each episode draws on primary sources, eyewitness testimony, and the kind of human detail that gets lost in conventional accounts.

The host — Dr. Simonas Strelcovas

Dr. Simonas Strelcovas is a historian (PhD) specializing in twentieth-century European and East Asian history, with a focus on war, refugees, occupation, and armed and civil resistance. He is Associate Professor of Partnership at Vilnius University’s Faculty of History, and former director of the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History (2023–2025). His most widely read work is the Japanese-language monograph 第二次大戦下リトアニアの難民と杉原千畝――「命のヴィザ」の真相 (Tokyo, 2020), which reconstructs the true background of Chiune Sugihara’s “visas for life” — the Japanese consul in Kaunas who in 1940 issued transit visas to Jewish refugees fleeing east, saving thousands of lives. The book draws on archival material from Japan, Lithuania, and the United States, and corrects several persistent myths about the Sugihara story. Strelcovas’s archival work has taken him beyond Lithuania to Japan, Poland, Ukraine, South Korea, and Kazakhstan. He works across wartime diplomatic records, refugee transit documents, oral testimonies, and partisan-era personal correspondence — with a consistent emphasis on the civilians, refugees, and ordinary participants whose stories more conventional histories tend to leave at the margins. ## What this podcast does Brings rigorous, source-based history to a global English-speaking audience. Most of the material covered here has not been accessible in English before. The framing is human rather than heroic — stories about ordinary people facing extraordinary moral choices, the bureaucracies that shaped their options, and the long shadows their decisions left behind. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube — or get show notes via Substack.