Ona Šimaitė worked as a librarian at the University of Vilnius in Lithuania. German troops occupied the city in June 1941, and Jews had to move into a ghetto.
Ona Šimaitė claimed she had to retrieve books from interned Jews, which enabled her to enter the ghetto regularly. Šimaitė was shocked by the precarious living conditions in the ghetto, and decided to help. She provided food and smuggled letters, medications, and forged papers into the ghetto. She took valuable manuscripts and documents out of the ghetto and hid them in the library. Šimaitė helped ghetto inmates to escape and then housed them with Lithuanian families, or in her own home for a time.
In April 1944 Šimaitė was arrested by the Gestapo. She was tortured and sentenced to death. Colleagues bribed civil servants and managed to prevent her execution. Instead, she was deported to Dachau concentration camp, and from there to a camp in Alsace-Lorraine. After her liberation, Šimaitė lived in France. She was honored as Righteous Among the Nations in 1966.