Stasys Šatūnas lived in Šiauliai with his wife Ona and their three young sons. They married in Kaunas in 1937; Stasys came from Šilainiai village near Kėdainiai. During the Nazi occupation, he worked at the Frenkel leather-processing factory, where prisoners from the Šiauliai ghetto were also forced to work.

During the operation to murder children in the Šiauliai ghetto on 5 November 1943, seven-year-old Emma Kaplan’s younger sister and four cousins were killed. Emma’s father Leiba Kaplanas worked at the Frenkel leather factory, where he sometimes secretly brought his daughter. On learning of the killings, he did not return Emma to the ghetto and hid her in the factory for a week.

Stasys Šatūnas, a leather worker at the same factory, devised a way to rescue the girl: he came to work in the morning with his four-year-old son Konstantinas, then left that evening with two children, Konstantinas and Emma. The Šatūnas family welcomed her into their rented apartment on Vytauto Street in Šiauliai and introduced her to others as a relative. Because Emma did not speak Lithuanian fluently enough, she had to pretend she could not speak around strangers. When danger increased, their upstairs neighbour Filonenkienė hid her in a wardrobe or bed, pretending that the girl had a contagious illness.

Every day at the factory, Stasys told Leiba how his daughter was doing. As the front approached, her father asked him to bring Emma back to the factory. There, she, her father Leiba, mother Bluma and her mother’s sister Sara Furaitė spent the last two weeks before 27 July 1944 hiding in an attic. After the war, the Kaplan family settled in Vilnius and kept in touch with the Šatūnas family. Emma Kaplan, later Volkova, emigrated to Israel.

Their son Konstantinas Eugenijus Šatūnas, who later became a well-known stained-glass artist, remembered his father as sociable, resourceful and hardworking. Although Stasys had little formal education, he held a responsible job and was liked by colleagues. Konstantinas said that his father got along well with people and tried not to hurt them. Konstantinas himself maintained a close relationship with Emma: while studying, he lived for a time with the Kaplan family in Vilnius and later renewed contact with her in Israel. His stained-glass menorah commemorated this family connection and Lithuania’s Jews.

On 13 March 2000, Yad Vashem recognized Stasys and Ona Šatūnas as Righteous Among the Nations. In 2011, they were posthumously awarded the Life Saving Cross.