Ona Šatūnienė lived in Šiauliai with her husband Stasys, whom she married in Kaunas in 1937, and their three young sons. In autumn 1943, the family took in seven-year-old Jewish girl Emma Kaplan, who was being rescued from the Šiauliai ghetto.

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.

Besides raising three young sons and caring for Emma in hiding, Ona was expecting a fourth child, who was born on 1 January 1944. There was no specially prepared hiding place in the Šatūnas home, so the girl’s safety depended on daily caution, the family’s solidarity and their neighbour’s help. Their son Konstantinas Eugenijus Šatūnas remembered his mother as a calm, caring person who never raised her voice or scolded. Ona loved the theatre and played the piano, guitar and mandolin.

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.

Konstantinas Šatūnas maintained a warm relationship with Emma after the war. While studying in Vilnius, he lived with the Kaplan family for a time, and remained in contact with Emma after she emigrated to Israel. The artist commemorated this rescue story by creating a stained-glass menorah.

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.