Antisemitism and Holocaust denial
On the Ruins of Jerusalem of Lithuania – trapped between the Jewish memory and the Russian bear, and between a nightmarish past and a threatening present, the Baltic Republic is searching for its future. Amotz Asa-El, 23.1.20 - impressive, erect and far reaching like the new office building he inhabits, the mayor of Vilna, Remigijus Šimašius walks with me to the panoramic window of the mayor’s office suite on the 19th floor, from which the palaces, alleyways and picturesque spires that used to be known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania, can be seen.
The previous Minister of Justice waves his hand from the ‘White Bridge’ above the Neris River towards the silver dome of the University Planetarium, promising that, within four years, there will be a six-kilometer strip along the river with parks, bicycle paths, hiking trails, picnic areas and bathing beaches.
The optimism, energy and self-confidence conveyed by this vision, reveals just one of three landscapes which make up post-Soviet Lithuania – the landscape hovering on the surface: a picturesque, prosperous and proud landscape, which stands in stark contrast to its two other landscapes, that which is hidden below the surface and that which can be found beyond its borders.
Lithuania above ground tells a story of beauty, defiance and success.
The first landscape:
Barely 30 years after the Red Army battalions had killed 14 anti-Soviet demonstrators and injured more than 700, it would seem that the Republic, with a population of 2.8 million, has completed its transition from east to west, in every respect: politically, economically and mentally. Fast highways, filled with new cars, cut through thick coniferous forests and golden carpets of wheat, on their way to toiling factories and glittering malls, which reflect a jump of the average annual income to US$ 16,500 and a market growth of about 3% per year for the past decade.
Lithuania is thriving because its citizens are industrious and its politicians are responsible. Its national debt, 24% of its GDP, is one of the lowest of the developed countries, not to mention the budget deficit of only 0.7% of its GDP. These achievements explain why the leading international financial corporations, from Western Union and Nasdaq to Vamodis and Danske Bank, have chosen to set up house in Vilna.
In point of fact, there is still a lot of work to be done by Lithuania on its landscape, such as replacing the ugly and crumbling communist housing in which over half of the capital’s inhabitants live. However, the way forward is clear: from poverty to wealth. During a conversation in the Foreign Ministry’s elegant building, where everyone is proud of Lithuania’s smooth integration into the European Union and NATO, Ramūnas Davidonis, a diplomat who had also served in his embassy in Tel Aviv, concludes: ‘Compared to 1990, a miracle has taken place here’.
As if, in short, they are the face of the momentum, pride and hope which fills the above ground Lithuania. The below ground Lithuania is the complete opposite.
The second landscape:
If, 230 years ago, we had climbed up to the penthouse from which we looked out over Vilna as it is today, we would have seen – a few minutes’ walk across the bank where bike trails and summer camp beaches were going to be set up – the house of the Vilna Gaon (Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, 1720 – 1797). On the site of the house of this world-renowned Torah and Talmud scholar, there stands today a granite pedestal on which there is a bust of the Vilna Gaon showing his thick beard, and which overlooks a rectangle of bare earth. The house itself, just like the great rabbi who spent his days and nights there studying, praying, writing and teaching, and like the impressive community that gave birth to his legacy, was as if it had never been.
The Gaon was admired and respected all his life, but his influence only took off after his death, when his students created a network of yeshivas starting in Volozhin and spreading hundreds of kilometers to the four winds of heaven, from Slobodka to Brody and from Slutsk to Brisk, and became a Talmudic Ivy League the like of which had not been seen by the Jewish people since the prosperity of the yeshivas in Babylon.
The Soviets destroyed the Gaon’s house, a cultural crime in and of itself, but inconsequential compared to the obliteration of the adjoining building, the largest and most impressive of the 110 synagogues which Vilna boasted before the war. The remains of the building which had been set alight, ransacked and destroyed by the Nazis, was ‘shaved’ by the Soviets in the mid-fifties to make place for a kindergarten which was later replaced by a faceless school building – ashamed, abandoned and desolate.
As darkness falls on the silent statue, on the Soviet school, and on the silent ‘Jews Street’ next to them, I lend an ear to Lithuania under the surface, and easily manage to hear the scholars asking ‘What is Hannuka?’, toddlers in the rabbi’s house memorize Hebrew cantillation, a large crowd sings ‘Good comes from the lights created by our G-d’, and the old people lament ‘My G-d is on fire’. How could Jewish souls not hear the gurgling of Lithuania’s guts, even without the help of archeology which recently exposed parts of the ‘Bima’, the Mikveh, and the memorial tablet dating back to 1796 which had been donated by Shmuel and Eliezer in memory of their parents, Haim and Sarah?
The city’s mayor, Šimašius, promises to remove the abandoned Soviet building and erect a site in memory of the city’s Jewish past, which would include the exposed remains of the synagogue. However, if anyone wants to find out about the Jewish past here, they do not need to wait for the memorial site says the tour guide William Zitkauskas, a half-Jew with a tattoo of a candelabra on his forearm, and who, after serving in the IDF returned to Vilna.
In Kovno, 90 km west of Vilna, William leads me to a garage whose right-hand wall has a row of curved windows filled in with bricks, and in the back corner of the wall stands a blocked staircase which leads to another corner of under the surface Lithuania. William asserts that this is a synagogue, based on the shape of the windows and how they are laid out, and the location of the staircase which once led to a mikveh. There is no doubt about it, he states with the decisiveness of halachic arbitrators, amongst whom may be one of his ancestors.
Lithuania under the surface may suddenly pop up, at anytime and anywhere: from a loose piece of roofing, a rusty panel similar to a solar collector, on top of an abandoned shack in Kėdainiai (50 km. north of Kovno), which had clearly been used as a succah, and up to the empty shell of a rare, wooden synagogue which recently came to light in Žiežmariai, which was once a shtetl where Yiddish was widely spoken, located 60 km south of that same abandoned succah.
The most prosaic bulge jutting out from under the surface Lithuania is, of course, the cemetery. “I look after 250 cemeteries and 250 murder sites on my own” says the head of the Lithuanian Jewish community, Faina Kukliansky, drily, when we met in her office in a building which used to be a Jewish High School, most of whose students ended their lives in those killing fields which she takes pains to maintain.
The infamous Ponar is the largest and most famous of them all, with a dense growth of pine, cypress and birch trees, a silent forest, mesmerizing and bewitched, and five km south-west of where the Gaon’s house had once stood.
It’s true, most of the 100,000 men, women, children and infants who had been plucked here were Jews, but in contrast to the ruins of the synagogue in Vilna, it is not necessary to be a Jew in the Ponar forest to hear the chirping of the birds of under the surface Lithuania whispering G-d’s question to Cain, above the fresh corpse of his brother Abel: “What have you done?”.
The extent to which Lithuanians on the ground can hear Lithuania under the surface crying out can be debated, but by all accounts, Lithuania’s leaders are dauntlessly looking at the truth.
Contrary to the recent Polish ban on mentioning the role of the Polish people in the horrors of WW2, the monument at the entrance to Ponar clearly blames the ‘Hitlerite Invaders and their Local Acolytes’, in four languages, as is also stated on a similar sign in front of a couple of silent, preserved synagogues in Kėdainiai.
As if somehow still breathing, under the surface Lithuania constantly challenges Lithuania on the ground. Last summer, for instance, a public debate broke out regarding a plaque at the National Academy of Science commemorating Jonas Noreika, a patriot who the Soviets had executed, but who was also a Nazi collaborator who had helped to isolate and rob the Jews in his area before killing them.
The plaque was actually removed by the mayor, but it was in the wake of the fight the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Center had in the courts against its removal, asserting that Noreika had not carried out any war crimes. These kinds of memorial struggles could happen at any time and anywhere, from remote Šukioniai , from where Noreika came, and which named the local school after him, and up to Trispalvė (Tricolor) Street in Vilna, which is, today, named after the state flag but, until recently, was named after Kazys Škirpa who, while stationed in Berlin, led an anti-Soviet movement whose members participated in the extermination of the Jews.
The determination at the municipal level to fight the denial is part of the general government approach, which includes teaching about the Holocaust in the state curriculum, as well as a parliamentary declaration for 2020 – the 300th anniversary of the birth of the Gaon – as ‘The Year of the Vilna Gaon and the History of the Lithuanian Jews’.
These and others are part of the ongoing effort to uncover, commemorate and salute the 700 years of Jewish history in a country that entered WW2 with 200,000 Jews, and ended the war with about nine-tenths of the Jews having been butchered, the highest extermination rate played out on all the stages of the Holocaust.
This is what the second landscape of Lithuania looks like, which covers the scenes of the past with its hands, in contrast to Lithuania’s third landscape, which invades the present and even darkens its horizon, a horizon overshadowed by the Russian bear.
The third landscape:
The thick forest that surrounds Rukla barracks is reminiscent of the Ponar forest, about an hour’s drive south-west of it, but here, too, the thunder of machine guns interrupts the silence of nature. The soldiers who press the trigger are neither Nazis nor their acolytes, but Belgian infantry soldiers attacking with live fire on moving targets at the edge of the clearing in front of us.
No, these are not echoes from WW2, but the sounds of the second Cold War, the sword dance that was sparked by Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, escalating with the annexation of the Crimea in 2014, when, overnight, Lithuania was thrown into the nightmares of the past.
“The Russians want us to go back to being their puppets”, said the Minister of Defense Raimundas Karoblis, a lawyer, diplomat and a graduate of the prestigious high school in Panevėžys which was founded nearly 300 years ago. “Our greatest fear”, the minister explains, “is that the Russian army will occupy the northern end of our border with Poland”.
This fear is real, not just from a political point of view, but also from a geographical one. The length of the border is only about 100 km; in the east it borders with the Russian satellite state of Belarus, and on the western with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, where there is a heavy presence of Russian land, air and sea forces. The Lithuanians are concerned about a surprise two-pronged attack which could, in a very short time, cut it and its Baltic neighbors – Latvia and Estonia – off from the rest of the NATO states.
This anxiety has gripped Lithuania so strongly that, just a few months after the annexation of the Crimea, it reintroduced conscription which had been rescinded seven years earlier, thereby convincing NATO to double and treble its presence and activities on Lithuania’s soil.
NATO agreed. Three separate armies have been stationed in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in recent years, under German, Canadian and British command, a corps which creates a continuum of NATO forces in Poland commanded by the US military. “We have a lot of equipment”, said Lieutenant Colonel Reuven Habel in his office at the Rukla base, his jacket sleeve adorned with the German flag and NATO symbol. The equipment the German battalion commander is talking about includes Leopard tanks and 155 mm self-propelled cannons used for training about 90 km east of here, in Padrava, within hearing distance of Belarus.
In the current situation, the German army which, all through the previous Cold War years, had never crossed the borders of its own country, now carries out long-range logistical training, including transporting 12,000 tons of equipment on six trains into Lithuania via Poland, and back, every six months. “You should understand”, Habel says to me without my realizing what he is about to ask me to understand, “we Germans are terrible at logistics”.
About 5,000 NATO soldiers train in the Baltic arena on a daily basis, ranging from the movement of companies and platoons up to divisions, as well as large-scale maneuvers as was conducted last Spring with the participation of 50 battleships and submarines together with 40 aircraft, led by the US navy, or such as another exercise which was conducted at the same time on the Belarus border, led by the small, but growing, Lithuanian army.
“Following the annexation of the Crimea, we decided to re-establish the army”, says Minister Karoblis, who is in charge of doubling security manpower from 20,000 to 40,000 soldiers, and increasing military spending five-fold from US$ 268m to US$ 1.25b by the end of the next decade.
The Russians, on the other hand, have doubled their tank and bomber strength in Kaliningrad, accelerated maneuvers in Belarus, besides carrying out cyber attacks targeting, according to the Minister of Defence, financial institutions in Vilna as well as himself, using trolls which tried to discredit him as a Russian spy.
“It goes to show that I am doing a good job” said the Minister before detailing some of what he has amassed so far – mechanized infantry battalions, artillery support units, medium-range anti-aircraft missiles and modern Javelin anti-tank missiles – and then, gravely adds: “The feeling here runs high that, if Lithuania is attacked, it will fight to the end”.
A potential central figure in this warfare could be Colonel Mindaugas Steponavičius, a graduate of the US Army War College and a brigade commander in the Lithuanian army, who is wearing military fatigues and commando boots when I meet him in his office at the Rukla base. “We are approaching a future where people will come to realize that the good life of the West also requires responsibility”, he says, referring to the positive response (in his words) of young Lithuanians to the renewal of conscription.
In short, this is what the third landscape of Lithuania looks like, a landscape of the Russian threat, a threat that, ironically, calls for a renewed role for Lithuania’s Jews, the type of Jews that the Vilna Gaon, his students and the rest of the ‘residents’ of Lithuania under the surface, would have difficulty recognizing.
The Lithuanians who strive to augment a response to the Russian threat, now come into contact with Jews who have built the type of army that they are trying to build, who produce the type of weapons that they would like to acquire, and who have successfully confronted the predecessor of the empire which terrorized them.
Take, for instance, the heavy machine guns that are fired nowadays in the depths of the Lithuanian forest and which are operated by the Samson electronic systems produced by the Israeli company Rafael, and which form part of a €100m deal in which Lithuania also purchased Boxer armored fighting vehicles and Spike anti-tank missiles from Israel.
Israel’s experience is greater than its industry, since the IDF has beaten armies larger than itself which, for the Lithuanians, means that it is possible for a small population to organize, equip and train a large army, thereby leading them to take an interest in the Israeli reserve system. Over and above all that, the Israeli precedent of confronting one power with the backing of another power is exactly what Lithuania is trying to replicate when dealing with the unpredictable Russia of Vladimir Putin.
In a nutshell, this is the context in which the industrious, modern, defiant and prudent Lithuania plans to mark the 700th anniversary of the rise of one of the most creative, influential and tragic Jewish communities that the Jewish people has ever produced.
The events of the 300th anniversary of the Gaon’s birth next year will naturally focus on Lithuania’s second landscape, which is buried under the surface, with the other two landscapes – the one above ground and the one beyond the horizon – being presented to a lesser extent.
The fourth landscape:
However, the journey to Lithuania for many Israeli intellectuals, academia, religious and statesmen, will lead to a fourth landscape which isn’t concerned with looking down, up or forward, but to looking back; the gaze of Lot’s wife while fleeing from her home; a look which would leave them, as it left me, mesmerized by the undeniable beauty, by an irresistible nostalgia, and from an inexplicable longing so painfully phrased by Leah Goldberg when looking back from the Promised Land to the Lithuania of her childhood.
‘My homeland’ which the poet scribbled when looking back, from Tel Aviv, to Kovno where she had grown up, remembering the land of beauty and poverty, the land where pale-faced beggars look towards the light, a humid, rainy land where even the king has no crown, a miserable, poor and bitter land, a land of disgrace and shame, but a land where its sons and daughters are bride and groom, a land of blessed candles and set tables, a land where generations of Jews, as in Leah’s imagination, will pass through it with a song and a music box in order to seek out every corner, courtyard, alley and garden, to take a stone from the ruins as a souvenir, and mourn its glowing poverty.
Heads and leaders of countries of the world had gathered together at Yad Vashem to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, proclaiming “We remember the Holocaust and fight anti-Semitism”, Lithuanian Holocaust survivors and the next generations gathered together to demonstrate opposite the Lithuanian Embassy in Ramat Gan.
Antisemitism continues in independent Lithuania – Press Research Study /Dov Levin
During the Holocaust, the number of Jews murdered in Lithuania was among the highest in all European countries. Lithuanians cooperated with the Germans and took an active part in the extermination of Jews. Antisemitism in Lithuania then and today is not only expressed by the common people, but controls all media. The authorities’ response is weak, and only to the extent that it fears being denounced in Europe. The press often contains antisemitic articles and plots against Jews, verbal attacks and desecration of Jewish cemeteries, as well as Holocaust denial. In addition, Jews are accused of having cooperated with the Soviet authorities, and the accusation is that it was the Jews that massacred the Lithuanian people.
“There is no shortage of Jews who were involved in the murder of their people” / David Becker 29/1/2021
A storm broke out in Lithuania following a statement by a member of parliament that distorted the history of Holocaust events in the country, according to a publication in the Lithuanian branch of the Russian website "Sputnik."
Valdes Rakotis, a representative in parliament on behalf of the "National Union - Lithuanian Christian Democrats" party said at the International Holocaust Remembrance Day held yesterday (Wednesday) that "there was no shortage of Jews who were involved in the murders of their people."
He also called for "examining the positions of the Jews, and what made them cooperate with the Soviet authorities."
Lithuania Tortures a Spanish Human Rights Activist / Tomas Stanislovas 1/9/2020
Today is the 7th day that Spanish anti-Holocaust speaker Miquel Puertas spends in a Lithuanian prison. He was arrested on August 25, 2020, by the Lithuanian State Security Department for his public statements accusing Lithuanian national “heroes” of murdering Jews during the Holocaust.
Miquel Puertas is put on the non-public list of threats to national security of Lithuania, and is prohibited to enter Lithuania for life…
Vidmantas Valušaitis “has been deliberately distorting history in his publications for several years and presenting to the public untrue facts about the anti-Semitic actions of the Lithuanian Activists’ Front and the Provisional Government of Lithuania” during the Holocaust, the Jewish Community of Lithuania association said in a statement Friday on its website.
The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania has faced Holocaust distortion allegations for years.
The Jewish community in Lithuania said it “does not support the appointment of a person who is an open supporter of those who disseminated ideas of anti-Semitism in Lithuania.” The statement added that Valusaitis is unfit for the post because he is “openly defending anti-Semites who directly or indirectly took part in the extermination of the Jews of Lithuania.”
In July, Valušaitis penned an article defending Juozas Luksa-Daumantas, a nationalist accused of participating in a Holocaust-era massacre of Jews. The Lithuanian parliament recently named the year 2021 as dedicated to celebrating his memory. Multiple witnesses have placed Luksa-Daumantas, a leader of the pro-Nazi Lithuanian Activist Front militia during World War II, at the 1941 Lietukis Garage massacre in Kaunas. Valušaitis wrote that this cannot be true, because relatives of Luksa-Daumantas’ wife had rescued Jews, and photos said to be of Luksa-Daumantas at the site of the massacre were forgeries...
A Lithuanian human rights activist, who last year destroyed a plaque in honor of a Nazi war criminal, was sentenced this week to three months in prison and a fine. / Ofer Aderet August 2020
A human rights activist from Lithuania, who last year destroyed a memorial plaque to a Nazi war criminal, was sentenced this week to three months in prison and a fine. The man, Tomas Stanislovas, told “Haaretz” yesterday (Wednesday) that he had fled the country. "Let them look for me. I think I committed a heroic act, not a crime," he added. In April 2019, Tomas documented himself smashing a memorial plaque to the war criminal Jonas Noreika, considered a national hero in Lithuania, in its capital, Vilna.
Tomas documented himself in a video in which he was seen climbing a ladder up to the plaque, placed near the Jewish cemetery in 1997, waving a hammer and smashing it. He then got down and waited for the police. In front of the camera, he spoke in condemnation of the man whose memory plaque he had shattered, and recounted his crimes and antisemitic activity. "Although he murdered 14,000 Jews, in Lithuania he is a national hero with monuments in his name," Tomas said at the time, criticizing his country, which he said "glorifies its Nazi past."
This week, a local court in Vilna sentenced Tomas to three months in prison and a fine equal to NIS 9,000. The judges convicted him, along with harming the plaque, also of "harming the feelings of the Lithuanian people." Tomas told “Haaretz” that there are hundreds of monuments glorifying the Nazis throughout Lithuania. After his conviction, he appealed to the UN Commission on Human Rights, but it will be a long time before his appeal is heard.
Noreika is considered a hero by many Lithuanians because he fought against the repressive communist rule that ruled the country until the summer of 1941 - and again from 1944. During the Nazi occupation, he was the senior commander in three cities - Šiauliai, Plunge and Telz - where about 14,500 Jews were murdered. Norieka was the one who signed their deportation documents to the ghettos and the looting of their property. About 96% of Lithuanian Jews (about 200,000 people) were murdered in the Holocaust, often with the help of Lithuanian collaborators.
Tomas' protest was carried out after a Lithuanian court rejected a lawsuit filed by a Jewish resident of California son of Lithuanian Holocaust survivors, demanding that the memorial be removed and to stop the national respect given Noreika. The prosecutor, Grant Gochin, enlisted the help of Noreika's granddaughter, who documented the crimes committed by her grandfather.
Selective Memory by: Rafael Aharon, 10/8/20 on the Zman Israel website.
Lithuania this month removed a plaque commemorating a national hero who collaborated with the Nazis, and canceled a street named after another collaborator ● But the new president called on politicians not to interfere in this sensitive issue, and many in the government do not recognize Lithuanian crimes in WWII ● A visit to a country trying to deal with its problematic past.
Another Seminar in Vilna to take place in August 2020
“Learning from the Past, Acting for the future – Holocaust Education and Human Rights” is the title of a seminar taking place in Vilnius, Lithuania over four half-days during the dates 23-27 August 2020. Participants will include researchers and TOLI spokesmen, the secretary of the International Commission for the Assessment of Nazi and Soviet War Crimes in Lithuania, Vytautas Magnus University (VMU), the US Holocaust Museum, and the Estonian Institute for Human Rights. In order to really understand Jewish culture and what was lost in the Holocaust, the seminar will delve deeply into Lithuanian history and European involvement in the Holocaust. The program will include a guided tour of the Vilna Gaon Museum and the Museum of Tolerance; testimonies will be given by Holocaust survivors, and there will be a walking tour of the Vilna Ghetto and the synagogue, and a kosher dinner will be provided. We will also discuss the role played by Sugihara in issuing visas to the vast number of Jews trying to escape from the country.
TOLI promotes Holocaust education and human rights with an inclusive approach that enables students to learn about the Holocaust, as well as learning from the Holocaust and apply what they have learned to the current reality in order to promote human rights by dealing with racial prejudice, injustices and bias. The project is very important in that the Lithuanian government has made significant steps to recognize the Holocaust as an integral part of Lithuanian history, as well as European history. While World War Two is already on the study curriculum in Lithuania, the challenge facing Lithuanian educators is the necessity to improve and promote Holocaust education.
Nazi hunter teams up with Lithuanian journalist to investigate Holocaust crimes By Matthew Kalman 8/8/2020,
For anyone seeking to understand why the Nazi crimes of the 1940s are still a source of controversy throughout post-communist Eastern Europe, “Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust” is a shocking book — and essential reading.
Part road trip, part “buddy film” and part true-crime expose, “Our People” follows veteran Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff and renowned Lithuanian journalist Ruta Vanagaite on a journey through the haunted house of Lithuania’s past.
Co-authored by the duo, the book caused a national sensation when it was first published in Lithuania in 2016. It became a bestseller, dividing families and sparking an establishment backlash so intense that the publishers withdrew all of Vanagaite’s books from sale, and she felt so threatened she fled the country. The book was published in English in March.
It will come as a shock to many to learn that the Holocaust in Lithuania — home to 220,000 Jews before the Nazi occupation, of whom perhaps five percent survived, is indeed “hidden.” The beautiful countryside is invisibly scarred by dozens of pits, some of them unmarked, where thousands of Jews were slaughtered, dumped, covered with lime and rubble and left to rot. Lithuania’s earth is soiled with the blood and stench of mass murder perpetrated in large part by Lithuanian citizens, many of whom have never been identified, let alone arrested and prosecuted for their terrible crimes.
Zuroff, the Nazi-hunter, had been trying to bring Lithuanian Holocaust criminals to justice for years. The great uncle for whom he was named, Efraim Zar, lived in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, where he was seized and killed in 1941.
“There’s no question in my mind that trials have a much stronger impact than history books,” Zuroff says. But the Lithuanians, flush from their liberation from Soviet rule, were in no mood to spoil the celebration of their newfound independence by arresting elderly citizens.
Zuroff had never met Vanagaite until she discovered that her grandfather and her uncle may have been implicated — directly or indirectly — in the murder of Lithuanian Jews and the seizure of their property. She wanted to know more about this largely unwritten chapter of her country’s past and started to organize Jewish-themed events and visits to the places where these unspoken horrors occurred.
Looking for guest speakers to spice up a Holocaust history discussion in Vilnius, she was warned not to invite Zuroff, who was said to be a bully and anti-Lithuanian provocateur, most likely in the pay of the country’s nemesis, Vladimir Putin. She was told he was aggressive and made schoolteachers cry. She decided to meet him, if only to see if he could be persuaded not to spark a fistfight at the event.
For his part, Zuroff agreed to have coffee with Vanagaite but with zero expectations. In the years since Lithuanian independence in 1990, he had been trying without success to persuade the authorities to confront their role in the murder of the Jews during the Nazi occupation, and their continued failure to bring hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Lithuanian war criminals to trial.
Zuroff was the opposite of the puny, bookish Jewish sterotype that Vanagaite was expecting. “Here before me was a giant,” she recalls. “An unexpected powerful presence seemed to ooze from this person. I didn’t want to sit too close to him.”
Zuroff, ever skeptical, wondered aloud whether Vanagaite’s sudden interest in her country’s Jewish past was motivated by the availability of generous European Union funding. But it was the tireless Nazi hunter and ruiner of reputations who was taken by surprise.
“No,” she replied. “I am doing it because I discovered that some of my relatives had most likely taken part in the Holocaust. And I feel that in remembering and honoring the Jews murdered, I will to some extent make amends for their crime.”
Her response rendered Zuroff speechless. “She was the first person I had ever met in Lithuania who admitted a thing like this,” he says.
An unlikely roadtrip
Vanagaite began wondering what it would be like to travel with Zuroff to the sites of the mass murders and try to find the last living eyewitnesses to the terrible events that had taken place there in the 1940s. Zuroff was thinking along similar lines. Now he had finally found a well-known, eloquent Lithuanian who admitted her family’s role in the Holocaust, perhaps her people would listen.
“I thought maybe if the message comes from an ethnic Lithuanian, Ruta Vanagaite, not Jewish, no connection — maybe this will finally convince them of the truth and the accuracy of the real narrative of the Holocaust,” Zuroff says.
Like any good buddy story, they set off on their travels an unlikely couple, each deeply suspicious of the other. As Vanagaite’s jeep began rolling, they were both nervous. All the witnesses would be very old. Would they find anyone who would talk?
I thought we might have a very unpleasant journey and we might fight a lot
Even though Zuroff and Vanagaite both saw the importance of revealing the history of those events, they agreed on little else. Zuroff wanted the remaining criminals to stand trial — Vanagaite was unconvinced. Zuroff seemed to have nothing good to say about Vanagaite’s beautiful country which was finally celebrating its release from crushing Soviet tyranny. And they hardly knew each other. The project seemed liable to collapse at any moment.
“I thought we might have a very unpleasant journey and we might fight a lot,” Vanagaite recalls. “I thought if we start fighting we just have to cut it short. It was really an experiment because I didn’t know what was going to happen, whether he would become aggressive or not, if he would make me cry or not. In the end, he cried a lot himself, so that was my big achievement. Sometimes we cried together.”
They were perfectly matched for the task at hand. Zuroff carried in his head the details of the terrible events they were trying to uncover, but he would always be an outsider, a foreign Jew with an American accent and an imposing physical presence. Vanagaite arrived with decades of reporting experience, a hunger for knowledge and an easy manner with the elderly interviewees. Together, they plucked the hitherto silent witnesses from the obscurity of their village lives. Many had never spoken before of the horrific crimes they had stumbled into as frightened children.
Standing on the doorsteps of village homes, in the forest clearings where the massacres had been carried out, and in the streets of small country towns, this odd couple of Holocaust chroniclers breathed new life into long-forgotten memories of events so shocking that the force of their retelling after decades of silence, overlaid with guilt and pain, seemed to change the very air.
“I never expected I would find any witnesses. I never expected they would talk,” Vanagaite says.
Gathering the stories
In Svemcionys, a town where 8,000 Jews once lived, they saw an old woman leaving a grocery store who seemed about the right age. Her story tumbled out. She and her sister were very close to two Jewish sisters, the Bentski girls, aged 7 and 15. In October 1941, when nearly 4,000 Jews were rounded up to be shot dead at a local military base on Yom Kippur, the woman’s parents discussed whether they could adopt her friend and take her in. They decided it would be too risky.
“When they were marched by us, my mother and I cried because we couldn’t save the little girl,” the old woman told her visitors.
“You probably were very afraid of the Germans?” asked Zuroff.
“No, we could have hidden her forever,” the old woman replied. “We were afraid of our neighbors.”
“She started crying,” Zuroff says. “It broke my heart. It was obvious she had never told the story to anybody. She was walking around with this on her heart since 1941, more than 70 years, and she finally was able to tell someone. I think it was a relief for her but it was heartbreaking, absolutely heartbreaking.”
As in so many of the mass murders of Jews and others throughout the country, the Special Unit squad in Svemcionys in October 1941 was made up largely of Lithuanians. Many of them escaped prosecution.
There were only about 800 Jews in Butrimonys in September 1941 when the local police chief ordered them rounded up in the local primary school so they could be killed the following day. The murders were planned to be carried out by the 3rd Platoon of the TDA, the National Labor Defense Battalion, born from the insurgents who had battled the Soviets as they retreated from Lithuania in 1941.
The 3rd Platoon were busy murdering the Jews of Alytus, another town nearby. They hurried over. The Jews were stripped naked in the town square and marched off to a clearing in the nearby Klidzionys Forest.
“The pits in the forest had already been dug; everyone knew they would shoot the Jews, and were waiting for it to happen,” Antanas Kmieliauskas, one of Lithuania’s most famous artists, then 9 years old, told interviewers from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1998.
Kmieliauskas and his friends hid behind a house and watched as the Jews were led, naked, in groups of 10, to the edge of the pit and shot dead.
“After those shootings I had nightmares. About pits. Perhaps all the children had nightmares,” he said.
Before visiting the town, Vanagaite called on the artist, then 83, to see if there were any more details he remembered.
After the shootings, the children neared the scene to find “some people in the pit were still alive,” he recalled. One badly wounded man was trying to breathe through the blood blocking his nose. “The killers did not want to waste the bullets on the victim, so one of them went to the forest to get a stone.”
Kmieliauskas sketched the scene that had haunted him for so long and gave Vanagaite the drawings, but after telling her the final piece of the story, the artist was worried.
“Please, Ruta, don’t say that these people spoke Lithuanian. Don’t tell the story in the book,” he pleaded. “I love my country. I know it and you know it. Let’s not say it in public. Let’s not shit in our own nest.”
Too close for comfort
The same reluctance to air this dirtiest of laundry in public also haunted Vanagaite’s family. Ruta Vanagaite never met her aunt’s husband, Antanas. They emigrated to the US after the war, from where he sent her jeans and other prized Western contraband while Lithuania was part of the Soviet bloc. It was only after he died that she realized he had been the police chief in Ponevezh, home of the famous yeshiva, where more than 8,000 Jews were massacred by late August 1941. She still doesn’t know if he played any part in carrying out the Nazi orders to murder the town’s Jews and steal their property, which was distributed among the rest of the population, including household goods and clothing.
“I am wondering whether my grandmother received anything? Did my mother, who was 14, ever wear any of these clothes?” she asks.
Vanagaite’s doubts about her uncle hover over thousands more Lithuanian officials, including some of the country’s national heroes, lauded, like he was, for leading the insurgency against the Soviet occupiers as they fled before the Nazi invasion in 1941. Bitterness against the Soviet occupation framed Lithuanians’ sense of gratitude to the Nazis for liberating them from Stalin. When the Nazis began rounding up the Jews as the price of their occupation, many Lithuanians went along. Decades later, the sufferings of the Jews appeared to pale in comparison to the many years of Soviet tyranny.
The Nazis were there for a very short time, a very long time ago… And the Jews were not our people
“The Nazis were there for a very short time, a very long time ago, and they actually didn’t do anything so bad for Lithuanians,” says Vanagaite. “Of course we had to give our products to the army, but there was no crime that people would remember. And the Jews were not our people.”
“Lithuanians don’t equate them. The Soviets were much worse. They were attacking us and the Nazis were attacking the Jews,” she says.
Vanagaite’s grandfather was a national hero, Jonas Vanagas, a political prisoner convicted of anti-Soviet activities, who died six months after he was sent to a gulag in 1945 for helping to drive out the Soviet invaders in 1941. There is no evidence to suggest that Vanagas was implicated in crimes against the Jews, but records show that Balys Simke, arrested and imprisoned with Vanagaite’s grandfather, helped force march the Jews through Ukmerge to the prison where they were shot in September 1941 by the Rollkommando Hamann, a Special Unit made up of eight to 10 Germans and 80 Lithuanians who carried out mass killings across the Lithuanian countryside.
Even more controversial are the prominent nationalist leaders with blood on their hands, like Jonas Noreika, a key figure in the Lithuanian resistance to the Soviet occupation after World War II, who was implicated in Holocaust crimes. The Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania, funded by the government, officially exonerated Noreika. The center also disputed a list of 23,000 suspected Lithuanian Holocaust criminals compiled by the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, whittling it down to 2,055, then deleting it altogether from its publications.
Part of society thinks they were perpetrators and part of society thinks they are heroes. Both are true
“Part of society thinks they were perpetrators and part of society thinks they are heroes. Both are true,” Vanagaite says. “Noreika didn’t shoot anybody himself. But the question is: Did he know that signing the orders for the ghettoization of the Jews and redistributing Jewish property was ultimately part of the process of sending people to their death?
“We don’t know what was happening in his head. Hitler didn’t shoot anybody personally. For Lithuanians it’s much safer to think that if they didn’t shoot, they are innocent, especially if they were fighting the Soviets after the Holocaust,” she says.
Myth of ‘double genocide’
Zuroff says the attitude to the Holocaust of the modern Lithuanian state, and most of its citizens, is so warped by Soviet oppression that is has created a myth of “double genocide” in which the crimes of the Nazis and the Soviets are equated.
Even more dangerous, he says, are the efforts of Lithuania and other former eastern bloc states to try and export this double genocide doctrine to official Holocaust memorials and education in the rest of Europe.
“The Soviets were in Lithuania much longer and the Nazis were there relatively briefly, but if a country has a choice between being a country of perpetrators or a country of victims, it’s a no-brainer. Of course they want to be a country of victims,” Zuroff says. “I do not want to in any way minimize communist crimes against the peoples of Eastern Europe but the double genocide theory is very dangerous. It’s undermining. It’ll eventually change when people understand the truth.”
“But they also deserve to have their victims remembered and to get compensation from the Russians,” he says. “Part of the problem is that the Russians’ hands are not clean. They didn’t do anything to make up for it. They didn’t admit their guilt, they didn’t compensate the victims, they didn’t express regret for all the horrible things that the Soviet Union did — and it was horrible, absolutely horrible.”
Vanagaite says she understands the reluctance of Lithuanians to confront their complex past, but hopes that their book has started to thaw long-held convictions, especially as the people involved fade into history.
“Losing your hero or losing your image of the past or the history of your country is losing part of yourself,” she says. “All the people who are sensitive about the fathers and grandfathers — my generation — are dying away. So the ice will melt. Unfortunately I don’t think it will melt in my lifetime.”
The Closing of the Synagogue in Vilna / by Itamar Eichner 7.8.2019.
The leaders of the Jewish community in Lithuania advised that, after receiving threats, they were going to close the synagogue and the community headquarters in the capital Vilna. In a statement by the community, we learned: “In an atmosphere of growing tension and incitement, neither the Jewish community nor the synagogue in Vilna have the means to ensure the safety of visitors, including Holocaust survivors and their families”.
Antisemitic tensions have risen in Vilna recently due to a public debate about the commemoration of Lithuanian veterans from WW2 who had been involved in the Holocaust. State authorities have recently removed a memorial plaque of one senior official, and changed the name of a street which had been named after another one.
Many Lithuanians were outraged at the steps taken, fanned by incitement by politicians who instigated demonstrations, according to community sources. “The Lithuanian Jewish community have been receiving threatening phone calls and letters over the past few days”, the statement also announced.
The community asked for the help of the authorities to ensure the safety of the Jewish cemetery, located abut 20 km from the capital Vilna. Lithuania’s prime minister, Saulius Skvernelis, called upon the state’s security services “to take immediate action to prevent potential acts of ethnic hatred and, if necessary, to use any other legal means”.
Prior to the Holocaust, there were 60,000 Jews in Lithuania, consisting about one third of Vilna’s population, but most of them were murdered. Today, the Jewish community stands at only 3,000 out of the country’s population of 2.9 million.
On 27th July, the Vilna municipality removed the memorial plaque of Jonas Noreika because of Noreika’s support of the Nazi decision to erect a ghetto for the Jews and loot their property. A few days previously, on 24th July, the city council had decided to rename a street in the city center which had previously been named after Kazys Škirpa, a diplomat and officer in the Lithuanian army, because of his antisemitic views.
Phrases from Genesis and passages from Psalms, constitute the inscriptions engraved on the lectern from which the Jews had read the Torah for 300 years, until the Nazi invasion which resulted in the burning of the synagogue and destruction of the community. Intriguing inscriptions were discovered during the excavations which revealed the connection of the ancient community to the Land of Israel.
Meanwhile, the wave of antisemitism continues to rise in many parts of the continent. The rabbi of a synagogue was attacked in Munich, and his two sons were assaulted as they were leaving after prayers. This took place at noon last Saturday (the Sabbath), when two young Germans spat at and cursed them.
According to the Munich police, the attack took place in the borough of Schwabing. The rabbi and his 19-year-old sons were wearing kippahs. As mentioned, the youngsters cursed them, shouted antisemitic remarks at them (f…ing Jews) and started spitting at them over and over again. The rabbi and his sons managed to run away. The police have started an inquiry.
The German daily Der Tagesspiegel reported that, in Germany, a Jewish cemetery is desecrated at least once a fortnight. In 2018, there were 27 attacks on Jewish cemeteries, only three of which have the police managed to solve. This was the response given by the Federal Ministry of Interior to the parliamentary question asked by Petra Pau, the VP of the Bundestag. This reflects a rise from the previous year when there were 21 such incidents.
In 2017, there were 27 attacks on synagogues. Here, too, only a very few were solved: the police only managed to locate the perpetrators of four of the attacks, and one instance of cemetery desecration. Since 2000, the number of grave desecrations in Germany has reach over 750 (there are about 2,000 Jewish cemeteries in Germany).
The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dr. Josef Schuster, said that, unfortunately, the desecration of Jewish graves and attacks on synagogues have become a daily occurrence in Germany. “Germany cannot afford to become complacent about this situation as if it were the norm”, he said. He urged the security authorities to increase police security of cemeteries, and concentrate more on solving the outstanding cases.
70 years after his death, the granddaughter of a Lithuanian hero accuses her grandfather of committing mass murder during the Holocaust –. Ofer Aderet 01.02.19
In light of testimonies indicating that her grandfather was a Nazi war criminal, a teacher from Chicago has initiated a campaign to annul his status in Lithuania where he is considered a hero. Before the judges in Vilna she provided incriminating evidence against him.
A pre-trial opened in Lithuania in January 2019. The plaintiff, Grant Gochin, is a Californian Jew, that 100 members of his family were murdered in Lithuania during the Holocaust. The defendant is the government research institute that declared that one of the murderers of Gochin’s family – the Lithuanian Jonas Noreika – was a war hero. The main aspect of the prosecution: a claim of Holocaust denial which is considered a crime in that country.
All eyes in Lithuania and elsewhere are focused on the court house in the capital, Vilna, not only because of the historical, legal and political aspects of this case that will be tried in a country in which the murder of 96% of its Jewish citizens (some 200,000 people) during the Holocaust, was often facilitated with the collaboration of Lithuanians. Interest in the trial has grown owing to one woman, Silvia Foti, an American teacher and journalist, who is also Noreika’s granddaughter.
Foti, who was brought up with legends about her grandfather who was a national hero in his homeland, discovered some years ago that he was in fact a Nazi war criminal. When she delved deeper into the matter she discovered evidence that he was responsible for the murder of at least 14,000 Jews during the Holocaust.
Recently, 70 years after her grandfather’s death, she partnered with Gochin, and is now providing the court with incriminating evidence against her grandfather. “We want to expose who my grandfather really was”, she told “Ha’aretz” (the newspaper) this week. “There is a chance that history can be changed and my grandfather will be recognized as a person who played a prominent role in the Holocaust.”
Foti was brought up in the US in a Christian family that emigrated from Lithuania after World War Two. Her grandfather Noreika remained in Lithuania. In 1947, the KGB sentenced him to death, because he had fought against the Communist regime that was in control in Lithuania before and after Nazi occupation. Later on, when Lithuania became independent again, he received posthumous status as a national hero and was considered a martyr. “I was always told that my grandfather was a hero who fought bravely against the Communists”, says his granddaughter. “I worshipped him, I considered him a role model and I loved him… his presence surrounded us constantly in our home.”
Foti’s mother started to write the grandfather’s biography, but she became ill and could not complete her work. 18 years ago, as her life was nearing its end, she asked her daughter to continue the project and provided her with thousands of documents that she had collected religiously. Foti did not imagine at the time that this task would shatter her, lead to a crisis that would affect her on different levels - personal, familial and national - and would change her life.
Her grandmother, Noreika’s widow did actually warn her not to dig too deeply into the matter and advised her “to leave history alone”. But Foti felt that she had to carry out her mother’s will: “I thought I would write about a hero, because that’s all I heard about him”, she recalls. “Until then I had hardly heard anything about the Holocaust of the Jews in Lithuania. All I knew was that the Germans murdered the Jews and the Lithuanians were innocent victims.”
By this time, Foti had already begun noticing a few blots in her grandfather’s past but at first she thought they were baseless rumors. “The first time I heard something about my grandfather being involved with the murder of Jews, my original reaction was not to believe it and to deny it”, she said, but as time went on the doubts began to trouble her. “I felt torn: as his granddaughter I wanted to escape from what I heard. As a reporter, I know I had to look into it. As his granddaughter, I wanted evidence to clear his name, but as a reporter I wanted the truth.”
In 2000, after both her mother and grandmother had passed away, she travelled to Lithuania to bury their ashes, as they had requested. To her surprise, the Lithuanian president also came to the ceremony at the Vilna cathedral to pay his last respects to the widow and daughter of “General Storm” as her grandfather was known to his admirers. Later, during a tour of Vilna, she visited the building that houses the Academy of Science, where her grandfather worked as a lawyer in the mornings and took part in anti-Communist activities at night. At the entrance there is a plaque in his memory with an engraving of his face.
From there she continued north to the town where her grandfather was born, to take part in a ceremony in his memory at a local school named after him – and it was there that the school principal shattered the myth. “I was widely criticized for my decision to name the school after him”, he said. When she asked why, the principal replied: “Your grandfather was accused of murdering Jews.”
Foti decided to continue investigating when she returned to the US, and she panicked when she discovered that the written documents did indeed confirm what the school principal had told her. At first she found a leaflet published by her grandfather in 1933 entitled: “Raise your Head, Lithuanian”, urging people to boycott Jewish businesses. In another book entitled “Mass Murder in Lithuania”, she saw that in August 1941 her grandfather had written an edict commanding the expulsion of the Jews of Šiauliai to the Žagarė ghetto. “As his granddaughter I wanted to burn the leaflet and that book”, she said.
Slowly but surely she discovered that her mother had hidden the full story of her grandfather from her. As far as the Lithuanians were concerned he was considered a hero, because he had fought against the Communist regime that governed Lithuania until the summer of 1941 (and again from 1944). However, as far as the Jews were concerned, he was a war criminal, because during the years under Nazi occupation, he was selected by the Germans to be the officer in charge of the district of Šiauliai, in the center-north part of the country, and he even helped them implement the final solution. “Discovering my grandfather’s past was a horrific experience,” she recalls. “The number of feelings I went through were unimaginable, ranging from denial through anger and then depression and a deep sense of humiliation”.
The findings incriminating her grandfather were hard for her to absorb, so she left them on a back burner for a few years. In 2013 she went back to Lithuania and hired the services of a local Holocaust investigator. “I showed him all the monuments that were erected in memory of my grandfather, and he took me to the killing pits in which the Jews were buried because of him”, she recalled. “I gave him a book in which my grandfather is portrayed as a hero, and he gave me Holocaust books that present him as a villain.”
The facts revealed to her after this only intensified her pain: it appeared that her grandfather, whose name is displayed on streets and monuments in Lithuania, initiated a roundup of Jews even before the Nazi occupation. He then became the senior officer in three cities – Šiauliai, Plungė and Telšiai – in which 14,500 Jews were murdered. His involvement in the murders was indirect, but he was the one who signed their deportation papers sending them to the ghettos with orders to ransack their property. His family benefitted directly from the stolen property when they moved into a house from which the Jewish owners had been driven out. Finally she reached a decisive conclusion: “My grandfather took part in making Lithuania Judenrein. He helped the Nazis murder Jews and did nothing to stop them.”
The shocking discovery of her grandfather’s past led Foti to start an extraordinary campaign on the internet last year, in which she reveals his crimes, provides evidence of them and leads a struggle to dismantle the monuments in his memory and to rescind the honor he had been given. On her internet site (silviafoti.com) she presents to the public all the documents she had collected incriminating her grandfather. At present there are 50 different sources published on 6,000 pages including sections from testimonies found at Yad Vashem, memoirs, diaries and other items. Most of them are in Lithuanian, a few in Russian, German and Yiddish. Some have been translated into Hebrew. According to her, most of the reactions from the Lithuanian community in the US have been negative. “They think I am being disloyal to Lithuania and to my family’s name.”
Last year a change in the story took place when Foti found out that she wasn’t the only person probing the stains on her grandfather’s past. At that point Gochin, whose family was murdered during the Holocaust in Lithuania, started becoming involved. “Our research indicates that my grandfather facilitated to a large degree the murder of his family members”, she said.
From then on they became united in a joint mission: “Our goal – the granddaughter of a Holocaust war criminal and the descendent of Holocaust victims – is to bring the truth to the land of our fathers”, she declares. According to her, “The disgrace to our family is a national disgrace. I will never agree to abuse the memory of Holocaust victims by continuing the lies about my grandfather and the terrible things he did. Deliberately distorting history only brings more disgrace to Lithuania.”
Foti and Gochin teamed up with another duo – Nazi hunter Dr. Efraim Zuroff (named for a family member who was murdered in Lithuania) and the Lithuanian author Rūta Vanagaitė, some of whose family members took part in murdering the local Jewish community. Over the past years, they travelled the length and breadth of Lithuania searching for sites where massacres had taken place, and documented their findings in the book entitled “Our People - Discovering Lithuania's Hidden Holocaust”. Last year, Zuroff told “Ha’aretz” that their research had revealed that at least 20,000 Lithuanians had committed mass murder: “The crimes committed against Jews constitute a tragedy that will always cast a dark shadow”, he said.
Meanwhile, Gochin is ready for the trial which will reconvene on 5th March 2020. “The documents are incriminating and speak for themselves”, he told “Ha’aretz”. “There is no way to deny their existence nor the fact that Noreika is guilty of crimes against humanity during the Holocaust”. However, he is not optimistic regarding the outcome of the trial. “I don’t believe that the court will rule in my favor, because that would mean admitting that the government is involved in Holocaust denial”, he added. “Noreika is only one of a very large number of Holocaust criminals who received national recognition”. In his opinion, if he were convicted, this might “cast doubt on the entire national narrative”. Foti agrees with his assessment. “If my grandfather is found to be a Nazi criminal, Lithuania will also have to recognize the part of other members of its citizenry in the Holocaust, and this scares them”, she added. “My grandfather is not the only case, he was part of a nationwide system working for the destruction of Jews”.
Whatever the outcome, Gochin does not intend to give up and promises that if Noreika is not condemned as a war criminal, he will petition the European Human Rights Court. Foti wonders whether a Jew killer can really be considered a hero, even if he did fight bravely against the Communists. “I know it’s strange that a granddaughter wants to spoil the perception of her grandfather as a hero”, she admits, but she thinks that the most proper way to deal with this is for her to expose what did happen, in the hope that Lithuania will deal with its past, for its own sake, for the world, and especially for the sake of the Jews.
Nowadays she is working to finish her grandfather’s biography, originally a song of praise that has now become a bitter “J’accuse”. Thus, she becomes connected to another granddaughter who, in the past, wrote a book condemning her own grandfather. She is Jennifer Teege, the granddaughter of Amon Goeth, the infamous commander in charge of the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland, whose book “My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me” aroused a great deal of interest in Germany five years’ ago.
Read more on Silvia Foti’s Blog/July 2020
Where the Genocide Museum Is (Mostly) Mum on the Fate of Jews By Rod Nordland March 30, 2018
VILNIUS, Lithuania — During the Holocaust, many Lithuanian Jews were not killed in Nazi death camps, but by their neighbors, usually shot or even beaten to death. In all, 90 percent of an estimated 250,000 Jews perished, wiping out a community that had been part of Lithuanian life for five centuries. So it may come as a surprise that in Vilnius, the country’s capital, there is a thriving Jewish community center (including a cafe serving bagels), an expanded new Jewish Museum and fully functioning synagogue — beneficiaries of a Western-looking government that encourages Litvak Jews to return and has proposed to declare 2019 “The Year of the Jew.”
In the Ponary neighborhood, on the outskirts of town, there is a memorial, which eventually included the 70,000 Jews who were stripped naked and shot to death in the forest there. And in the city, there is a huge Museum of Genocide Victims.
That, however, is where the glowing picture suddenly becomes murky.
Until recent years, the museum, in what was once the headquarters for the Nazi S.S. and later the K.G.B., the Soviet secret police and intelligence apparatus, did not even mention the Holocaust, in which the German Nazis used Lithuanian partisans and police to round up and kill the country’s Jews.
More Jews were killed in Lithuania, in actual numbers as well as percentages, than German Jews who died in far more populous Germany.
The word genocide in the museum’s name refers to what the Soviets did after their occupation of the country upon the Nazi defeat in 1945. While Soviet rule was brutal, few historians would classify it as a genocide.
Some 20,000 Lithuanians were killed in Stalinist purges and in Siberian camps, where a quarter million Lithuanians were deported. There was never an effort to wipe out the Lithuanian population.
In 2011, after international criticism, the museum added a single room, in a small K.G.B. interrogation cell in the basement, devoted to the genocide of Jews. But it stuck to describing what Russia did as “genocide” in the rest of its three floors of exhibits, in a building that takes up much of a city block.
Dovid Katz, a Jewish scholar of Yiddish and a historian with Lithuanian ancestry, called the museum “a 21st-century version of Holocaust denial.” Mr. Katz, an American who lives in Vilnius, edits the Defending History website, devoted to challenging what he sees as Lithuania’s revisionist approach to the Holocaust.
“Calling what the Soviets did a genocide is a lot of double-talk sophistry to turn all the victims into criminals, and all the murderers into heroes,” he said.
But Ronaldas Racinskas, the executive director of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, said, “We should avoid an ‘Olympics of suffering’ by asking questions like ‘Who suffered more?’ or ‘Which occupation is better or worse?’ ” Critics of the commission have said it is designed to make the Soviet occupation equivalent to the Holocaust.
Much in Vilnius, which had once been world famous as a center of Jewish culture and scholarship, makes Lithuanian Jews uncomfortable. Streets are named after people like Kazys Skirpa, who advocated ridding Lithuania of Jews even before the Holocaust began, and after dates like the 23rd of June, the day the German invasion and Lithuanian Holocaust began.
One of the capital’s most prominent churches, the Evangelical Reformed Church, which is ecumenically related to the American Presbyterian denomination, has its main front steps formed of headstones from Jewish cemeteries, some with Hebrew inscriptions clearly visible.
A church spokesman, Nerijus Krikscikas, laid the blame for that on the Soviet authorities, who had seized the church and rebuilt it. He said the authorities hoped to eventually remove the headstones but were hampered because it was a registered historical place.
“The massive destruction of cultural heritage is a clear indication of the Soviet regime’s anti-Semitism and anti-Protestantism,” Mr. Krikscikas said.
On a bigger scale, the giant Soviet-built Palace of Concerts and Sports, where Lithuania’s famously popular basketball stars play, is built over an ancient Jewish cemetery. The government wants to expand it, rather than tear it down.
The small Jewish community in Lithuania, numbering some 3,000 to 4,000, is deeply divided over how to respond on such issues. Renaldas Vaisbrodas, the executive director of the Lithuanian Jewish Community association, a national group, said he expected the church’s Jewish headstones would eventually be returned, as part of a process happening throughout the city with such artifacts.
“This was done during the Soviet times when headstones were used in all sorts of building projects,” he said. “We must also acknowledge in past years a wonderful project by local authorities to replace and gather them up in a proper place, so the headstones are slowly returning.”
Simonas Gurevicius, head of the Vilnius Jewish Community association, a local group that has split from the national association, said the cemetery itself had enormous historical significance, with most of its remains intact, even if all the headstones were used for building materials.
“The Soviets didn’t build just coincidentally the Sports Palace there, they built it as part of an anti-Semitic campaign of destruction of Jewish sites,” he said. “Is this Soviet despotism a part of the heritage we would like to keep?”
This painful debate is part of a broader one as Eastern European nations continue to grapple with the legacy of the Holocaust.
Mr. Katz, the scholar, is among those who has described the Lithuanian approach to its history as “double genocide” — meaning an effort to equate the Soviet occupations in Eastern Europe with the Holocaust by, for example, having national holidays commemorating both Nazi and Soviet evils on the same day.
Long before Poland aroused controversy this year with a law making it a crime to blame Poles for complicity in the Holocaust, Lithuania has had an even broader such law on its books. Since 2010 Lithuania has criminalized “denial or gross trivializing” of either Soviet or Nazi genocide or crimes against humanity.
Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi hunter, said that the center had the names of 20,000 Lithuanians who participated in the Holocaust but that only three were ever prosecuted and convicted — and of those, none ever served jail time. “It’s a joke,” he said.
“Until recently, Lithuania was really the locomotive pulling this whole train of Holocaust distortion in Eastern Europe,” he said. Now Poland, Hungary and Ukraine all have engaged in trying to minimize the Holocaust, he said.
“If everyone’s guilty, no one’s guilty,” he added.
Mr. Katz considers the Lithuanian commission one of the founders of the double genocide conceit.
“It’s a massive effort to rewrite history,” he said. “Double genocide makes it sound so universal and noncontroversial that people don’t know they’re signing up for a far-right revision of history that turns murderers into heroes. Virtually all of the Eastern European murderers were anti-Soviet.”
Mr. Racinskas, the commission’s executive director, said the group had a separate sub-commission on the Holocaust that included international Jewish representatives, like members from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Israel.
Last week, the Lithuanian Parliament reacted to the controversy over the Museum of Genocide Victims by voting to consider a measure that would change the museum’s name to the Museum of Occupation. The bill has yet to pass.
Monika Kareniauskaite, the chief historian for the museum’s parent organization, the Genocide and Resistance Research Center, said the museum had focused on Soviet crimes partly because the building is where many of the K.G.B.’s torture and killings took place, whereas Holocaust crimes took place elsewhere.
“Today we would be happy also to change it and focus more on Nazi crimes and Holocaust,” she said, but funding is short and, she added, many older Lithuanians and particularly former political prisoners insist on keeping the focus on what they view as “Soviet genocide.”
Mr. Katz, the scholar, scoffed. “Congratulations on abandoning the misconceived campaign to set up a fake genocide to obfuscate the real one that took place here,” he said. “It needs to go much further than fix its name.”
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