IS LITHUANIA really persecuting Holocaust survivors as if they were war criminals?
Not quite, but the story is still troubling. It starts with the Nazi occupation
of Lithuania when the Germans, with local help, were murdering Jews (more
than 200,000 Jews perished, around 95% of the pre-war population). The Nazis’
main opponent was the Soviet Union, so Jews’ only chance of survival was
to fight alongside Soviet-backed partisan groups, who were fighting both
against Hitler and to restore communist rule in Lithuania.
Sixty years on, independent Lithuania is still wrestling with the dilemmas of
the wartime years. The Soviets condemned many Nazi collaborators
(and tens of thousands of others) immediately after the war,
but atrocities committed by the other side remain almost
wholly unpunished. Perpetrators of dreadful crimes are still
living freely in Russia and elsewhere.
Yet the interest Lithuanian prosecutors have shown in a handful of elderly Holocaust
survivors seems to have only a tangential relationship with
righting those historical wrongs. Fania Brantsovsky, now
86, is a librarian at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in Lithuania,
a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto and a former partisan. Prosecutors
say they want to talk to her and another survivor, Rachel
Margolis, about a partisan massacre of civilians in 1944.
Perhaps most spectacularly, a prosecutor wants to interview Yitzhak Arad, a Lithuanian-born
historian and ex-head of Yad Vashem in Israel. Until recently
he sat on a high-level Lithuanian commission investigating
crimes perpetrated by totalitarian regimes in the country.
Now he is refusing to co-operate. In a book published in
1979 he described how his partisan unit “punished” villagers
who did not give them food.
No formal charges have been brought;
the prosecutors say they are just following up a line of
inquiry. But they claim to be “searching” for Ms Brantsovsky,
as if she were a fugitive. The Lithuanian government seems
embarrassed by the issue but says it cannot intervene in
the justice system. It is bits of the Lithuanian media, calling
for the individuals concerned to be put on trial as terrorists
and criminals, who have done most to inflame the situation.
But it is still bad. Lithuania’s record
on prosecuting war criminals of the other stripe has been
spotty, to put it mildly. Targeting prominent local Jews
looks selective, even vindictive. It also fits into a general
pattern of what Dovid Katz, the Yiddish Institute’s research
director, calls “Holocaust obfuscation”. This involves a
series of false moral equivalences: Jews were disloyal citizens
of pre-war Lithuania, helped the Soviet occupiers in 1940,
and were therefore partly to blame for their fate. And the
genocide that really matters was the one that Lithuanian
people suffered at Soviet hands after 1944.
These arguments are as repellent as
they are flimsy. Jews (perhaps 500 of them) comprised around
a third of the pre-war Communist Party. But Jews also suffered
disproportionately from the deportations of June 1941, aimed
at the bourgeoisie of all races. The Soviet Union was profoundly
anti-Semitic.
Dodging the blame for Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust is shameful.
It also makes separating facts from Soviet-era smears (now
enthusiastically repeated by Kremlin propagandists) more
difficult. Lithuania suffered dreadfully under Soviet rule,
but “genocide” is the wrong word. Lithuania in fact suffered
less than its Baltic neighbours. It regained territory (including
its historic capital, Vilnius) and a wily local Communist
leader shielded it from russification.
It may suit demagogic politicians and their media hangers-on to distort history
and defame Jews. But it reflects dreadfully on Lithuania,
at a time when small countries in Russia’s shadow need all
the help they can get.
economist.com
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