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Editor’s note: Lithuanian authorities in late September closed their two-year
investigation into the wartime partisan activities of Yitzhak Arad, a Lithuanian-born
Israeli historian and a former head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial,
reportedly on the urging of the European Union and the United States. Prosecutors
said there was insufficient evidence to link Arad to possible war crimes
committed by Soviet partisans during a 1944 fight with German forces that
left many Lithuanian civilians dead. The authorities are still considering
whether to put two Lithuanian Jewish women, Fania Brantsovskaya (Brantsovsky)
and Rachel Margolis, on the witness stand in connection with the killings.
A disturbing tendency has recently appeared in Lithuania. In the words of the
eminent scholar of Yiddish Dovid Katz, this tendency may
best be described as the “Holocaust obfuscation movement.”
Its essence lies in subversion of the logic and evidence
of the Holocaust, whitewashing or at least selectively reading
the history of the Second World War and drastically shifting
the roles of victims and evil-doers.
The criminal prosecution of former Soviet partisans of Jewish
background, in present-day Lithuania, on the grounds of war
crimes allegedly committed against Lithuanians, can be described
in no other way than as a morally repugnant attempt to blame
the victims of the Holocaust for war crimes by manipulating
historical facts, images, and stereotypes of the Second World
War. When Holocaust survivors, who had no other option during
the war than to join the Soviet partisan movement, become
suspected of war crimes, we reach the climax of the innocence
and victimization syndrome, a new variety of blaming the
victim – the grimace of a modern amoral culture.
An older relation of the Holocaust whitewashing tendency
is something we might term the “theory of the two genocides.”
In truth, this pattern of thinking is mere prejudice, called
theory inasmuch as conspiracy theory is also so termed. The
notion of two genocides was conceived during World War II;
afterward, it reappeared first among emigrants (in Soviet
Lithuania, one was not allowed even to mention any specific
relations between Lithuanians and Jews, any beautiful moments
or tensions between them: There were neither Lithuanians
nor Jews as nations, there were only Soviet citizens). It
was a kind of attempt to explain the relations between Lithuanians
and Jews and why those relations came to such a tragic pass.
After all, there had to be some reaction to the uncanny fact
that two totalitarian ideologies and the world-destroying
regimes hatched by them excavated a fateful gulf between
Lithuanians and Jews, between peoples who had seemed inseparable
for more than six centu
ries.
BEYOND CAUSE AND EFFECT
It is flat nonsense that Lithuanians have always hated Jews and have been waiting
for an occasion to obliterate them, as is sometimes blatantly asserted. Leaving
aside isolated cases of pathological hatred for Jews, those Lithuanians who good-humoredly
banter Jews and at the same time themselves are imbued with Jewish humor or even
manners make to me the best argument that there is not, and never was, a Kafkaesque
chasm of unnameable, mutual horror between these two nations. The two nations
were fatefully separated not by nameless and anonymous forces of the modern world,
but by very definite social upheavals of the 20th century: World War II and the
ideologies behind it as well as the criminal regimes that institutionalized them.
Horror, the feeling of insecurity, war-deformed relations between people are
matters that cannot be explained rationally. As the Lithuanian poet and literary
scholar Tomas Venclova has aptly remarked, in any crime there is a transcendent
vestige that obstinately resists being wedged into a rational theory. I would
not need much convincing that some of the Lithuanians who saved Jews might have
been, if not modern anti-Semites, then at least traditional religious Judeophobes,
but being Christians they saved people whose lives were in danger. And the converse:
I have no doubt that a person who sympathized with Jews in the presence of war
and of the collision of two forms of terrible evil could, if not murder them,
then at least round them up, confine them in a ghetto, and deliver them for killing.
I repeat, I would not be surprised at that a bit, because schemes of cause and
effect are fruitless and explain nothing in times of social upheavals.
An eminent émigré Lithuanian political thinker, Aleksandras Shtromas, himself
a near-miraculous survivor who owed his life to a Christian couple, remarked
that in Lithuania during the Holocaust the same thing happened as in any other
country: one minority killed, another saved, and the remaining majority simply
observed silently and in fear, pretending that these events were no concern of
theirs. Finally, there were also shocked and traumatized Lithuanians who refused
to believe the evidence of their own eyes that their neighbors and classmates
might be murdered so promptly and horribly.
To be at a loss and not to know what to do are not instances of reprehensible
or criminal weakness. Unfortunately, this is part of human reality. The few who
act differently are the exceptions to the rule. Shtromas was certain that in
such a situation in which the Lithuanians found themselves – in the confrontation
of the two totalitarian regimes, and thereby in the situation of open and non-punishable
political terror – the members of any other nation, including the Jews themselves,
would have acted more or less in the same way. After all, very similar events
happened in Latvia, Ukraine, and other countries that suffered parallel fates.
WHEN FACT FALLS VICTIM TO THEORY
The first genocide – proponents of the theory of two genocides say, taking up
and slightly modifying certain gems of Goebbels’ propaganda – consisted of the
mass killing of Lithuanians in 1940, instigated by the Jews who themselves took
part in it in large numbers. I shall not initiate another argument over what
has already been proved by historians: The number of Jewish members in the underground
Lithuanian Communist Party was ridiculously small, and if we compare the putative
special role of the Jews at the top of the party with that of leading lights
Antanas Snieckus, Mecys Gedvilas, or the former social democrat Justas Paleckis,
such a role would turn out to be simple fiction.
According to this theory, the disloyalty to, and betrayal of, Lithuania by the
Jews became that last straw that broke the patient back of the otherwise tolerant
and noble Lithuanian nation. The aggrieved and revengeful Lithuanians then took
part (though in single and isolated cases) in the killing of the Jews that had
been organized by Nazis. By the way, I could present quotes and references in
which our famous and practically canonized philosophers bluntly explicate this
position. What, then, to expect from those who but clumsily and belatedly have
picked out a few pearls of this wisdom?
In other words, one genocide, carried out by the Bolsheviks (first of all Jewish)
and whose victim was the Lithuanian nation, triggered the other genocide, carried
out by the Nazis and a few Lithuanians in collaboration with them. But if we
bring the inner logic of this construction to the ultimate limit, we would have
to admit that the Holocaust was merely Germany’s revenge upon the Jews for Bolshevism,
world domination, and conspiracy against the European nations. The foundations
for these beliefs are stoutly laid in Mein Kampf.
Tomas Venclova has called the theory of two genocides troglodytic; indeed, only
moral troglodytes can believe in their hearts that the killing of old people,
children, and women is punishment for the actions of the Jews, who happened to
dwell in a multinational state and acted together with the members of other nations
– Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, and
others.
MERE MENTAL BLOCKS?
Let us look now at a pathetic echo of this theory which has already sounded in
today’s Lithuania. Legal harassment (which was later called by the prosecutors
“an invitation to testify”) of former ghetto prisoners and Soviet partisans is
nothing less than a follow-on of the theory of two genocides. I can hardly believe
that our prosecutors can be so deeply and hopelessly caught up in it, but it
seems that is precisely the case. If the ghetto survivors and partisans Rachel
Margolis and Fania Brantsovskaya after this still are called to testify, several
simple questions offer themselves.
What, then, were those young Jews, whose parents were murdered in their presence,
supposed to do? Join the Nazis and their local collaborators, who methodically
exterminated them? Or perish themselves, thus unraveling that complicated dilemma?
If at that time Soviet partisans were the only power fighting the Nazis, who
else then could the Jews join in their fight against their killers? If the moral
logic of our prosecutors implies this problem, it seems the only solution would
have been to have died. It turns out that these people have complicated their
lives and committed a crime precisely by managing to stay alive. If every legal
action rests on a certain moral logic and system of values not explicitly declared
in legal documents, can it really be that the theory of two genocides is such
a moral and value base for the persecution of the former ghetto prisoners and
partisans who fought the Nazis?
One would be hard pressed to find a way of bringing Lithuania into greater disrepute
in the world than by such actions against the victims of the Holocaust. It is
difficult to believe that thinking people thus could degrade Lithuania’s reputation
and demoralize its society, especially the younger generation, no matter how
much they may dislike the Jews (that is their right; they are not obliged to
like Jews). Is it a sheer provocation, soon to be taken up in Russia’s repulsive
and aggression-filled anti-Baltic and anti-Lithuanian propaganda, the “Baltic
fascists” card that country always plays? Or are these simply mental clots suffered
by several of our prosecutors – an inability to interpret reality other than
through the prejudices of two genocides, symmetry of suffering, and Jewish disloyalty?
Do we really see here Goebbels’s post-mortem smile?
When The Economist recently ran a commentary on the damage to Lithuania arising
from these legal actions, a few Lithuanian journalists hastened to denounce the
magazine’s blackmailing and threats against Lithuania. I would wish upon ourselves
as many such enemies and blackmailers as possible, be they inside or outside
Lithuania. I can understand the nonconformism of some journalists and their unwillingness
to agree mechanically with everything written. Provocation and nonconformism
are undoubtedly good things in journalism, but not at the expense of truth, morality,
and humanity.
In fact, the logic is very simple here. If your country or a country you sympathize
with is wrong, and wrong perniciously, then it hurts, and you do whatever you
can to stop it or at least to sound a warning. The moral and political byroads
of other countries concern us less urgently. To tell the truth, I am not so sad
about anti-Semitism in Russia, Poland, or Germany – it has always been there,
and there have always been those who bravely, intrepidly, and nobly took up the
struggle against it. But I am sad and hurt that my homeland, as it happens, is
still intoxicated with hatred for the vanishing Lithuanian Jews.
tol.cz
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