Professor
Timothy Snyder of Yale University, the author of the famous
(and controversial) book “Bloodlands” was brought to Lithuania
last week for a symposium on the Holocaust attended also
by the director of YIVO in New York. In the course of the
same week, the Lithuanian government repatriated, reburied
with full honors and held a series of events honoring the
1941 Nazi-puppet prime minister who signed off on the German
order for all Jews in Kaunas (Kovno) to be forced into a
ghetto.
Dear Tim,
Greetings, and sorry we missed each
other in Vilnius this time. I write in the context of our
ongoing and respectful conversation, which started in the
Guardian (thanks to Matt Seaton, and prominently including
Efraim Zuroff) back in 2010 (I, II, III, IV); continuing
through our meeting at Yale, the Aftermath Conference in
Melbourne, Australia, in 2011 (thanks to Mark Baker, and
with participation of Jan Gross and Patrick Desbois), and
more recently, via my review of your book Bloodlands (along
with Alexander Prusin’s The Lands Between), in East European
Jewish Affairs.
In that review, I dealt with a number
of areas of disagreement that are on the table concerning
the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and the efforts underway
to use state funds to downgrade it in a number of countries,
particularly the Baltics.
But these debates are inherently separate
from the troubling issue on which I’m addressing you today:
the ongoing instrumentalization and abuse of your important
work by well-oiled government-financed ultra-nationalist
and often antisemitic forces in Eastern Europe who have (wrongly)
found in your work the ammunition for a discernible slide
in the direction of the Double Genocide movement, which reached
its zenith with the 2008 Prague Declaration (critiques here),
and in the direction of positing the sort of “complexity”
that is regularly invoked, particularly here in the Baltics,
as euphemism for what is now called Holocaust Obfuscation.
There is, alas, in nationalist and
antisemitic circles in some East European states a movement
to sanitize or actually glorify local Holocaust collaborators
and perpetrators (who were after all, usually quite reliably
“anti-Soviet” and “anti-Russian”). In Lithuania alone, this
effort has gone hand in hand with a tragic effort to concurrently
blame the victims by trying to criminalize, in the absence
of any evidence, Holocaust survivors who are alive because
they joined the anti-Nazi resistance. Not one of these kangaroo
cases has yet led to a public apology, not even to 90 year
old Dr. Rachel Margolis in Rechovot, who still dreams of
one last visit to her native Vilna.
As reported in DefendingHistory.com
last September, a foreign-ministry hosted event in Vilnius
in September 2011 included a speech by a leading local historian
in which he claimed (wrongly) that your book offers support
for the condemnation of Jewish partisans who fought against
the Nazis. In May 2011, a historian speaking on Lithuanian
radio boasted that “It’s not all hopeless” because of Bloodlands.
Even before that, in late 2010, a
far-right film production cited you as an expert consultant
in a project to glorify the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF)
perpetrators who unleashed murder and mutilation of Jewish
civilians in dozens of Lithuanian towns before the Nazis
even arrived (and who announced their intentions before the
war even started). (I trust you withdrew from that project,
and offer my belated congratulations for so doing).
But that episode somehow connects
with this week. The same ultranationalist filmmakers recently
announced their premiere on Sunday 20 May 2012 in Kaunas
of a new “documentary” (promo clip here) adulating Juozas
Ambrazevičius (later Brazaitis), the 1941 Nazi puppet “prime
minister” in Kaunas who signed off on orders for the setting
up of a concentration camp for Jews, and the requirement
that “all the Jews of Kaunas” be moved within four weeks
to a ghetto.
The new film premiered yesterday in
Kaunas as the grand finale of four days of Lithuanian government
financed events (May 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th) focused on the
reburial with full honors and the elaborate honoring of the
World War II Nazi puppet prime minister.
What do these events have to do with
you, or with the director of Yivo from New York who joined
you? Directly speaking – absolutely nothing. In fact, people
in the Jewish community here in Vilnius feel certain that
when you (and he) accepted the invitations for the May 2012
symposium and related events here in Lithuania that you had
no idea your presence would coincide with the long-planned
glorification of a major Holocaust collaborator.
But when such things happen, it becomes
necessary to react, if not by postponing one’s trip then
by speaking out unambiguously with moral clarity.
Events featuring a Yale historian
and the head of Yivo, coming at the same time as the state-sponsored
events to honor the collaborator, have been used, first:
to deflect foreign and diplomatic attention from the Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis
outrage, which has drawn protests this past week from B’nai
B’rith, the Wiesenthal Center, an international petition,
and critically, the remnant Jewish Community of Lithuania;
second: to use your appearance to legitimize those events.
After all, if a Yale professor and the head of Yivo are happy
to appear the same week about the Holocaust and not come
out publicly and firmly against the concurrent glorification
of the collaborator, well, then it can’t be such a big deal…
It was sad that neither of you publicly
condemned the Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis events during your
symposium on the Holocaust in Lithuania. However, it did
come up in an interviewer’s question to yourself.
According to the interview published
on 15min.lt on 18 May 2012 (and for the sake of the Almighty,
please do tell us if they misquoted you), your answer to
the question about the repatriation, honoring and reburial
of the Nazi puppet prime minister underway during your visit
was as follows:
“I am going to choose my words very
carefully here. I think before you rebury anyone, you should
think very very hard and probably wait a very very long time
because once you rebury somebody once, you can’t rebury them
again.”
Is that really all you have to say to Lithuanian society,
during your visit here, regarding the latest in a litany
of government sponsored events to honor collaborators and
perpetrators of the Lithuanian Holocaust and not seldom to
use your own name and book as artillery?
During this past week, very courageous
Lithuanian citizens (who remain here and may even have to
face this or that consequence in their careers) have raised
their proud voices in dignified protest. They include the
members of parliament Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis and Algirdas
Sysas; member of the European Parliament Leonidas Donskis;
political scientist Darius Udrys; former editor of the Jewish
newspaper here, Milan Chersonski; dozens of Lithuanian citizens
who have signed Krystyna Anna Steiger’s petition; and, not
least, the small remnant Jewish community itself, which issued
a bold statement in partnership with the Jewish museum.
As a famous professor soon returning
to Yale, would it be too much respectfully to ask you to
reconsider your public reaction to the week’s events. You
can phrase this much more eloquently and elegantly. Here
is just a first thought:
“There are certainly many historical
complexities, but as a true friend of Lithuania, I have to
tell you frankly that state financing of the honoring of
a Nazi-puppet prime minister on whose watch the mass murder
of Lithuanian Jewry got underway, one who actually signed
orders separating out for persecution and worse those citizens
who were Jewish, is the worst possible message your government
could be sending. It is a tragic mistake, and if I had known
it would coincide with my visit, I would have asked to come
some other week out of respect for the victims of the Holocaust.
As someone who passionately shares your cause of educating
the West about Stalinist crimes, I have to tell you that
this sort of thing undermines that noble effort through and
through.”
Wishing you, as ever, the best of
everything,
Dovid algemeiner.com
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