A project offering
rewards to residents of the Baltic states for tips on Nazi
collaborators prompts a predictable wave of sometimes anti-Semitic
protest but also, surprisingly, two dozen murder investigations
As a young girl early in World War II, Eleonora Vilcinskiene
saw how Lithuanian militias committed atrocities against
Jews even before the Germans arrived in 1941. In her home
town of Rosikis, members of the local “Lithuanian Self-Defense
battalion” marched their Jewish neighbors into deep
mud, buried them up to their necks and cut off their beards
with a long blade used to slaughter pigs, tortured them for
two weeks and then murdered them. Today, Vilcinskiene, aging
and in poor health, says she remembers everything and that “the
guilty must answer.”
But Vilcinskiene is one of a small minority. Most Lithuanians
are totally opposed to efforts to bring to justice those
of their countrymen who took an active part in the murder
of Jews, and independent Lithuania has not sentenced a single
person to date in connection with the wholesale slaughter
of all but 8,000 of the 220,000-strong Jewish population
under Nazi occupation. Indeed, Lithuanians complain they
are being held collectively responsible for what they claim
were the actions of a few criminals, and there is almost
total denial of any wider Lithuanian role.
Just over a year ago, the Simon Wiesenthal Center — in
cooperation with the Targum Shlishi Foundation headed by
Miami-based Jewish philanthropist Aryeh Rubin — announced
Operation Last Chance, offering rewards of $10,000 for information
leading to the conviction of any Holocaust criminal in the
Baltic states. But after the media carried SWC’s offer,
websites were swamped with record numbers of anti-Semitic
comments and angry attacks on Ephraim Zuroff, the head of
the SWC in Jerusalem, who had launched Last Chance at a press
conference here in the Lithuanian capital.
Last April, SWC issued eased terms for collecting a reward — $1,000
for information leading to an official investigation, an
additional $1,500 for an indictment served against a suspect
able to stand trial, and the remaining $7,500 for conviction
and punishment. This prompted another rash of internet comments,
with references to Jews as cockroaches and elaborate theories
of international Jewish conspiracy. Several comments likened
anyone accepting the SWC offer to Judas.
Quite apart from the ongoing absence of reflection or regret
in Lithuania over the murderous role some of its citizens
played in the Holocaust, there is also a longstanding myth
that during the era of Soviet occupation — before and
after the Nazi 1941-44 period — most native Communists
were Jews and that the Jews committed genocide against the
Lithuanian nation through deportations to Siberia and summary
executions. The combination is a recipe for continued widespread
hate and misunderstanding of the Jews.
In this context, even the limited results of Operation Last
Chance are remarkable. The SWC has received leads to about
241 possible suspects — 184 from Lithuania, 38 from
Latvia, six from Estonia and even 13 from Ukraine, which
wasn’t initially included in the scope of the operation.
In turn, the SWC has submitted 32 names to prosecutors in
Lithuania, 13 to the U.S. and 10 to Latvia. Official murder
investigations of 24 suspects have now been initiated in
Lithuania. And this has now prompted the SWC to expand the
project to Poland, Romania and Austria. Still, the Lithuanian
prosecutor in charge of Holocaust and war-crimes cases, Rimvydas
Valentukevicius, told The Jerusalem Report that Lithuanian
police and security agencies are having trouble locating
the people named in many of the SWC tip-offs.
The SWC is offering total confidentiality to those submitting
information. If indictments are served, said Valentukevicius,
the judges will have discretion as to whether to hold public
or closed trials. He had no plans for a witness-protection
scheme, but did not rule this out. “We’ve had
two of these cases go to trial so far,” he said — referring
to pre-Operation Last Chances cases against former Lithuanian
State Security Department officials and alleged Nazi collaborators
Aleksandras Lileikis and Kazys Gimzauskas — “and
there wasn't any need for it then.”
(Lileikis and Gimzauskas were both stripped of U.S. citizenship
in 1996 for lying on their naturalization forms. Lileikis
was chief of the Vilnius section of the Lithuanian State
Security Department, Saugumas, and Gimzauskas served as a
deputy. Lileikis died in 2000, having been indicted only
after it was clear he was medically unfit to stand trial
for war crimes. In February 2001, a Lithuanian court convicted
Gimzauskas of collaborating with the Nazis to murder Jews,
but ruled he wasn’t mentally competent to face sentencing.)
While the offer of a $10,000- or even a $1,000-reward might
seem alluring — the average Lithuanian monthly wage
is about $250 — Simonas Alperavicius, head of the Lithuanian
Jewish Community, which is an address for Operation Last
Chance callers, says that most of those who have come forward
with information are not interested in the money, and this
is confirmed by the informants themselves, who say they simply
want to see justice finally done.
For instance, Justinas Jokubaitis of Klaipeda (formerly
the city of Memel, in German East Prussia, but part of inter-war
independent Lithuania), says the money was not an inducement — even
though his monthly pension is only some $100. Jokubaitis,
who claims to have witnessed atrocities against Jews, says
he came forward because there is so much talk about Soviet
deportations of Lithuanians but total silence on the fate
of the Jews.
At the initial press conference last year, Zuroff noted
that Nazi collaborators were dying off, as were witnesses,
and this could be the “last chance” (hence the
title of the project) to bring prosecutions. But most Lithuanians
who care even to discuss the issue contend that all Holocaust
crimes were thoroughly investigated by the Soviet tribunals,
all perpetrators were brought to justice long ago, and Zuroff
is beating a dead horse.
Most responsible scholars, however, say the Soviet Holocaust
trials were inadequate — show trials in the true sense
of the word, aimed at doing away with potential political
troublemakers. Liudas Truska and a small number of Lithuanian
historians, working under the umbrella of the Lithuanian
government's Commission for Assessing the Crimes of the Nazi
and Soviet Occupations, are consolidating materials deconstructing
long-held Lithuanian notions such as that myth, still espoused
by the younger generation of nationalist Lithuanian historians,
of Lithuanian Jews committing genocide against the Lithuanian
nation after the introduction of Soviet power. Scholars on
the commission also note that the Lithuanian exile community
in North America condemned the Soviet trials in the 1950s,
saying that only independent Lithuanian judges could try
cases of war crimes on Lithuanian territory.
Vilcinskiene, a witness at those Soviet trials who, at
age 15, says she saw her Jewish neighbors killed by her Lithuanian
neighbors in the northern town of Rokiskis, insists that
the Soviet authorities ignored her testimony, and that a
number of those she saw murdering Jews later became important
officials in the Soviet hierarchy. “Those same people,
the partisans who are raised up as heroes by our government
today, they committed murder,” protests Vilcinskiene.
In 1996 Vilcinskiene told her story again to Alperavicius,
whose community organization represents Lithuania's 3,000
or so remaining Jews. And she contacted the SWC via the Lithuanian
State Jewish Museum in Vilnius, which took her testimony
last fall. Special prosecutor Valentukevicius visited her
in May to take formal testimony. “They say they’re
all dead now,” she continues, referring to the common
perception of the perpetrators, “but I don’t
think so. I have this feeling some of them are still alive.
As long as Lithuania doesn’t come to terms with this
dark part of its history, the country can’t move on.”
Zuroff echoes the sentiment, saying he saw how a single
successful prosecution in Croatia — that of Dinko Sakic,
commandant of the Jasenovac concentration camp, jailed for
20 years in 1999 for responsibility for the murder of thousands
of camp inmates — can change public opinion. “I
am hoping that powerful eyewitnesses and good evidence will
help educate the Lithuanian public about the events of the
Holocaust and the need for the country to confront its past,” he
states.
But critics of Operation Last Chance are not only the cyber
riffraff, as Alperavicius calls the authors of some rabidly
anti-Semitic comments on the Lithuanian Internet. At least
one Lithuanian parliamentarian has called for Zuroff to be
declared persona non grata, for allegedly inciting anti-Semitism
during his visits. And, however surprisingly, Operation Last
Chance enjoys only very limited open support even among local
Jews. In fact, some of the internet critiques came from self-described
Jews, blasting Zuroff for souring Jewish-Lithuanian relations.
Lithuanian philosopher, TV personality and author of “The
Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews,” Leonidas Donskis,
who describes himself as an assimilated Jew and a child of
Holocaust survivors, says the Lithuanian public reaction
is understandable, in that it looks like SWC is trying to
buy justice. “There are very few, if any, Holocaust
deniers in Lithuania,” he says. “The stance of
the vast majority of Lithuanians could best be described
as a kind of defensiveness about an inconvenient past,” he
asserts, adding that it will take decades for Lithuania to
come to terms with its painful history. Still, Donskis says
he takes some consolation from the fact that Lithuania has
done more than Latvia or Estonia to change the curriculum
in high schools — to introduce new teaching programs
in Holocaust studies.
Dovid Katz, a Brooklyn-born, Vilnius-based professor of
Yiddish language, literature and culture, opposes the project
because of what he calls the “position and sensitivities
of the older Jewish community here, the survivor community...
They deserve to live out their days in tranquillity and peace,” he
says. Initiatives relating to the past need to be pursued
in a way that does not “cause resentments — now,
at this hour, when we need to be building bridges.”
Alperavicius, of course, strongly disagrees, saying this
is a simple matter of justice. He adds that he’s probably
the only Jew in Lithuania to publicly support Zuroff. Many
others, he suggests, “are probably afraid. But I’m
not.” Taking the opposite tack to Katz regarding the
interests of elderly Jews, he adds: “I’m old,
there's nothing left to be afraid of.”
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