LONDON—British author Peter Jukes, best known for his screenplays, literary criticism and political journalism, tweeted last week on the release in the United States of a new documentary film that heroizes certain postwar anti-Soviet “forest brothers” in Lithuania. The film, “The Invisible Front,” that premiered in Greenwich Village’s prestigious Cinema Village theater on 7 November, fails to even mention the view that various of the specific figures it glorifies for their post 1944 activities were in fact recycled Nazi collaborators — and in some cases actual Holocaust perpetrators — of 1941. That was the year when, in the days following the Nazi invasion launched on 22 June, the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) started butchering local civilian Jews, often elderly rabbis or young women, before the first German forces had arrived. Premeditation becomes evident from perusal of the LAF’s prewar leaflets.

The New York Times review of the film, that appeared on 6 November, failed to even mention that its primary hero might be controversial as a Nazi collaborator. The film was directed by Jonas Ohman and Vincas Sruoginis (see Geoff Vasil’s reply to an earlier article by Ohman). It is narrated by Dr. Darius Udrys, vice rector of the European Humanities University (EHU) in Vilnius, also known as the Belarusian Humanities University, which has in recent years run one-sided series of events on Holocaust-related issues and then gone on to host a Judaic studies series strictly limited to compliant speakers approved by the local nationalist establishment (sometimes leaving lower level organizers fluttering frantically to fill lecture halls but with strange requirements for preregistration vetting). Udrys, after plunging into Jewish affairs in 2007 with complaints about the alleged exclusion from a Lithuanian feastival in America of possibly non-existent “Yiddish dancers” somehow became part of the US board of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, where he tried to organize a one-sided Holocaust conference in Los Angeles in 2008 that was aborted after coming to the attention of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But Udrys then won wide accolades for a valiant stand, in 2012, against the reburial with full honors of the 1941 Nazi puppet PM; his opposition was praised for coming on time (before the burial) and for being stated in the language of unquivocal morality.

His 2014 narration of the film sanitizing another Nazi collaborator is therefore all the more baffling. Some in high places in Vilnius venture the guess that he needs to burnish his nationalist credentials in a bid for the rectorship of the European Humanities University in Vilnius. Control of “ethnic minority” cultures is paramount for some Baltic nationalists, leading some Belarusians to ask why the rector of the top Belarusian university, albeit in exile during the dictatorial Lukashenko regime, should not be a Belarusian, a speaker of the threatened Belarusian language, a specialist in Belarusian culture. The analogous questions are raised about the Yiddish institute in Vilnius, now directed by a non-speaker of Yiddish who is a member of the state’s commission on Nazi and Soviet crimes.

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