Elderly Jews say they are outraged that Lithuania is pursuing
them over their wartime role as anti-Nazi partisans
Fania Branstovsky was just
20 when she joined the Jewish partisan movement fighting
the Nazis in her home country of Lithuania. In the Vilnius
ghetto, she and her fellow partisans carried out attacks
against the occupying German forces. By the end of the
war, almost her entire family — more than 50 people –—
had perished at the hands of the Nazis. Yet now, over
60 years later, she is the one being branded unpatriotic,
and is reportedly under investigation by Lithuanian authorities
for alleged war crimes.
National and local newspapers
and television stations are referring to the 86-year-old
Holocaust survivor, who now works as a librarian at the
Vilnius Yiddish Institute, as a murderer and a terrorist.
Earlier this year, the Vilnius-based newspaper Lietuvos
Aidas called for her to be put on trial. The allegation
levelled against her is that during her time as a partisan,
she committed crimes against Lithuanians. But she strongly
denies that she and her partisan colleagues ever targeted
groups of local people.
“It’s very upsetting and shocking,”
says Branstovsky, a mother of two, with six grandchildren
and two great-grandchildren. “We fought against the powers
of the Nazis. Not against the locals. The Nazis wanted
to annihilate all Jews and all people who loved freedom,
and I joined the underground partisan organisation in
September 1943 to defend myself and my people. It was
a matter of honour.”
Even with a possible war-crimes
prosecution hanging over her, she has no regrets. “I
didn’t want all Jewish people to die with no resistance.
I feel very proud and I’m very glad that I had the opportunity
to do something for honour and humanity.”
She vows that the prospect
of being put on trial for war crimes will not drive her
out of her country. “I’m very patriotic. I was born here
and have always lived here. Of course I am worried, but
I am not planning to leave because of this. By doing
this they want to rewrite history.”
Branstovsky is not the only
Holocaust survivor being pursued by the Lithuanian authorities.
Yitzhak Arad, a historian and former chairman of Israel’s
Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, is also being investigated
over similar alleged crimes.
Arad joined the partisan movement
in the Vilnius ghetto during the war. His parents had
already been taken by the Nazis two years earlier, eventually
dying in Warsaw. So the teenage Arad decided to try to
make it alone. “The night before we had to go to the
ghetto, I escaped to Belorussia [then part of the Soviet
Union, now Belarus],” he recalls. “In doing that, I escaped
the killings. Forty members of my family were killed
as well as many people from my village.”
He returned to Vilnius as
a member of the pro-Soviet partisan movement, whose main
activity was sabotaging German trains. Having fought
so hard to survive the Nazi killings, Arad, who settled
in Israel after the war, says he is “upset and disappointed”
at being branded a war criminal.
“In doing this they are trying
to rewrite history and to turn the murderers of thousands
of Jews into heroes and the few survivors into criminals,”
he says.
Although he has had no formal
confirmation from the authorities that they are looking
into his partisan activities, or that a prosecution is
planned, he says he has heard through other channels
that a group of anti-Soviets in the country filed a complaint
against him to Lithuanian prosecutors. This led to an
investigation being launched. The local media have also
reported that an investigation is under way, accusing
both Arad and Branstovsky of massacring civilians in
the village of Kaniukai.
The prospect of standing trial
has, naturally enough, left Arad reluctant to return
to his home town. “I have not been back for two years,
and I’m not planning on going back now,” he says.
If trials do go ahead, it
seems that a third Jewish partisan could be the primary
witness for the prosecution. Rachel Margolis, founder
of Vilnius’s Jewish museum, has written a memoir recounting
her escape from the ghetto and her time as a partisan.
Extracts from her book, she fears, could be used as evidence
by prosecutors.
Margolis, who lost her family
in the Holocaust and now lives in Israel, was unavailable
to talk to the JC. But according to Efraim Zuroff, director
of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre,
an investigator was sent to the address which she uses
in Lithuania. He says the investigator interviewed Rachel
Konstanian, the director of the Vilnius Jewish Museum,
and told her that he was looking for Margolis in order
to question her regarding an investigation into Fania
Branstovsky.
Margolis’s cousin, Budd Margolis,
who lives in London, fears that the stress of going through
a trial could prove life-threatening to Holocaust survivors
now in their eighties. “This is very shocking and upsetting,”
he says. “My cousin, as well as the other two people
involved, are all quite elderly now, and it’s very unfortunate
that they have to deal with this at this stage of their
lives. It’s terribly unjust.”
He adds that his cousin is
now too scared to return to Lithuania. “She is worried
she may get arrested.”
Rachel Margolis’s memoir,
which has been published in Lithuania, contains a description
of how a group of partisans, including Fania Branstovsky,
attacked a Nazi garrison in the village of “Kanyuki”.
She writes: “The partisans had surrounded the garrison,
but the Nazis were exceptionally well armed and beat
off all attacks. They broke the flanks of the Jewish
detachments, and the partisans withdrew precipitously.
Then Magid jumped up on a rock and yelled: ‘We are Jews.
We will show them what we are capable of. Forward, comrades!’
This sobered the men up; they ran back and won.”
A willingness to prosecute
alleged war criminals is something not often displayed
by the Lithuanian authorities. Even though around 212,000
of its Jews were killed, the Baltic country has only
ever brought three of its citizens to trial over war
crimes, two of whom — Kazys Gimzauskas and Algimantas
Dailide — were convicted, but were excused imprisonment,
in Gimzauskas’s case because of illness, in Dailide’s
because of advanced age. Dailide was 85, a year younger
than Fania Branstovsky is now.
According to the Lithuania
embassy in London, there are currently no plans to prosecute
Branstovsky. In an emailed statement, Minister Counsellor,
Deputy Head of Mission Jonas Grinevicius said: “There
is no lawsuit against Mrs Branstovsky and there are no
charges by the Prosecution General against Mrs Branstovsky,
nor there is any other legal action against Mrs Branstovsky
initiated. Mrs Branstovsky is only asked to appear in
the court hearings as a witness in the case of the massacre
by Soviet partisans of peaceful inhabitants of Kaniukai
village in Salcininkai district. The killing of 38 Kaniukai
inhabitants occurred in January 1944, it was committed
by 120-150 Soviet partisans.”
Lithuanian denials do not
impress Efraim Zuroff. He has written a strongly worded
letter to Asta Skaisgiryté–Liauskienè, the Lithuanian
ambassador in Israel. In it he accuses the Lithuanian
authorities of “launching a campaign to discredit Jewish
resistance fighters by falsely accusing them of war crimes
in order to deflect attention from widespread Lithuanian
participation in the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust”.
He tells the JC that this
is a “malicious campaign against the innocent heroes
of the anti-Nazi resistance. We are hoping the investigations
will be dropped,” he says.
And so are Fania Branstovsky,
Yitzhak Arad and Rachel Margolis.
thejc.com
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