A few months ago, Lithuanian policemen and agents from the security service knocked
on Rachel Margolis' door in Vilna. Fortunately she was
not home, and was thus saved the humiliation of an interrogation.
Margolis, almost 90, was a Jewish partisan during World
War II, and is finding it difficult to recover from the
trauma even now, when she is living in her daughter's
home in Rehovot.
"My sin in the eyes of the nationalists and the anti-Semites in the Lithuanian
government," she says, "was that I was a partisan and fought against the Nazis and their collaborators."
The Lithuanian policemen and
agents wanted to interrogate her about her memoir, in
which she told about her partisan colleagues who in January
1944 attacked the village of Koniuchy (or in Lithuanian,
Kaniukai).
The Lithuanian partisans,
who operated under the aegis of the Central Partisan
Command of the Soviet Union, had information that there
was a German garrison in the village. After the fact,
it turned out that the Germans had abandoned the place.
In the battle that ensued, 38 villagers were killed,
including women and children. In independent Lithuania,
with a tendency to rewrite history after the disintegration
of the Soviet Union, they describe this attack as a "massacre," and a special prosecutor opened an investigation.
Margolis says she was not
even in Lithuania at the time of the attack, and was
active in another partisan unit in White Russia.
"I wrote a book
about the war, and in it I mentioned in a few lines that
I had heard from partisan friends about the attack," she says.
In the book she mentions another
partisan friend who was among the attackers, Fania Brantsovsky,
and another partisan, Sara Ginaite, both of whom are
also suspects and wanted for interrogation.
"That's Lithuanian
chutzpah," says Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israeli branch of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center. "To date, Lithuanian governments have not punished a single Lithuanian war criminal.
In spite of our considerable efforts and the large amount
of information we have given them, they handled three
cases with astonishing slowness. Not one of the three
served a single day in prison. On the other hand, they're
not ashamed to persecute and harass Lithuanian partisans
who fought the Nazis. What is common to all these cases
is that they're all Jews. Instead of punishing Lithuanian
criminals who collaborated with the Nazis and murdered
Jews, they're harassing the partisans, Jewish heroes."
Perhaps the height of chutzpah
was the attempt by Lithuania to investigate Dr. Yitzhak
Arad, a Holocaust historian and one-time partisan, a
former brigadier general and a chief education officer
in the Israel Defense Forces, and the chairman of the
board of Yad Vashem.
The Lithuanian claim against
Arad was that he served in a Soviet security services,
the NKVD, which engaged in murder and looting, and that
he was involved in the murder of innocent Lithuanians.
In the Lithuanian newspaper, Republika, they even published
an article two years ago entitled "The expert with blood on his hands."
Arad explained that the Lithuanian
claims against him were false. The Foreign Ministry and
Yad Vashem sharply protested the Lithuanian demand, and
refused to cooperate with the request.
However, there are some in
Israel who believe that neither the Foreign Ministry
nor Yad Vashem are acting with the determination expected
of them, and are demonstrating weakness. There are voices
who believe that Israel should lower its diplomatic contacts
with Lithuania if it continues harassing Jewish and Israeli
partisans. One of the critics is Zuroff.
"In the State of
Israel, they prefer to let Jewish organizations do the
dirty work and fight against the rewriting of history
in Lithuania," Zuroff said. "The State of Israel and those involved in the issue should have made it unequivocally
clear to the Lithuanian government that it is crossing
all the red lines."
Another harsh critic of Israeli
policy is historian Prof. Dov Levin, an expert on Lithuanian
Jewry. Levin chronicles in his books how more than 200,00
Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, mainly by the Lithuanian
collaborators who were eager to engage in murder without
the German Nazis having to convince them.
Levin, himself a partisan
in Lithuania and a member of the Yad Vashem council,
was opposed to the decision about 10 years ago by the
Foreign Ministry and Yad Vashem to cooperate with Lithuania
in the study of the history of World War II. His view
was not accepted, and a joint international committee
of Israeli, Lithuanian and other historians was established.
The committee, actually two
subcommittees, is studying the murder of the Jews in
the Holocaust in Lithuania as well as the murder of Lithuanians,
during the period of the Soviet occupation of the country
from 1940-1941 - as part of the infamous 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact - as well as the Soviet period from 1945 until independence
in 1991.
By doing so, the committee
is unfortunately helping the Lithuanians equate the two
historical developments. Levin believes that Yad Vashem
should have severed any connection with the Lithuanian
government and ended its activity.
"I told Yad Vashem,
'stop kissing up to the Lithuanians, it's kissing up
to evildoers,' " he emphasizes. Levin says that in a protest move, he recently decided to return
the decoration of honor he received in 1993 from the
Lithuanian president. He also decided not to visit Lithuania
again. "In the past I went there but now it disgusts me."
The Lithuanian ambassador
to Israel did not respond to Haaretz.
'Good diplomatic ties'
The deputy general director
of the Foreign Ministry, Pinhas Avivi, said that "the ministry takes the persecution of the Jewish partisans very seriously, and
we have made that clear to them by every means and at
every opportunity. But we do not believe that there is
a reason to destroy our relations with Lithuania and
to harm the good diplomatic ties between the two countries."
Yad Vashem responded: "To
say that we are 'soft toward the Lithuanians' in the
affair of Dr. Yitzhak Arad is groundless slander by someone
who perhaps is not familiar with the entire picture.
Regarding our participation in the committee, it is important
to emphasize that in light of the historical revisionism
that is evident in the investigation against Arad, we
consider it very important that teachers from Lithuania
come to Israel, to Yad Vashem, to study the subject of
the Holocaust and how to teach it in their classrooms."
haaretz.com
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