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I
became involved with the Jewish Museum Holocaust Exhibition
in Lithuania, known as the “Green House,” when I read
an article by Rachel Margolis, a veteran Jewish partisan,
about the library that was housed in the wartime ghetto
in Vilne
As Rokhl Kafrissen described in her column, “Vilne, Whispering,” in the September-October
issue of Jewish Currents, the library harbored a weapons
cache and served as a base for the Jewish partisan movement.
At the same time, it was an oasis of peace in the ghetto,
a place somehow apart, where for a time people could
escape the daily roster of starvation, slave labor and
death
I wrote a letter to Rachel
Margolis and sent it to her in Israel, where she now
lives. To my surprise, she wrote back almost immediately.
Eventually, I met her at the museum itself, where she
used to come every summer to lead tours. She showed me
exhibits I had already seen but not understood. Every
photo took on new dimensions under her guidance; every
item told a story, often personal for her as well as
part of the shared history of Lithuanian Jews.
Perhaps most memorably, she
showed me a small collection of documents about “The
Partisan Hymn” (“Zog Nit Keynmol”), by Hirsh Glik. He
had flagged her down one winter day in the ghetto, she
said, to recite the poem to her; people stood looking
at these two kids reciting poetry in the freezing cold.
As he said the lines, she began to sense a rhythm, which
turned into a melody that she knew from some Russian
film. They took it to a meeting of the FPO (United Partisan
Organization), where it was adopted as an anthem.
When Rachel told me this story,
I didn’t know how famous “The Partisan Hymn” is — for
many Jews, an anthem and a vow. For me it was only a
track on a CD, until she told me about its significance.
I’m afraid it means even less to most Lithuanians, who
have never even heard of it.
Something is seriously wrong
in Lithuania when it comes to Holocaust education and
historical sensibility. This becomes most obvious on
Fridays and weekends in the park that fronts the Green
House — which is hidden in an alley, around a curve,
up a hill behind apartment houses, with only a small
blue-and-white sign measuring less than a foot across
and six inches high. Local skinheads, mostly from the
apartment buildings around the museum, gather in that
park, which is dedicated, ironically enough, to Chiune
Sugihara, the Japanese consul who rescued thousands of
Jews in Kaunas.
The skinheads wear clothes
with logos like “HH,” code for “Heil Hitler.” Other hangers-on
sometimes carry axes or other weapons openly. They drink
beer and sometimes leave swastika graffiti along with
their bottles and cans. Last winter, they traced out
a giant swastika, along with some anti-Russian graffiti,
in the snow. In order to get to the Green House, a visitor
has to either go through this park or go around it.
On March 11th, 2008 — Lithuanian Independence Day (February 16th was the traditional
day in pre-World War II Lithuania) — about two hundred
skinheads and their friends marched from the Vilnius
Cathedral up Gedimino Prospect, the main street in town,
waving swastikas, neo-Nazi symbols, and Lithuanian and
Latvian flags and chanting “Juden raus!” as well as calls
to kill Jews and expel Russians. Police stood by and
watched. The march was reported in the media, and some
footage is available on YouTube, which is where I recognized
the ‘Sugihara’ skinheads among them. A number of other
participants were members of the Lithuanian armed forces.
The lack of Holocaust education means that many Lithuanians born after World
War II find it ever easier to deny the facts of history.
In public life, this means that Jewish issues often get
biased treatment in the local and national media. Rarely
is a ‘Jewish’ story presented from a detached perspective.
When controversy arose, for example, over a construction
project on parts of the former Jewish cemetery in Vilnius,
the news was presented in a charged tone that played
up conflicts within the Jewish community and downplayed
claims that the construction was, in fact, disturbing
Jewish graves. When the issue became somewhat internationalized
(several U.S. Congressional representatives took note),
the Lithuanian press reported that someone inside the
government had stabbed Lithuania in the back and doctored
data to make it appear that the Jewish cemetery had extended
into the construction site. When archaeologists actually
discovered human remains there, the media reported that
the Jewish community had ordered a halt to the dig “they themselves” had demanded. Every time a ‘Jewish’ story
appears — whether it has to do with property restitution
(there has been none to date), war-crimes trials, the
restoring of Lithuanian citizenship to Jews, or anything
else concerning the Holocaust, many Lithuanian journalists
get defensive or go on the offensive.
The ‘double genocide’ theory
is theofficial party line. President Valdas Adamkus (who
was a young anti-Soviet fighter who fled with his family
to Germany in 1944) tried to put the specter of World
War II atrocities to rest by creating a panel to study
“the crimes of the Nazi and Soviet occupational regimes”
in Lithuania. Initial criticism of this approach was
overcome when the commission attracted internationally
renowned figures, including Yitzhak Arad, a Holocaust
survivor who was the first director of Yad Vashem in
Israel. For several years, the panel turned out reports
and books in English and Lithuanian, sometimes with important
historical information.
Then Arad himself became the
target of an investigation by Lithuanian prosecutors
for alleged war crimes committed against Lithuanian civilians
in World War II. By following its ‘double genocide’ theory
to its logical conclusion — that Jews also committed
genocide against Lithuanians, so everyone is ‘even’ —
Lithuania undermined the credibility of its international
commission. Arad withdrew and said he wouldn’t be coming
back to Lithuania to take part in a “circus.” Israeli
prosecutors refused the request of Lithuanian prosecutors
to interrogate him. Various commentators, including neo-Nazis
and anti-Semites, had a field day posting to websites
such as Ha’aretz and Delfi.Lt to decry the double standard
of refusing to prosecute Jewish ‘war criminals.’
Claims that Jews committed
genocide against Lithuanians had begun in June, 1941,
when pro-Nazi Lithuanians spread rumors that Jews had
deported Lithuanians to the Soviet Union, that Jewish
snipers had fired on Lithuanian civilians, and that Jews
had drawn up lists of Lithuanians for death squads to
execute. This adaptation of the Nazi myth that Jews had
“stabbed the nation in the back” helped to assuage the
Lithuanian sense of inferiority, resulting from their
occupation by Poland for twenty years before Stalin invaded
in 1940, and their holding out for only eight hours before
handing the Memel territory back to Hitler’s Germany.
Rightwing Lithuanians began
to blame the Jews for the Soviet invasion. “Jew” meant
“Communist,” “Communist” meant “Jew,” they were “one
gang of bastards,” according to Lithuanian Activist Front
propaganda distributed before, during and after the German
invasion. When even the Nazis expressed shock at the
barbarity Lithuanians used in massacring Jews at the
Lietukis garage in Kaunas (June 27th, 1941), it was explained
that some of the perpetrators had lost family members
during the Soviet deportations. When the tide of war
turned and Germany pulled back from Stalingrad, Germans
in Vilnius and Kaunas blamed the Jews both for the defeat
and for starting World War II. The Germans — and Lithuanians
— were just the victims of some unspecified Jewish influence
emanating from behind barbed wire.
Almost all of the claims made by apologists for the Holocaust in Lithuania have
been roundly refuted. Jews did not serve in greater percentages
than Lithuanians in the repressive organs of the Soviet
authority. Jews did not draw up death lists of their
Lithuanian neighbors. Jews suffered more from the Soviet
deportations and faced many more restrictions on language
and religion than Lithuanians did. A greater percentage
of Jewish than Lithuanian businesses were nationalized
When faced with these facts, however, true believers in the ‘double genocide’
theory have plunged deeper into conspiratorial thinking
— and Lithuanian prosecutors have expanded their investigations.
Unable to question Yitzhak Arad, Lithuanian prosecutors
decided to question Fania Brantsovsky, the octogenarian
Vilna ghetto survivor and partisan who still serves as
librarian for the Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University,
as well as Rachel Margolis in Israel and another former
Jewish partisan, Sara Ginaite-Rubinson, in Canada. [Ginaite-Rubinson
wrote about the investigation, which was finally suspended
in late August, in the September-October issue of Jewish
Currents. See “Follow-Up” on page 7 of this issue. —
Editor]
The investigation centered
around the supposed massacre of civilians in a small
village, Koniuchi, near the Rudniki forest, which was
controlled by Soviet partisans late in the war. Here’s
what seems like a probable scenario: Jewish and Soviet
partisans regularly commandeered food and supplies from
local villages. Nazi efforts to contain the partisans
in Rudniki consisted mainly of arming villagers and local
police as proxy fighters. Koniuchi was hostile to Soviet
requisitioning, and contained
Nazi sympathizers who organized ambushes of Soviet partisans
— who organized a counterattack and put torch to the
village by firing incendiary ammunition into wooden buildings.
The pro-Nazi police officers made a last stand and fired
back. Around thirty-five villagers, mainly men but also
women and children, died in the battle. To date there
is no reason to believe any of the people sought by Lithuanian
prosecutors were present during this violence.
Was the incident worth a criminal
investigation in 2008? In nearby Eyshishok, some thirty-five
hundred Jewish civilians were murdered by Nazi killing
squads and Lithuanian collaborators over the course of
two September days in 1941 — and there has been no criminal
investigation. Since independence, in fact, Lithuanian
authorities have intentionally dragged their feet in
confronting the Lithuanian role in the Holocaust and
have delayed trials of known Lithuanian war criminals
deported from the U.S. or stripped of U.S. citizenship.
Since independence, Lithuania has prosecuted only three
Lithuanian Nazis — and spared them imprisonment.
Yet suddenly it seemed to
prosecutors to be a good idea to investigate the Koniuchi
incident. Why was this case more important than all the
cases in which Jews were worked to death building the
Vilnius-Kaunas highway, railways and airports in Vilnius
and Kaunas; in which Jews were murdered, their property
stolen by locals, police, municipalities and Germans;
in which Jewish corpses were raided for their gold teeth;
in which the Jews of Slobodka were literally butchered,
carved up, and beheaded by Lithuanians?
Something is terribly wrong
in Lithuania when elderly Holocaust survivors, who escaped
from Lithuanian ghettos and, despite hunger, cold and
incredible hardship, waged war on the Nazi monster, become
targets for legal harassment. And harassment it is. In
Lithuania, prosecutors don’t leave the office to investigate;
they issue a summons for you to come to them or face
arrest. They issue as many as they like, as often as
they like. Investigations drag on for years, during which
time prosecutors have the power to control your life,
seize your passport, forbid discussion and take you into
custody. Most Holocaust survivors really don’t have all
that much time left on earth, barring new breakthroughs
in human longevity.
One interesting theory about
what’sgoing on in Lithuania suggests that even educated
people have only recently learned enough English to begin
browsing Holocaust memoirs in that language, and so have
had a chance to learn something of their own history.
Such a process of discovery hasn’t fundamentally changed
the discourse about the Holocaust, however — to the contrary,
their English literacy allows anti-Semites to go wild
with Holocaust denial, as they discover an entire corpus
of anti-Jewish materials in English, as well as logos
from racist websites that have been creeping into Lithuanian
graffiti for a few years now, alongside the classic “Juden
raus!”
In addition, the Baltic states
have seen something of a pagan revival, especially among
youth, for a few years, which often goes hand-in-hand
with a folk nationalism involving Aryan ideology. Swastikas,
of course, are a pagan symbol, and so fascist imagery
and ideology are bridging youth subcultures — though
it’s not fair to say fascists are the majority in any
subculture but their own.
Swastikas were part of the
graffiti with which vandals defaced the Jewish Community
of Lithuania building in Vilnius in August, during the
Tisha B’Av observance. Other elements included a Star
of David at the end of a hangman’s noose and gallows,
“Juden raus!” and a somewhat mangled rendition of the
old symbol of Lithuanian statehood, the Post of Gediminas.
The vandalism covered the entire front of the building
along the street.
Within two days, hundreds
of comments by newspaper readers indulged in two conspiracy
theories about the event: that the Jews did it to themselves,
or that the Russians did it to foment ethnic strife.
The arguments for the first thesis were that Jews in
Lithuania needed to play the victim to win public sympathy
over recent bad press. Besides, no Lithuanian would’ve
mangled the symbol of Gediminas so badly! The arguments
for the second theory revolved around the fact that Lithuania
had supported Georgian claims to South Ossetia — hence,
Russian revenge.
Comments about the vandalism
revealed that the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism is alive and
well in Lithuania. The usual charges were reiterated:
that Jews had deported Lithuanians to Siberia and had
death lists of Lithuanian victims ready before the Bolsheviks
took power. Some of the more ingenious anti-Semites called
for charges and punishments to be levied against the
Lithuanian Jewish Community Center itself for displaying
swastikas along the length of its building, because Lithuania
recently made illegal the display of the swastika in
public!
The defaced building is located
on Pylimo Street. The old headquarters of the Jewish
museum are located right next to it. The Green House
and the Sugihara statue in the municipal square are only
a stone’s throw away. If I were a Lithuanian investigator,
rather than organizing a counter-intelligence operation
to catch the Russian spooks red-handed, or setting up
cameras to catch the wily Jews in the act of damaging
Jewish property, I would take the easy way out and decide
to investigate known local anti-Semites who congregate
nearby.
With the graffiti incident
still fresh,Lithuanians received another shock to their
preferred version of history when the respected London-based
publication, The Economist, ran a story that labeled
the prosecution of Jewish anti-Nazi partisans as an attempt
to cover up Lithuanian complicity in the Holocaust. Lithuanian
state television reported this as a top story, and excerpts
were quickly translated for Internet publication at the
delfi.lt site, infamous hangout for Lithuanian anti-Semites.
The Economist website also provided the ability to comment,
and people lost no time in explaining to the world how
their state was being defamed by the Jewish global financial/media
conspiracy.
Perhaps, in the end, a little
‘conspiring’ is what is needed to protect Lithuanian
Jews and force Lithuania to face up to its World War
II history. In 2009, for example, Vilnius is to share
with Linz, Austria, the distinction of being named the
cultural capital of the European Union. Unfortunately,
one culture will probably be missing from the festivities
— that of the Litvaks, the Lithuanian Jews. Cancelling
the designation for Vilnius would send a strong message
to the Lithuanian government and public about post-World
War II European values.
Similarly, the Guggenheim
Museum announced a joint project worth millions with
the Lithuanian government to create a major art museum
in Lithuania. But does Lithuania have a sufficiently
developed museum culture, given that the so-called “Genocide”
museum mentions Jewish victims once or twice in parentheses
while the Green House is hidden from tourists? Again,
cancelling the deal would send a strong message about
values.
The idea of a tourism boycott
of Lithuania has also frequently cropped up in respect
to Holocaust denial. Over the last decade, increasing
numbers of Israeli tourists have begun to visit the country,
which has basically rescued the failing economy of the
southeastern resort town of Druskininkai, once known
throughout the Soviet Union for its spas. Since the tourism
sector in Lithuania has been a major area of growth,
a concerted tourism boycott of the country would send
a very strong signal about the values held by the modern
travelling public.
Unfortunately, the walk-softly
approach hasn’t worked so far. Israel’s Yad Vashem has
made a priority of teaching Lithuanian teachers how to
teach the Holocaust in their classrooms, but there is
little evidence that teaching the Holocaust is important
for more than a handful of Lithuanian teachers. Western
embassies in Vilnius have used various approaches in
trying to get the Lithuanian state to take these issues
seriously, but their reluctance to rock the boat and
disturb the early years of a fragile democracy has made
their efforts ineffectual.
Meanwhile, various citizenship
laws enacted in recent years have put Jews at a disadvantage
in obtaining dual citizenship, while property restitution
has been delayed through various tactics, including the
requirement that current citizens of Lithuania be compensated
first. When foreign voices have pointed out that profit
was a major inducement for some Lithuanians to murder
their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust, the Lithuanian
press and public have tended to deny Lithuanian involvement
and liability, even though major Holocaust sources and
documents in the Lithuanian state archives prove that
volunteer murderers, local police and local populations
were fully engaged in stealing the assets of their victims,
so much so that the German authorities had to issue special
orders on how to deal with the theft of what they saw
as Reich property.
The internal dialogue has
devolved into noise. The most effective pressure would
be deprivation of funding for prestige projects, combined
with an increase in funding for Holocaust education in
public schools, in higher education, and perhaps even
in the military and police academies. The logical source
of this negative and positive pressure would be European
Union institutions, Western non-profits and foundations,
and the general public in countries where the Holocaust
is not kept secret.
jewishcurrents.org
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