Editor's
note: CNN's Gena Somra and Farhad Shadravan traveled
to Lithuania with Efraim Zuroff in November 2008, reporting
on his journey and producing the video in this piece.
(CNN) -- Efraim Zuroff's great-uncle was kidnapped in Vilnius, Lithuania, on
July 13, 1941, by a gang of Lithuanians "roaming the streets of the city looking for Jews with beards to arrest."
"He was taken to
Lukiskis Prison -- to this day the main jail in the city
-- and was murdered shortly thereafter," says Zuroff. So were his wife and two boys.
Born seven years later in
Brooklyn, New York, Zuroff was named for his great-uncle
and grew up questioning his American-born parents about
the Holocaust.
What were they doing? What
could they have done?
"And my parents
-- they said, 'Listen ... we went to demonstrations,
we tried to do what we could. But we didn't really know
what was going on, and it wasn't clear what we could
do. "
That answer did not satisfy Zuroff.
"I wanted to know what the average Jew sitting in his living room in Baltimore,
New York, Chicago, Miami, could have known by reading
the newspapers.
"I wanted to try
and understand how something like the Holocaust could
have happened."
Zuroff would go on to spend
his life hunting Nazis and ensuring their punishment.
Now the Israel director of The Simon Wiesenthal Center,
he has also worked for the U.S. Justice Department's
Office of Special Investigations, which is in charge
of Nazi war crimes prosecutions. Since the fall of the
Soviet Union, more names of alleged Holocaust criminals
have turned up from Lithuania than from anywhere else
in Eastern Europe, says Zuroff.
But prosecuting those criminals
for war crimes has been a disappointment, says Zuroff,
because since its independence in 1991, Lithuania has
failed to punish a single one of its own Holocaust war
criminals.
Now, says Zuroff, Lithuania
is trying to rewrite Holocaust history. "Nowhere in the world," he says, "has a government gone to such lengths to obscure their role in the Holocaust.
... Their mission is to change the history of the Holocaust
to make themselves blameless."
Lithuania and the Nazis
Within five months of Nazi
Germany's invasion in the summer of 1941, most of Lithuania's
200,000 to 220,000 Jews were dead -- shot and left in
massive sand pits and mass graves along with thousands
of ethnic Poles, the mentally ill and others. By the
end of the war, the percentage of Jews killed in Lithuania
-- 90 to 96 percent -- was as high or higher than anywhere
else in Europe.
"And the question is, 'Why were the numbers so high?' And here we come to a subject
that is very, very delicate and difficult," says Zuroff. "One of the main reasons so many Jews were killed here is because of the help
of the local population -- of the Lithuanians."
The pace of the mass murder of Lithuania's Jews -- and the active participation
of the local population -- are meticulously recorded
in two of the most infamous documents of Holocaust history.
The Jaeger Report, written
by Karl Jaeger, the SS commander of a Nazi killing unit
that operated around Vilnius, Lithuania, is a matter-of-fact
account of those killed each day under his command.
September 1, 1941, a typical
entry, lists those killed for the day as: "1,404 Jewish children, 1,763 Jews, 1,812 Jewesses, 109 mentally sick people,
one German woman who was married to a Jew, and one Russian
woman."
In the report, Jaeger notes
the "essential" help of local Lithuanians and says 4,000 Jews were "liquidated by pogroms and executions," exclusively by Lithuanian partisans. The final count of those murdered starting
in the summer of 1941 and ending in November of that
year is 133,346 -- the vast majority of them Jews.
Read Jaeger Report
"Ponary Diary,
1941-1943: A Bystander's Account of a Mass Murder," was written by Polish-Lithuanian journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz, who was living
within earshot of the biggest killing field in Lithuania,
the sand pits of the Ponary Forest.
It is a litany of unending
cruelty -- mostly of Lithuanians killing Lithuanian Jews.
Entries from April 5, 1943, describe the murder of about
2,500 Jews who arrive in 48 train freight cars:
"A woman with a
child in her arms and with two small girls clinging to
her dress: A Lithuanian begins to beat them mercilessly
with a club. A Jew without a jacket throws himself on
the Lithuanian to defend the woman being beaten. A shot
is fired -- he falls, practically at the feet of his
Jewess. A second Lithuanian seizes the woman's child
and throws him into the pit; the Jewish woman, like a
madwoman, runs to the pit, followed by her two little
children. Three shots are fired."
The Nazis arrived after a year of occupation by the Soviet Union that was so
brutal that many Lithuanians welcomed the Nazis when
they arrived in June 1941.
Nazi propaganda painted local Jews as communists in league with the Soviets,
stoking existing local anti-Semitism, and prompting the
provisional government in Lithuania, and thousands of
Lithuanians, to help facilitate the Nazi policy of liquidating
the local Jewish population, according to Yale Historian
Timothy Snyder, who has written extensively about the
region.
In reality, Jews -- making
up much of the "bourgeois" merchants and intellectuals that the Soviets sought to "re-educate" -- bore as much or more Soviet brutality as any, says Snyder.
And yet, even today, says
Leonidas Donskis, a Lithuanian MP in the European Parliament, "quite a large segment of Lithuanian society is still inclined to consider Jews
as collectively responsible for the mass killings and
deportations of civilians, as well as for other atrocities
committed during the Soviet occupation."
This myth is "just
the adoption of the disgraceful Nazi rhetoric concerning
the Jew and communism ... which is one of the cornerstones
of [Nazi propaganda chief Joseph] Goebels propaganda," says Donskis.
The prosecutions
In the 1990s, soon after Lithuania
regained its independence, the U.S. Justice Department's
Office of Special Investigations, consulting with Zuroff,
discovered dozens of Lithuanians with suspicious wartime
backgrounds living in the United States.
Nineteen were successfully
prosecuted for concealing their wartime collaboration
with the Nazis during the American immigration and naturalization
process. Since the United States had no jurisdiction
to prosecute them for war crimes, it took the maximum
legal action it could -- stripping them of their citizenship.
Twelve ended up in back in Lithuania, each with an extensive
case file detailing the evidence gathered by OSI.
But the Lithuanian prosecutor's
office showed no inclination to pursue the cases and
Lithuania, for the most part, says Zuroff, "welcomed them back with open arms."
Only after several years of
delays and significant international pressure, says Zuroff,
were three of the cases prosecuted. In the end, no one
was ever punished.
"The trials were
a farce," says Zuroff. "The defendants were never even forced to appear at the trials." The prosecutor "turned an incredibly important and highly significant process into a joke."
Audrius Bruzga, Lithuanian ambassador to the United States, says Lithuania facilitated
the trials to the extent that it could. The problem was
not a lack of political will, he says, but a lack of
time, because of the age of the defendants.
"People simply died during the process," he says, "and the others perhaps were not found fit to stand trial. ... It takes a lot
of time to put a case on."
But others say the delays
were purposeful. The prosecutor's office was afraid of
being called unpatriotic, says Donskis, so it dragged
out the process in the hopes that the suspects would
die or become old and sick enough to be declared unfit
to stand trial or serve time.
"Basically the
country failed because not a single [war] criminal was
brought to justice. It's as simple as that," says Donskis.
Contrast Lithuania's record
with that of Croatia, which, as a newly minted nation,
brought Dinko Sakic to trial in 1998 for crimes committed
during World War II while commander of the Jasenovac
concentration camp.
After Zuroff tracked him down,
Sakic was extradited from Argentina and convicted by
a Croatian court for taking part in the murder and torture
of thousands of Jews, Serbs, Gypsies and anti-fascist
Croats. The court sentenced him to 20 years in prison,
the harshest penalty under Croatian law at the time.
"The Sakic case
was really a watershed event in the history of Croatia
and something that really changed the tenor of the public
discussion about the Holocaust and was a wake-up call
for Croatian society," says Zuroff.
"In a Croatian
courtroom, with a Croatian flag, with a Croatian judge
in Croatian languages, and many witnesses -- Croatians
told the truth" about Holocaust crimes by Croatians.
"And it was broadcast
all over the country in radio, TV, print, day in and
day out."
For Zuroff, the Sakic case is a success not because it put an old war criminal
in jail -- though that was necessary -- but because it
helped ensure an honest reckoning of Croatia's past.
Germany has also gone to great lengths to face its ugly past.
"They, more than
any country," Zuroff says, "have tried to make atonement for the Holocaust and have paid billions of dollars
in reparations -- although it's not only the issue of
money but it's also the issue of education against extremism,
xenophobia, the banning of Nazi symbols. ... You can't
say Germany is not making an honest effort to face its
past."
But you can say it, says Zuroff,
about Lithuania.
The Museum of Genocide Victims
The state-funded Museum of
Genocide Victims in Vilnius, Lithuania, is an impressive
structure. In a country of relatively humble means, it
stands out for its size. Its stated objective is to "collect, keep and present historic documents about forms of physical and spiritual
genocide against the Lithuanian people."
But the story of the more
than 200,000 Jews killed in Lithuania by the Nazis and
their local collaborators is not part of the museum.
Instead, the museum memorializes
Lithuanian victims of Soviet occupation during World
War II.
As one Lithuanian put it, "We
have to learn our own history, before we learn their
[the Jews] history," implying the murdered Jews were not Lithuanians -- but they were.
Jews have been a constant
and integral part of Lithuania for hundreds of years.
Before the war, the city of Vilnius was known as the "Jerusalem of Lithuania." Jews made up more than a third of the city and contributed to its intellectual
and creative elite and to its complex, vibrant, social
fabric.
The question of excluding Jews then becomes "a question of whether you're embracing your own citizens or not," says Snyder.
Donskis agrees. "Instead of accepting the Holocaust as the tragedy of Lithuania, many people are
still inclined to regard the Holocaust to have been something
external." Instead, the nation focuses on the the horror of the Soviet occupations of Lithuania.
The crimes of the Soviets
in Eastern Europe and in Lithuania in particular are
not as well known in the West as they should be, says
Snyder.
In the first occupation, from
the summer of 1940 to the summer of 1941, the Soviets
deported, jailed and murdered anyone deemed a threat
-- ethnic Lithuanians as well as Poles and Jews.
Soviet brutality continued
when the Red Army re-conquered Lithuania in 1944 and
the almost 50 years of Soviet rule that followed were
brutal by any standard.
But did Soviet crimes amount
to genocide, as the name of the museum suggests?
Donskis calls the idea "profoundly
embarrassing."
"Historical and
political evidence doesn't support the theory that the
Soviet Union exterminated Lithuanians on national or
ethnic grounds."
Lithuanians who chose the
Soviet regime "were welcome in the Red Army. They were welcome among Soviet bureaucrats. They
had splendid careers. And we know that the Lithuanian
Communist Party was led by [non-Jewish] Lithuanians.
That's why the concept of genocide is simply not applicable
here."
Ambassador Bruzga is more
circumspect. "We do not equate one pain to another pain, one loss to another loss. But we would
like to take a broader, a holistic view on what happened
at that time in Lithuania -- and how it could happen
that those crimes were committed and people suffered
... no matter who they were -- what nationality, what
religion."
Asked whether Jewish Lithuanians,
who so obviously suffered a genocide, should be included
in Lithuania's Museum of Genocide Victims, Bruzga says, "It should be perhaps looked into ... I don't see why not," but then adds, "It could be one museum, it could be two or three museums." The Holocaust in Lithuania, says Bruzga, has to be considered in the context
of "other developments and crimes that surround it."
Still, Bruzga says huge questions
about the Holocaust in Lithuania remain:
"Why were there
a number of Lithuanians who took part, some of them willingly,
in the murder of Jews who were citizens of their own
country -- the same people living in the same land and
actually in the same neighborhood? ... What unleashed
that kind of monstrosity?"
"Before we take
many skeletons out of the closet, we will not get a catharsis.
And perhaps we will not be a peace with our past and
ourselves," says Bruzga.
Donskis is more specific:
"It will be impossible
for Lithuania to come to terms with its history ... until
the country's elite admits that the provisional government
of Lithuania in 1941 collaborated with the Nazis and
acted against Lithuanian citizens. Unfortunately, the
provisional government ... is praised up to the skies
in Lithuania."
"It is a disgrace."
For Zuroff, Lithuania missed
its best opportunity for catharsis by failing to punish
even one of its own citizens for Holocaust crimes.
"The Lithuanians
squandered the best chance they had to get that burden
of guilt off of them. And now it's going to take them
100 years to get rid of it. The only way they will succeed
is through education, documentation, research -- and
a lot of pain."
In August, the Wiesenthal
Center will release its 2010 Annual Report on the Worldwide
Investigation and Prosecution of Nazi War Criminals.
Lithuania, Zuroff says, will
receive an F.
edition.cnn.com
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