The webpage of the influential and globally recognized US television channel CNN has posted a long document in which self-styled Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff blames Lithuania for not punishing Holocaust collaborators.
He said that the fact almost all Jews living in our country were murdered was due to help from local residents. European Parliament member Leonidas Donskis claimed that our country has experienced a setback because no Nazi war criminal has received punishment.

The authors of the article express surprise that Soviet activity receives greater attention in Lithuania. "Did their crimes reach the level of genocide?" they ask rhetorically.

Zuroff said Lithuania had lost the opportunity to reach nirvana [?] by failing to punish even one of its citizens for participation in the Holocaust. "Lithuania missed the greatest chance it had to throw off the burder of guilt. Now it will take 100 years before it can do that. The only successfull path is education, documents, studies and great pain," the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel said in the article.

In August this center is preparing to publish it's 2010 report on a global study of Nazi crimes and punishment for them. "Lithuania will get an F," Zuroff warned, an extremely poor score.

The piece, called The Holocaust in Lithuania: One Man's Struggle for Justice, appeared on the site Thursday evening on the front page of the website at the very top, so that everyone who visited the CNN site could see it. Over several hours more than 200 facebook social networking users recommended it for their friends to read.

The piece begins with Zuroff's family tragedy. His great-grandfather's brother was abducted on July 13, 1941, in Vilnius by "a gang of Lithuanians combing the streets looking for bearded Jews to arrest." The man was transported to Lukiskes prison and quickly killed. The same fate awaited his wife and two sons.

Seven years later in the Brooklyn neighborhood in New York, newborn Zuroff received his dead realtive's name and grew up asking his parents, who were also born in America, about the Holocaust. The answer that Jews marched in demonstrations, and tried to do everything they could but didn't know what was really going on and what to do about it, apparently didn't satisify him. "I wanted to try to understand how the Holocaust could have begun," he explained.

For that reason Zuroff dedicated his life to Nazi hunting and punishment. He earlier worked at the US Justice Department's office of special investigations which was responsible for prosecuting Nazi war crimes. He said that after the break-up of the USSR there were more names of people responsible for the Holocaust in Lithuania than anywhere else in Eastern Europe.

But the prosecution [or pursuit] of these people for war crimes caused disappointment, CNN quotes Zuroff as saying, because from the time Independence was restored Lithuania didn't punish "even one of its people
for Holocaust crimes."

Now, he says, our country is trying to rewrite the history of the Holocaust. "Nowhere [else] in the world are there governments trying [so hard] to cover up [their] role in the Holocaust. ... Their mission is to change the history of the Holocaust so they won't be accused," the Nazi hunter explained.

The article further recalls historical facts about events during the Second World War. During 5 months after the Nazi German invasion in 1941 the majority of Lithuania's 200,000-220,000 Jews allegedly had died--shot and left in the sand in large pits [same word can be ditches] and in mass graves together with thousands of Poles, psychiatric patients and other people. During the war 90%-96% of Jews living in our country were killed--allegedly the highest [percentage] in Europe.

"The question arises: why is this number so high? Here we come to a subtle and complex matter. One of the main reasons why so many Jews were killed
is the aid of local residents, of Lithuanians," Zuroff claimed. This is
allegedly confirmed by documents quoted in the [CNN] piece: the report by the SS officer Karl Jaeger of the Nazi murder unit operating in the Vilnius region and the diary of Polish-Lithuanian [sic] journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz.

DOnskis noted that even today "a rather large proportion of Lithuanian society tends to believe Jews are collectively responsible for massaces of civilians and deportations, as well as other brutalities that happened during the Soviet occupation."

In the last decade the abovementioned US Justice Department unit in consultation with Zuroff found dozens of Lithuanians living in the country whose war-time biographies raised suspicions. Nineteen of them were convicted of hiding their collaboration with the Nazis during the immigration and naturalization process. The US was unable to bring these people to justice for war crimes [sic], so the harshest punishment was revocation of citizenship.

Twelve of the convicted returned to Lithuania, but officials here allegedly had no desire to investigate the cases in their own country [?]--the returnees "were met with open arms." Only after several years
were three investigations completed, but in reality no person was punished. "The court processes were a farce. The accused didn't even have to show up at the trial. Prosecutors turned an extraordinarily important process into a joke," Zuroff explained.

Lithuanian ambassador Audrius Bruzga was quoted in the piece and said that what was lacking was not political will, but time: the accused simply died of old age before the [trial] process ended. Donskis noted the delay was purposeful: allegedly prosecutors were afraid of being called unpatriotic, so the process was drawn out in the belief that the accused would die or
would be unable to attend trial due to illness, or couldn't be sentenced due to illness. "The country in essence experienced a misfortune, because not even one (war) criminal was brought to jsutice," the European Parliament parliamentarian noted.

Croatia and Germany are named as countries that allegedly are exemplary in seeking out war criminals and pushing for appropriate judgment of their actions.

Several video recordings from Zuroff's visit to Lithuania are provided next [to the article on the CNN webpage]. The authors of the piece invite their readers also to visit virtually the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius. Recalling that the Soviets deported many Lithuanians, they add that this is what is given the most attention [at the Genocide museum]. " But did Soviet crimes reach the level of genocide?" they ask
rhetorically.

Donskis called this idea especially disturbing: "Historical and political evidence do not confirm the theory that the USSR exterminated Lithuanians on the basis of nationality or ethnicity." He said Lithuania will not be
able to come to terms with her history as long as the country's elite do not recognize that the provisional Government in 1941 cooperated with the Nazis and operated against their own citizens. "Unfortunately, the provisional Government in Lithuania is exalted to heaven," the MEP lamented.

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