Chairman Alperovich, fellow Litvaks, ladies and gentlemen,
As
the grandson of Shmuel Leib Zar of Lingmiany and Beila Gifter Zar?"? of Shaduva, I am particularly pleased to be able to participate in this conference
of Litvaks, which for me is a family gathering. I am only sorry
that more of my fellow Litvaks are not here with us, but to be
perfectly honest, I am not surprised. Because one of the reasons
that more Litvaks, and particularly many from Israel, did not come
is because of the topic that I would like to address.
That topic is Lithuania’s
Holocaust past, a subject that hovers like an ominous black
cloud over the Jewish past in this country and continues to
dominate Lithuanian-Jewish relations. Twenty minutes are obviously
not enough to adequately describe the role played by Lithuanians
in the Holocaust, but perhaps I can leave you with several
images which illustrate the depth of the problem.
With much attention in recent years focused
on the Saugumas (Security Police) and the police battalions
because of the cases of Lileikis, Gimzauskas, Gecevicius and
others, the terrible cruelty of the Lithuanian population during
the initial days and weeks of the Nazi invasion are sometimes
forgotten. In at least forty communities, Jews were physically
attacked by their Lithuanian neighbors before the Nazis arrived,
and in many places the attacks were accompanied by indescribable
brutality. In Ushpil (Uzpalis), the murderer Capunas raped
the daughter of the local rabbi, Rabbi Lieb Kamarsz, in front
of him and then put the rabbi in prison for several days without
any food or water before having him executed. In Birz (Birzai)
the local shochet was murdered by the local townspeople who
tied his beard to a horse’s tail and sent the horse galloping through the streets until the shochet was
dead. In Popilyan (Papile) the local rabbi, Rabbi Avraham Hacohen
Levin was forced to eat pork soup before he was murdered.
In the large cities, the situation was
of course no different. Who can forget the horrifying testimony
of the German photographer who witnessed the brutal murder
of tens of Jews in the Lietukis garage in Kovno on June 25,
1941.
“Close to my quarters
I noticed a crowd of people in the forecourt of a petrol
station which was surrounded by a wall on three sides. The
way to the road was completely blocked by a wall of people.
I was confronted by the following scene: in the left corner
of the yard there was a group of men aged between thirty
and fifty. There must have been forty to fifty of them. They
were herded together and kept under guard by some civilians.
The civilians were armed with rifles and wore armbands, as
can be seen in the pictures I took. A young man – he must have been Lithuanian - …with rolled-up sleeves was armed with an iron crowbar. He dragged out one man
at a time from the group and struck him with the crowbar
with one or more blows on the back of his head. Within three-quarters
of an hour he had beaten to death the entire group of forty-five
to fifty people in this way. I took a series of photographs
of the victims…
“After the entire
group had been beaten to death, the young man put the crowbar
to one side, fetched an accordion and went and stood on the
mountain of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem.
I recognized the tune and was informed by bystanders that
this was the national anthem. The behavior of the civilians
present (women and children) was unbelievable. After each
man had been killed they began to clap and when the national
anthem started up they joined in singing and clapping. In
the front row there were women with small children in their
arms who stayed there right until the end of the whole proceedings.”
And on that “patriotic” note
who can ignore the words of Major Antanas Impulevicius who
reminded the men of the 12th Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalion
prior to setting out for their mission of mass murder in Belarus
that they should fulfill their mission “with resolute will, honesty, and honor. Always and everywhere show yourselves
worthy of the noble name of a Lithuanian soldier because you
are the representatives of the entire Lithuanian nation.”
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