Can Lithuania Face Its Holocaust Past?
Reflections of a Concerned Litvak

Lecture by Dr. Efraim Zuroff at the Conference on “Litvakes In The World” –
The First World Litvak Congress

Tuesday, August 28, 2001 / 9 Elul 5701
Vilna, Hotel Villon, 12:45

 

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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