On a recent visit to Vilnius, the US spokeswoman on anti-Semitism failed to address
Lithuania’s attempt to hide its active complicity in the Shoah.
Over the past year, I have written articles in The Jerusalem Post concerning
the disturbing problem of Holocaust distortion in Eastern Europe,
and especially its most dangerous dimension – an insidious campaign
to obtain official recognition in European bodies that the crimes
of communism are equivalent to those of the Nazis
While this battle has hereto been primarily fought in Europe, it now appears
that the Americans, whose assistance is critical in combating these
attacks on the accepted Holocaust narrative, have apparently been
duped by the Lithuanians, who are spending millions of euros to hide
their active complicity in Shoah crimes and their failure to prosecute
Holocaust perpetrators. Thus, if recent press reports out of Vilnius
are to be believed (and in this case there is no reason to doubt
them), the US government’s spokeswoman on anti-Semitism failed to
address the issue in her visit last week to Lithuania.
On the contrary, in her comments, according to a Baltic
News Service report, special US envoy Hannah Rosenthal, who heads
the grandly-named Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, not
only declared that Lithuania had “taken very proactive steps in dealing
with anti-Semitism,” but also promised the Lithuanians 64,000 euros
“to develop Holocaust education,” without a word against the campaign
to equate communist and Nazi crimes.
ANYONE ACQUAINTED with the manner in which the largest
Baltic republic has dealt with its particularly bloody Holocaust
past and an entire range of practical Holocaust-related issues, as
well as with local anti-Semitism, would be shocked by these pronouncements,
and especially by the elements missing from Rosenthal’s declarations.
For starters, there was no mention of last month’s
neo-fascist march in the center of Vilnius, which was supported by
members of the Seimas (Lithuanian parliament) from the ruling party
and which only drew faint public criticism from any quarter after
foreign critics raised the issue. Nor has there been any public outcry
following the vandalization of synagogues (last week in Sveksna)
and the like. The Lithuanian government actually excels in pronouncements
regarding anti-Semitism, but rarely acts in a manner which sends
an unequivocal message against it.
Nowhere is this gap more telling than in the government’s
attitude toward the role of Lithuanians in Holocaust crimes. During
World War II, 212,000 of the 220,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania
were murdered – the highest victim rate in Europe. A key factor was
the widespread participation of volunteer local Nazi collaborators
– a phenomenon which encompassed all strata of Lithuanian society
from the clergy and intellectuals to its worst elements.
During the Soviet occupation, many local perpetrators
were prosecuted and punished, but the subject of the Jews’ fate was
manipulated by the communists for their own propaganda, and it was
only when Lithuania regained independence in 1991 that there was
finally an opportunity for the Lithuanian people to honestly deal
with the role of their nationals in Holocaust crimes. Unfortunately,
this critical opportunity has been squandered by the Lithuanians,
who seem to get greater and greater rewards the more they abuse the
historical record.
IN PRACTICAL terms, we can begin with the fact that
not a single Lithuanian Nazi war criminal has been punished since
independence. What makes this particularly infuriating is that there
was no shortage of available suspects. Thus 14 such individuals who
escaped after the war to the US were deported back to Lithuania for
concealing their collaboration during the immigration and naturalization
process, among them Aleksandras Lileikis and Kazys Gimzauskas, the
commander and deputy commander of the dreaded Saugumas (Lithuanian
security police) in the Vilnius district, who returned in reasonable
health, but were only indicted after they were medically unfit to
stand trial.
A third Saugumas operative, Algimantas Dailide, was
actually sentenced to prison, but the judges refused to implement
his sentence. Instead, local prosecutors went after totally innocent
Jewish anti-Nazi partisans on trumped up charges of war crimes to
create a false symmetry between ostensible World War II crimes by
Jews and Holocaust atrocities by Lithuanians.
Even worse, the Lithuanians are leading the campaign
to equate communist and Holocaust crimes in the European Union and
throughout the world in an effort to rewrite history and help rid
themselves of the unpleasant label of “Holocaust perpetrators,” which
can then be replaced by “victims of communism,” with all the concomitant
privileges and perks. In this respect, the subject of the Holocaust
is being purposely misused to pursue an agenda which abuses its history
and dishonors its victims.
Under these circumstances, one would expect that the
US, a country with a highly developed Holocaust consciousness and
probably the best Shoah museum outside Israel, would know better
than to reward the country which has done so much to distort Holocaust
history and so little to punish its perpetrators.
What better occasion than Rosenthal’s visit to Vilnius
to finally make clear that there should be no tolerance for false
historical symmetries between Nazism and communism, and that the
time had come for Vilnius to teach the truth and internalize its
lessons.
Instead of donating funds to a government which is
the chief culprit in a campaign of disinformation, the Americans
should be demanding that pupils in Lithuanian schools finally be
taught the whole truth about their history during World War II, as
difficult and as painful as that may be.
jpost.com
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