by Markas Zingeris

In the last few days the restored memorial plaque was quietly replaced on the outer wall of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences dedicated to Jonas Noreika. The mayor of Vilnius kept his promise. It’s not so simple, however, to piece back together the shards of memory about our complex past. I will admit that Noreika both repulses me and attracts me. Like a riddle which will never be solved. Such a mess has arisen over him between historians and journalists that it’s spilled over into the largest newspapers in the world (and also, by the way, as grist in the mill of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine; in March the Eurasia Daily reported on Stanislovas Tomas’s attach with a sledgehammer, claiming the alleged “law professor” lost his patience because a war criminal was being worshiped and grabbed a hammer). And I’m also left with a conflicted impression from that discussion between the blind and the deaf which in Lithuania is called a discussion by historians of our most painful issues of the past.

Full story in Lithuanian here.