by Sergejus Kanovičius
Photo by Paulius Peleckis/BFL © 2019 Baltijos fotografijos linija

Ghettos are good. Herding people into them was an attempt to save the Jews. Honoring the herders is nothing special, just good etiquette. As is the division of property of the murdered.

The installation of plaques commemorating false heroes is a classic of the rule of law. The silence of almost all political leaders is a sign that all of this is to be tolerated and acceptable. Vilnius is decorated with hundreds of portraits of those who wished the Jews well in the ghettos, posters proclaiming Vilnius shouldn’t be the Jerusalem of the North, those wearing white armbands marching from the President’s Office towards the erection of the plaque guarded by the police, Holocaust denial and the revision of history on the lips of politicians and staff from the Genocide Center. Or maybe someone wants a t-shirt bearing pictures of these doers of good to the Jews? They’re not expensive. Patriotism is cheap, just thirty euros apiece. A swastika with flowers in front of the Lithuanian Jewish Community going extinct is just the logical continuation of this.

Everything, acts of good and evil, require favorable circumstances. Those flowers on that swastika are just flowers. They do not differ from those who silently tolerate this entire context, nor from those actively creating it. The dead cannot vote. But this silence regarding the living is telling.

Of course the girl is guilty if she wears a short skirt and gets raped. After all, everyone told her it was dangerous to walk around in a short skirt, but she didn’t listen. The Jews themselves are drawing the swastikas because they themselves entered the ghettos, they themselves fellinto the pits, they are themselves guilty that there were these heroic figures who demanded reports on whether all of them had been rounded up in the Žagarė ghetto, or whether there was still some Jew somewhere who hadn’t yet been rescued by the blessing of the ghetto.

“Herr Wolfgang, I report that yesterday we sold property recovered from the Jews rescued in the pits for so many and so many reichmarks. Some cobbler’s shoe forms remain unsold.” Even if the Jews of Vilnius were resurrected, they’d look around and emigrate again. To Ponar. Why bother here?

Ah, but really, we must not forget the gift of September 23 of speech regained: to stand at a microphone in Ponar and express government regret. To keep things in their correct proportions.