The following paean to modern sophisticated Lithuanian Holocaust distortion appeared on the webpage of Lithuanian Public Radio and Television, which disavowed any responsibility for its content. The author’s contention tautininkas doesn’t mean the same thing as nationalist is ahistorical, the tautininkai and the ateitininkai were pre-WW II Lithuanian political movements/parties whose titles were directly translated from nationalists and futurists, respectively.
International Holocaust Day and Historical Memory
by Valdas Rakutis, Conservative MP
The world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day January 27. This observance is especially important to Lithuania where the dimensions of the Holocaust as a percentage were among the largest throughout Europe. It is calculated that over several years from 1941 to 1944 about 96 percent of Lithuanian Jews were murdered (approximately 190,000 people).
Barely nine thousand Jews remained in Lithuania after the war. The Holocaust represents the largest number of victims over the shortest period in Lithuanian history. Wikipedia in English provides these numbers. These numbers don’t include Jews who fled into the U.S.S.R., their number isn’t known precisely.
The extermination of the Jewish people is visible everywhere you travel in Lithuania: brown cultural heritage signs inform you of executions and mass burial sites. In Kaunas and along the Nieman River there, where people often travel, you encounter these signs every few kilometers. Some of them have been there since the Soviet era, others have been set up or refurbished more recently.
No one expresses doubts about the respect due to those people who were murdered only because they were born Jews. We don’t choose how we are born, we don’t select which houses of prayer we will attend, we don’t choose the color of our hair, and therefore we cannot be punished, exterminated and derided for these things. But do we visit these sites, do we read the inscriptions of what happened and why? Who were the Nazis? Who were these local lackeys and collaborators? Why did people act this way? How could this happen at all?
As we know, signs of the times are important in that they say something, teach and pass on important knowledge to the next generation. They have to speak and they have to be heard. For that to happen, however, the individual must be ready to accept the information. But this is very hard to do when we don’t even talk about it among our family members. This is a topic which is not discussed. And it’s not discussed for several reasons.
First, there is no clear narrative, or it is one which is difficult to face. And sometimes we don’t know what to say when we hear only one side. If you don’t know yourself, how can you explain it to someone else? A year ago my sea scouts and I travelled through the town of Prienai and we stopped at a statue commemorating Holocaust victims, and for a good half hour we talked about the reasons for and the results of the Holocaust. The young people said thank you for making it clearer to them. Shouldn’t we talk to people in the language they understand, taking into consideration all sides and their ideas and motives? So that there wouldn’t be an automatic rejection.
It seems the easiest thing is to understand the Nazis because they are the bad guys. They are basically evil. But they weren’t born evil, they became such. They were raised to be that way using a certain process. After World War I, which Germany lost, they looked around for who was to blame, and eagerly accepted the idea the Jews and Communists were to blame. General Erich Luedendorf came up with the idea of their having been knifed in the back, the theory the Germans had fought honorably and well along the fronts and were nearing victory, while Jews and Communists far from the front were inciting riots and revolution, which forced the signing of a difficult truce.
Although this theory didn’t have a lot in common with the truth, and in the fall of 1918 the Germans were unable to prosecute the war further due to famine and disintegration, and when the USA joined the war there was no more hope of victory, nonetheless many in Germany found this theory comforting. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Germans were raised to think of themselves as the very best of the best, and so easily accepted these sorts of simple explanations, and then easily accepted racist doctrines.
And here is the very dangerous conclusion that others as well, people today, can be raised to be evil, if they are affected by similar ideas, if there is the same sort of talk in the schools and if they are affected by a specific sort of environment of hate and self-aggrandizement. This could happen now, too, as it did in 1941, although the names might differ. Racism has a spiritual origin and is based on the universally recognized if not openly declared views of part of society.
Propagators of Communism, the polar opposite ideology, also carried out a Holocaust. We well know of its deportations, exterminated nations and elites, and so we harbor no doubts concerning the methodological relationship of the Reds and the Browns. Of course the Nazi leaders learned much from the gulag system, from Russia’s system of deportation and katorgas, perfected by the Bolsheviks Yagoda and Yezhov.
Totalitarian systems give rise to evil, and their leaders in the name of creating a superstate or supermen sacrifice other, less important nations, or a portion of them. Even the seemingly innocent slogan “America first” can be distorted towards violence and the desire to murder others or people who think otherwise. We saw this recently in the riots at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. [sic]. This is terrific, but it can happen anywhere and any time, regardless of stereotypes and flags.
After World War II Europeans understood and judged the lesson of totalitarianism. But this was a lesson which was only learned partially: the Nazis were clearly an evil, but concerning the Reds there were various views. It should be noted the entire German and Japanese peoples were demonized. But not all Germans were Nazis, and Communism went uncondemned.
It’s similar in Lithuania: the common Lithuania often was a member of the Communist Party, and many of use made a smaller or larger career for ourselves during the Soviet times. How will you admit this now? The unlearned lessons of history lead to the repetition of mistakes. If Stalinism isn’t condemned, it leads to Putinism.
But let’s return to the Nazis. The party in charge of the Nazi project was called the German Workers’ National-Socialist Party, which was formally both socialist and nationalist. I think we talk about it too little, we don’t get into it or we tend to simplify it. While this is one of the main topics for documentary films in the West, in Lithuania symbols and the cinema say more. Sometimes it seems as if we demonize the Germans themselves more that we do Naziism. And we shouldn’t, because Naziism had proponents among other peoples, and probably still does.
Let’s learn more about the origin of the ideas of the Holocaust and that will let our minds understand the root of evil. God and ideas rule the world, but not all ideas come from God. Of special concern is how some people identify themselves as nationalists. Dear reader, this is a very bad self-identification because a nationalist is a person who is only concerned with his own people and in the name of the real or imagined interests of that nation is prepared to sacrifice other nations. This is the fundamental idea of the Holocaust.
Reject that title as soon as possible, this is a symbol of evil. The Lithuanian people have a much better title: tautininkai [nationalists]. Although it sounds similar, especially in English, the difference is huge. A tautininkas is a person who is concerned with his people, their language, customs and heritage, but who also respects other peoples. These are people of a completely different humanitarian culture who do much good work, who created our Lithuania as well, and Poland and Latvia and Israel, and other nation-state type countries. And people of these views could not have been Holocaust murderers.
But what about those collaborators? Who were those people who accepted these horrific ideas? Were they the leaders of the Lithuanian nation, people such as the first military volunteer Kazys Škirpa, or general Storm [Jonas Noreika]? Maybe Antanas Smetona? Despite great agitation in recent times, it has never been proved they organized the Holocaust [sic]. No, these were totally different people, often uneducated who tended to feel important once they got a rifle in their arms, people who sometimes had suffered greatly from Soviet oppression in 1941, who sometimes blindly followed orders. They were similar to the Soviet goons.
Let’s get to know them, let’s realize why they did what they did. After all there was no lack of Holocaust perpetrators even among the Jews, especially in the self-governance structures in the ghettos. We must loudly name these people and try to insure people like them never appear again. But we must also answer the question of what the views of the Jews themselves were, what ideas led a portion of the Jews to collaborate with the Soviet government, to take up important posts in the Soviet structures of oppression. Sometimes understanding the reasons allows us to understand the consequences, even if it doesn’t justify the behavior.
Today, on International Holocaust Day, let’s invite our children and grandchildren over and let’s tell them of the dangers of totalitarianism, paying special attention to an examination of the reasons for it, and let’s talk about the monuments which witness to the tragedy of the past. Only when we understand why it happened will we come closer to the perfection of consciousness, only then will we learn to see evil even in our own midst. So let’s pay respect to our democratic values and teach the next generation the simple truth: the Lord created everyone in His own image, equal, and no one ever gave anyone the right to kill. Even in the name of real or imagined ideals. And let’s light candles for the victims of the Holocaust.
Text in Lithuanian here.