by Arkadijus Vinokuras, LRT.lt, September 5, 2023

With great pomp the de-Sovietization law has been released into public circulation. Correction: the law bans the propagation of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and ideology in any form. The law allows for the removal of symbols of both authoritarian ideological from public spaces.

Nonetheless, the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania [hereinafter Genocide Center] and the worshipers of Nazi collaborators arrayed around that institution are standing shoulder to shoulder when it comes to the removal of symbols from the period of the Nazi occupation. When Genocide Center historian Alfredas Rukšėnas cynically called for respecting the feelings of those who honor the murderer Juozas Krikštaponis, the question arose of whether Lithuania isn’t being guided by a broken moral compass.

The worship of Nazi collaborators is a method by which Lithuania’s radical right-wingers push their pro-fascist and authoritarian ideas on society and put a stop to historical truth. At the same time, attempting to hide their obvious affiliation with the Nazis, they beat their chests crying out they are against anti-Semitism, respect victims of the Holocaust, condemn Nazis and fascists, but still they worship these “heroes” who called for a fascist revolution in Lithuania. Who called for getting rid of the Jews and murdering them.

Full text in Lithuanian here.

by Arkadijus Vinokuras, Times of Israel, September 2, 2023

Director of the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania [hereinafter Genocide Center] Arūnas Bubnys in refusing to carry out the decision from the so-called De-Sovietization Commission to remove a monument commemorating murderer of Jews Juozas Krikštaponis, under pressure from public anger, has ordered the municipal administration of Ukmergės [Vilkomir] to remove the bas-relief image and name of Juozas Krikštaponis and to rededicate the monument to local Lithuanian partisans.

Finally, some initiative has been shown, although the law was grossly violated. Nonetheless, the issue of what influence the National Unification Party [Nacionalinis susivienijimas] and other interest groups have over Genocide Center commemorative policies remains unanswered.

The situation is absurd: Genocide Center director Arūnas Bubnys acting as sovereign has come up with his own pseudo-rules and has refused for months to follow the order from the De-Sovietization Commission, an order which, according to Lithuanian law, must be carried out within 5 days.

Photo: Jews in the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania are boarded onto trucks during a deportation action to a work camp c. 1942 (Image: US Holocaust Memorial Museum)

by Justin Amler, August 30, 2023

Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust
by Rūta Vanagaitė and Efraim Zuroff
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 240 pp., A$49.99

Under the terms of the secret protocols of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union in June 1940. After the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, Lithuania was occupied by the Germans in June 1941.

Caught in the middle were the country’s Jews.

Our People is a book about a journey in search of truth in the face of authorities who want to take that truth and distort it into something quite different.

One of the greatest myths of the Holocaust was that it was Hitler and the Nazis alone who committed the atrocities against the Jews. But this is, at best, misleading. While the Nazis were the driving force behind the genocide of the Jewish people, they could not have succeeded without the collaboration of willing local citizens across many countries.

by Grant Gochin

Fearing stigmatization and persecution, Lithuanian rescuers of Jews awarded the “Righteous among the Nations” designation, often hid it from their neighbors and family members for decades. Today, the Lithuanian Government honors these Rescuers on a national level (as they should have from the very beginning). Unfortunately, the Lithuanian honors are not sincere and are just another performance. Jewish people who were saved are reduced to vehicles for Lithuanian virtue signaling.

“Righteous Among Nations” Lithuanians comprised only 0.04% of the Lithuanian population. These genuine heroes are now used by the State as an alibi for anyone who is Lithuanian, i.e. the 0.04% are presented to the public as the stereotypical norm, while the 99.96% of Lithuanians who were not “Righteous Among Nations”, are negated or their deeds rewritten. This is clear Holocaust distortion.

Krikštaponis

The case of Juozas Krikštaponis is far more illustrative of Lithuania then, and now. Krikštaponis was a vicious, genocidal murderer. But, he “only” murdered Jews. So, for Lithuania this is not any impediment to national honors. Lithuania honors so many murderers of Jews, that it appears this could be a standard for national hero status.

The De-Sovietization Commission convened by the Lithuanian parliament has presented recommendations to the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania (hereinafter Genocide Center) that the statue commemorating the partisan Juozas Krikštaponis in Ukmergė (Vilkomir) be removed. Unfortunately, instead of taking concrete actions to remove this statue commemorating a person responsible for the murder of thousands of Jews, the Genocide Center has sent a request to the Lithuanian Office of Prosecutor General to rescind this man’s status as a Lithuanian partisan fighter. This is clearly an attempt to prolong the process and to place responsibility on a different agency.

“Krikštaponis’s culpability in the Holocaust is not disputed. This is shown by the documents the Genocide Center has collected and in their own finding of history concerning him. Carrying out mass murder is a crime which is not annulled by other good deeds. In marking the 80th anniversary of the anti-Nazi resistance and liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto, this monument to Krikštaponis is an insult to the memory of all the victims and to their surviving family members,” Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman and attorney Faina Kukliansky said.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community calls upon the Genocide Center to take immediate action based on the recommendations by the De-Sovietization Commission to remove this statue to Krikštaponis from the city center of Ukmergė.

“This is the eighth act of vandalism in seven months. Although we’ve gone to all the authorities asking for protection for the memorial and the mass grave, this site continues to be vandalized,” Ukmergė Jewish Community chairman Artūras Taicas said.

Located just 4 kilometers outside Ukmergė (Vilkomir) the memorial in the Pivonija Forest marks the mass grave of 11,000 Jews murdered there.

Taicas said that his calls to police over earlier incidents went unheeded.

“Frankly, I don’t believe and I don’t believe in officials who think the desecration of graves is trivial,” Taicas added.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman brought up the issue at a meeting with Ukmergė mayor Darius Varnas in June.

“It’s difficult to believe the police with modern equipment for criminal investigations can’t track down the owners of four-wheel off-road vehicles who continually disturb this Jewish site of eternal rest. There really aren’t a lot of these vehicles around and it would be possible to check tire treads. Furthermore, mobile telephone records would show who was using them. There’s not just one or two solutions to this, there are many, so one begins to think this is being avoided intentionally,” Kukliansky commented.

The Lithuanian news site delfi.lt published an opinion piece on July 7 co-authored by Lithuanian MP and head of the Liberal Union Party Eugenijus Gentvilas and Marijus Gailius, the party’s press representative, outlining patterns they found leading to anti-Semitism on facebook among Lithuanians:

Disinformation Conglomerate: How Anti-Vaxers Become Anti-Semites

A strong wave of anti-Semitism has swept over the country over the last two months, whose dimensions and harm are comparable to what took place 20 years ago when publisher Vitas Tomkus published his series of articles in his newspaper Respublika called “They Rule the World” back in February of 2003. This time, though, the anti-Semitic attack is probably more dangerous, because it isn’t being sown by a single unethical writer, but by a large group of people, be they evil-minded or naïve, on the social networks. Furthermore the anti-Semitic campaign continues and there is no end in sight.

At the tip of the spear of the anti-Semitic narrative crafted and continuing to be promoted is member of parliament Remigijus Žemaitaitis. On May 9 he posted and later repeated a line of Lithuanian folk anti-Semitism. Since then the MP has posted more than 10 posts and entries disparaging the Holocaust and, without an history education, tendentiously “researching” the role play by people of Jewish ethnicity in the commission of crimes against the Lithuanian people. Historian Nerijus Šepetys provided a frank assessment of the politician’s version of history: “He will say anything at all and mixes it all up.” On July 4 the parliamentary faction leaders from the ruling coalition parties condemned Žemaitaitis’s “intentional and directed anti-Semitic attacks which trivialize the Holocaust, hatred sown for one ethnicity and provocation of public and national disorder.” They called for a procedure to be initiated to make an inquiry into the MP’s alleged breaking of his oath of office and his constitutional accountability.