Photo: Outer wall of so-called Genocide Museum on Vilnius’s main street near parliament. Personal collection.

by Grant Gochin

One of the greatest public relations catastrophes of president Reagan’s tenure was his May, 1985, visit to a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, which contained numerous members of the SS. Today, nearly four decades later, the visit is still remembered with anger, amazement and mostly, for America, embarrassment.

NATO has announced that the next meeting of NATO heads of state and government will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11-12, 2023. There are, unfortunately, obvious parallels to Reagan’s “goodwill” visit to Bitburg.

In World War II, and primarily in the second half of 1941, about 200,000 Lithuanian Jews–about 96%–were systematically expelled from their homes, robbed, starved, tortured, and brutally murdered primarily by ethnic Lithuanian death squads euphemistically referred to as “auxiliary police” units. Lithuania does not acknowledge the fact that most of the mass murderers were ethnic Lithuanians. To the contrary, Lithuania in many cases has elevated the stature of many of those who led the Lithuanian Holocaust, arguing that they were anti-Soviet. This itself is an echo of the Nazis’ canard conflating Jews with Communism.

Grant Gochin delivered the following remarks to an audience of about 200 people at the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre of the Green and Sea Point Hebrew Congregation in Cape Town in the early evening of October 27.

Hello, chaverim, friends, I am honored and delighted to be on my home soil, speaking to my own people. My Mishpocha. Thank you for coming. My sincere thanks to the organizers and attendees, and those who have kept me going in this cause.

Every Jewish person in this room has ancestry from Lithuania. Most of us here now, are alive because our families got out before Lithuanians were able to murder us. We are all who are left, to remember and speak the truth. Our families’ voices cannot be stilled through apathy or forgetfulness. Our families’ voices must be heard.

I became eager to find out about the “Old Country” from the stories and lessons of my paternal grandfather. More and more, I knew I had to walk those streets and see those forests.

I was the very first Jew to apply to Lithuania for citizenship. Three times, they rejected me for reasons even the Lithuanian Supreme Court ruled to be “absurd.” There were two sets of rules, one for real “ethnic” Lithuanians, and a separate queue for Litvaks. This simplified their process–automatic denial for Jews. I fought back.

To mark the Day of Lithuanian Jewish Victims of Genocide proclaimed by the Lithuanian parliament in 1994, different groups converged on the Ponar Memorial Complex on September 23, 2022. One group held a different commemoration in the Vilnius ghetto territory, Vilnius Old Town, and arrived by train. Other groups came by bus and private automobile. Near the railroad tracks in Ponar where Holocaust victims were unloaded and sent to the killing pits, March of the Living participants, the Lithuanian Jewish Community, the International Commission for Assessing the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania, Lithuanian politicians, foreign diplomats and members of the public assembled and walked the same route to the Ponar Memorial Complex where short speeches were delivered in front of the central monument there.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky said: “We lived in peace, we couldn’t have imagined at all there would be war and in such a manner. Confidence in life, confidence in the future can be broken. And the young people need to hear about this. Because the young people are also responsible for our future, not just because we want to teach them to be good citizens.”