Holocaust – Page 43 – Lithuanian Jewish Community

A Tale of Two Statues

In remembrance of signatories of conscience

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky’s observations on the eve of the 103rd celebration of February 16

We live in good times, incomparable to those which the Lithuanian Jewish community experiences eight decades ago. We live in a time of great achievements and at the same time there is still much to achieve. We live at a time when we still have to explain and defend ourselves, and we do this patiently but resolutely. We live at a time when society is crossing swords over ideas, attitudes and, most significantly, statues. Let this be the tale of two statues which don’t exist.

We are about to celebrate February 16, Lithuania Day, for the 103rd time. When we name the names of the signatories to the Lithuanian Act of Independence, this shows that the date for us is not just an historical day, but the triumph of the personal decision made by specific people whose result–a free and sovereign country–we all enjoy and take pride in. In the context of February 16, let’s also remember another group of people, a group I call signatories of conscience, the people whose decision resulted in hundreds of lives saved.

During the different Holocaust commemorations we often hear people taking pride that over 900 Lithuanians have been named Righteous Gentiles, but I don’t hear their names or their stories. I see the lack of context. And the context is very simple: the citizens of the first Republic of Lithuania, the same people who forged the young state, heard the Jews’ cry for help and responded. Do you think about the fact that generation which hid persecuted Jews on their farms, in their apartments and basements were the same people who created the first Lithuanian Republic? That they are the same generation whose achievements in art, learning and politics we take pride in today, whose deeds and lives we cite today as examples in the creation of the state? They include the family of February 16th signatory and engineer Steponas Kairys, and Lithuanian president Kazys Grinius, and the daughter of M. K. Čiurlionis, one of Lithuania’s greatest artists, Danutė Čiurlionytė abd her husband Vladimiras Zubovas, the family of Lithuanian writer Balys Sruoga, the family of writer Kazys Binkis, and professor Pranas Mažylis, the grandfather of Liudas Mažylis who rediscovered the original Lithuanian proclamation of independence German archives. They include Ona Jablonskytė, the daughter of the founder of the standard Lithuanian language Jonas Joblonskis, and his daughter-in-law advyga Jablonskienė. And not just presidents and professors, but simple village people were able to make the right choice. These are names which are inseparable from the history of Lithuania. Why don’t we want to erect a statues to these people, Lithuania’s signatories of conscience?

2021-02-152021-03-15

Writer Katarzyna Markusz Questioned by Polish Prosecutor for Insulting National Myth about Holocaust

Katarzyna Markusz was questioned on suspicion of violating a law against defaming the country after an anonymous complaint about an article from 2020. She faces up to 3 years in jail.

Polish police are probing a local journalist who wrote last year about Polish complicity in the Holocaust.

Katarzyna Markusz, who runs the Jewish.pl website and writes for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, was questioned last Thursday on suspicion that she violated Article 133 of the Polish constitution, which subjects those who “publicly insults the Nation or the Republic of Poland” to up to three years in prison.

An anonymous complaint was filed against Markusz, which led to her detention and interrogation, according to Oko.press.

In October, 2020, Markusz wrote in an article: “Will we live to see the day when the Polish authorities also admit that hostility toward Jews was widespread among Poles, and that Polish complicity in the Holocaust is a historical fact?

2021-02-152021-02-26

Two Noreikas: Laser Sight against Flintlock Musket in Information Wars

by Mingailė Jurkutė, chief historian, Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania

The current director of the Genocide Center is trying to give the impression all that is happening are just internal department disputes, depot against depot, one faction of historians against another, or maybe historians vs. museum specialists, or maybe even brave, ambitious and mobile visionaries of the new administration against the academics at a small bureaucratic institution who long for stagnation and a light work-load. This is a terrific and naked lie.

Center historians are productive and their academic production and other specific Center production, for example, writing brief–barely two pages long–and exact findings of history, which often require examining just as much material as for an article in the normal academic format. And they want reform, they are proposing reforms themselves. This story is a very successful technique when you want misconstrue and hide what is going on, for example, as Soviet ideologues went to extremes to explain the partisan war was really a class war, or a civil war, and in any case… an internal social dispute.

But I want to return the real players (the sides) to center stage, because they are getting lost due to the noise, agitation and intentional mud-slinging (of which an example is the letter the administration drafted to defend the administration, not without pressure from direct bosses to staff to sign on in telephone calls made outside working hours, forcing employees to arrive in person at the workplace to sign in the midst of the pandemic).

2021-02-122021-02-12

Stark War of Principles Brewing in Lithuanian Parliament: Ruling Coalition MPs to Cross Swords

by Vytautas Bruveris, Lietuvos rytas

Even representatives of different camps within the ruling majority are set to cross swords. This war of positions will come to the fore in parliament because of the activities of the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania currently besieged by scandal.

Tomas Raskevičius, chairman of the Lithuanian parliament’s Human Rights Committee and a member of the ruling Freedom Party, believes the Office of State Auditor needs to thoroughly investigate the Genocide Center and says there could be many different problems there.

The Human Rights Committee exercises parliamentary supervision of the Genocide Center, but the Lithuanian parliament’s National Security and Defense Committee chaired by conservative Laurynas Kasčiūnas has taken the reins over the Center into its own hands. Further, a special working group empaneled by parliamentary speaker Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen is set to begin investigating the activities of the Genocide Center, a working group which will also feature a diversity of opinions.

2021-02-122021-02-24

Former Death Camp Guard Age 100 Faces Charges in Germany

Delfi.lt

Charges have been laid in Germany against a 100-year-old former concentration camp guard accused of complicity in the murder of 3,518 people as the country rushes to bring the last living people who worked for the Nazis to justice, AFP reported Monday.

The male suspect is accused of “consciously and willingly” aiding in the murder of Jewish prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg north of Berlin between 1942 and 1945. Despite the accused’s advanced age, he was found to be able to stand trial according to prosecutors, who said the trial would be televised. These charges following those made in recent days against a concentration camp secretary accused of being an accomplice in the murder of 10,000 people. This is the first such case in recent years made against a woman who worked at a Nazi concentration camp.

Reader’s question: Will the Lithuania and the EU find the will to try or condemn members of the Lithuanian Activist Front and the Lithuanian Provisional Government who adopted the Nazis’ plan to exterminate Jews and carried it out, who voluntarily elected to take part in the Holocaust?

Full text in Lithuanian here.

2021-02-11

Sent to Siberia Despite Rescuing Jews

Photo: Lithuanian deportees en route to Siberia. Center: Family of B. and I. Jablonskiai. The only known photograph in Lithuania of a deportation cattle wagon.

by Romualdas Beniušis

This year marks 70 years since the third large post-war deportation operation Osen (Autumn) carried out by the Soviet security structures (MGB) on October 2 and 3, 1951, during which more than 16,000 people deemed “bourgeoisie,” including 5,000 children, were packed into cattle cars and deported to Siberia.

At that time, 39 children didn’t reach their places of exile. Their deaths marked the way along which Lithuanians were deported to Siberia. This time, the lists of deportees were entrusted to the local government administration and Party committees because it had become ever more difficult to find the “bourgeoisie” needed for carrying out the deportation plans. Thus the opportunity arose to include on the list of people to be deported those the local government didn’t like, the more educated, and even people who lived in the cities, carrying out personal grudges and to seize the property of the deportees.

Since only a few days passed between the confirmation of the lists and the beginning of deportations, the deportations began to be carried out without formal deportation cases which were drawn up later. The barely-literate locals who compiled the lists and usually foreign MGB officials who drafted the formal cases made endless mistakes in those documents, distorting surnames, dates of birth and so on, but this did not become an obstruction on the way to Siberia.

2021-02-112021-03-04

Lithuanian History Institute Director Tells Parliamentary Speaker Genocide Center Planned Propaganda Campaigns

15min.lt

Speaker of Lithuanian parliament Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen met representatives Tuesday of universities and the Lithuanian History Institute to discuss the situation at Lithuania’s Genocide Center, following a boycott of Genocide Center announced by these institutions. Lithuanian History Institute director Alvydas Nikžentaitis said the problem is not just a domestic one and needs a final solution.

Historians from Vilnius University, Vytautas Magnus University, Klaipėda University and the Lithuanian History Institute sent the speaker a letter complaining the new leadership of Genocide Center under Adas Jakubauskas after he was appointed in February of 2020 had led to a primitive politicization of sensitive and painful events of the past without taking sources into account. They said they could no longer work with Genocide Center under those conditions, and didn’t agree with unprofessional statements made by representatives of the Genocide Center.

Nikžentaitis said there had been indications very long before Jakubauskas’s appointment that things weren’t right at the Center, and that his colleagues had made numerous complaints. Nikžentaitis said some of them were even persecuted for expressing their opinion regarding the Center. Nikžentaitis listed among other complaints that there were allegedly discussions inside Genocide Center that if the current director of the Center’s Department of Historical Research [Arūnas Bubnys] withdrew from the post, he would be given a different post, while behind the scenes agreement was reached on replacing him with another person more obedient to the leadership.

“So basically this was preparing the ground, let’s say, for preparing opinions very far from academic at the Center, so that the Center would be ready to carry out specific propaganda goals,” Nikžentaitis said.

On the meeting with the speaker of parliament, Nikžentaitis said they discussed how to change the existing situation. He added that in a certain sense the problems at Genocide Center were pre-programmed from its very inception.

Full article in Lithuanian here.

2021-02-102021-02-19

World Jewish Congress Dismayed at Polish Court Ruling against Holocaust Historians

Press Release
February 9, 2021

NEW YORK–World Jewish Congress president Ronald S. Lauder expressed his dismay following the announcement of a verdict in a Polish libel case against historians prof. Barbara Engelking and prof. Jan Grabowski for their scholarly work in which they cited the testimony of a survivor regarding the actions of a Polish mayor during the Holocaust.

Commenting on the decision, Lauder said, “As someone who has been deeply engaged with Poland for more than three decades, I am dismayed that a Warsaw court ruled against historians prof. Barbara Engelking and pProf. Jan Grabowski in the misguided libel case that was brought against them. It is simply unacceptable that historians should be afraid of citing credible testimony of Holocaust survivors.

“This outcome does not bode well for the future of historical research in Poland and sends precisely the wrong message to those who seek to stifle the work of scholars. I hope that today’s verdict will be overturned on appeal, and that the day will come when decisions regarding the integrity of history will once again be left to historians and not politicians or judges.”

2021-02-102021-02-10

Mass Murders in Utena: Memories of the Holocaust

Photo: Just a few buildings witnessing to the Jewish past still stand in Utena.

Translated to Lithuanian by Vytautas Ridikas from Massacres in Utena by Tsozdik Bleiman writing in Russian

§§§

As the only living witness left, I am able to share some special memories.

My father Jakov Bleiman, who was formerly a rabbi in Crimea, performed the same duties in Utena, where my brother-in-law Efraim Yudelovich also lived with the family. At the beginning of the war I lived in Kaunas.

I decided to see my parents and then, if the right conditions were in place, to evacuate with the entire family. As it turned out there was no way to leave for somewhere, because just as I arrived in the city the Germans entered. Our fate became clear: we were all condemned to death.

Thursday. The first day of the German regime. Dozens of Jews are herded to work, led to the Germans and their Lithuanian helpers. The work is meaningless and insignificant, just in order to deride the Jews, sending them around all day with brooms, shovels and other implements.

2021-02-092021-03-04

Lithuanian Media Respond to Changes at Genocide Center

The Lithuanian media report several stories related to recent internal dissent and the resignation of Vidmantas Valiušaitis at the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania, usually called the Genocide Center, a state-financed arbiter of the official Lithuanian version of history.

Delfi.lt reported Lithuanian speaker of parliament Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen said it was too early to talk of replacing Genocide Center’s recently-appointed director Adas Jakubauskas, but called the problems there real, and said she thought a parliamentary commission should be formed to look into complaints which came to light last week when staff historians at the state institution published an open letter issued as an appeal to the speaker of parliament, complaining history was being politicized under the current director, see https://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/cmilyte-nielsen-kelti-genocido-centro-vadovybes-kaitos-klausima-tikrai-per-anksti.d?id=86384653 for the complete story in Lithuanian. Long-time observers note the Genocide Center has always been politicized and that is its main mission as defined in law, to present a politicized version of history.

Delfi.lt also carried an in-depth account of a discussion held last week on Lithuania’s Žinių Radijas talk radio station between Vytautas Bruveris, a writer and journalist who has won much public respect for his reporting and editorials over the years at Lithuania’s Lietuvos rytas newspaper, and Vidmantas Valiušaitis, a writer with an ultra-nationalist view of Lithuanian history who has worked as a newspaper writer and whose work has been featured in the official magazine of the Lithuanian military, Karys. Valiušaitis’s appointment to a post created especially for him by the new director of Genocide Center was one of the main complaints in the appeal staff and historians sent to the speaker of parliament. The text in Lithuanian can be found here:

2021-02-092021-02-15

Valiušaitis Quits as Advisor to Director of Genocide Center

Vidmantas Valiušaitis announced he is quitting the post of advisor to the general director of the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania (Genocide Center). He served in the post for five-and-a-half months. Valiušaitis said a letter by Center staff was partially responsible for his leaving.

The webpage of Lithuanian Public Radio and Television reported last week on an appeal a group of Genocide Center researchers made to their general director Adas Jakubauskas and parliamentary leaders, complaining research had become ideologized and politicized following a change in leadership.

They also complained of a stressful and emotional work environment, and said experienced historians were leaving because of pressure from the leadership. Their appeal singled out Vidmantas Valiušaitis as an issue of concern, saying a special post had been created for him specifically with job requirements tailored especially for him, introducing a skills requirement which was unconnected with the activities carried out by the Genocide Center.

Full article in Lithuanian here.

2021-02-03

Lithuanian President Says MP’s Statements on Holocaust “Regretful Misunderstanding”

by G. Jaruševičiūtė, ELTA

Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda criticized scandalous statements on the Holocaust by Conservative MP Valdas Rakutis. He said he regretted people with such great political responsibility sometimes make these sorts of statements painful to the families of Holocaust victims.

“It’s really a regretful misunderstanding made on this very important commemorative day when we all again bow and stand in memory with the victims, the Jewish people during World War II. And it’s a shame that we sometimes hear these kinds of speculations by people with great political responsibility which cause further pain to relatives of the victims, and pain to our partners,” president Nausėda said at a press conference at the Office of President.

He expressed hope the correct conclusions would be drawn from Rakutis’s statements.

“I hope the conclusion will be drawn that this person’s opinion, specially that of Mr. Valdas Rakutis, in no way expresses the opinion of the party, the parliamentary faction or the parliament. I think there have been sufficient comments made and denials issued from the head of the party, but still we apologize for the lack of understanding and request no hurried conclusions be made,” the president said.

Full report in Lithuanian here.

2021-02-03

Time for Genocide Center to Halt Mob Rule and Communist Censorship

by Arkadijus Vinokuras

The events shaking the Genocide Center in the last few days are the logical result of several years of flawed policy. This is what happens when responsibility for research into and assessment of historical events is passed into the hands of politically-agitated profaners. According to the professional historians who are finally quitting the Genocide Center, this leads to: “the disappearance of the distinction between the work of professional specialists and amateurish initiatives. In terms of both historical research and the field of commemoration and the authoring and publication of documents, there is a danger that this will become an imitation of academic and expert work and a profanation of academic research.”

So, the honorable historians of the Genocide Center confirmed in a statement they released what I have been repeating for several years now: there simply cannot be a state institution whose task it is to perform objective studies in connection with the history of our country, if it is led by radicals appointed by politicians rather than professional historians. All these sorts of self-declared historians–geologists, philologists and mechanics–cannot prepare properly findings of history for the courts and other important institutions. All the more so if they don’t even consult with professional historians.

The result of this dishonest and likely criminal activity (when history is written based not on facts but on politically-motivated interpretations and myths) are findings of history, binding legally. Thus Kazys Škirpa, who collaborated with the Nazis, dreamt of a Nazi Lithuania and drove the Jews out, is proclaimed a Lithuanian hero. The same goes for Jonas Noreika, who for two years acted as a Holocaust perpetrator, and if his heroization isn’t enough, now he has become “a rescuer of Jews.” And those Jews, allegedly, “themselves, of their own volition, barricaded themselves in ghettos.” So did other Lithuanians as well “themselves, of their own will, yearned to leave for Siberia?” Isn’t it pathetically funny, the Genocide Center’s self-justification is “our Holocaust was different, and collaboration with the Nazis was also different than in other places?” Another example: Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, who was, it seems, “vindicated and rehabilitated by US institutions.” This is how the brains of Lithuanian people with no connection are washed, people who find it very difficult to determine where the truth lies, and where the lie does.

2021-02-022021-02-15

US Commission for Heritage Abroad Responds to MP Rakutis

Letter to Lithuanian MP Rakutis_29Jan2021

2021-02-012021-02-03

Three Historians and Institute Director Refuse to Work with Genocide Center

Three university history staff and the head of the Lithuanian History Institute report they cannot cooperate any loner with the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuanian (Genocide Center) because of the policies carried out by the leaders of the latter.

Lithuanian History Institute director Alvydas Nikžentaitis, Vilinius University History Faculty dean Loreta Skurvydaitė, Klaipėda University Baltic Regional History and Archaeological Institute director Vasilijus Safronovas and Vytautas Magnus University head of History Faculty Marius Sirutavičius sent notice of this decision to Lithuanian parliamentary speaker Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen Monday.

Meanwhile, Genocide Center general director Adas Jakubauskas reported some staff there are dissatisfied with reforms underway there and are making noises about that in the community of historians.

2021-02-012021-02-01

Internet Launch of Silvia Foti’s Book “in” Mexico City

2021-02-01

ICAN Launches Campaign to Educate All 535 Members of Congress on Lithuanian Holocaust Distortion and Denial

Following International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) has launched an issue education initiative to ensure all 535 members of the United States Congress learn about the ongoing Holocaust revisionism campaign perpetrated by the Lithuanian government.

“The Republic of Lithuania is engaged in a cynical, dishonest, and morally bankrupt campaign to deny and distort facts about the Holocaust. Facts supported by indisputable evidence, which proves that Lithuanians engaged in Holocaust crimes on a massive scale,” said Dillon Hosier, CEO at ICAN.

“The Lithuanian government not only hides the criminal histories of Holocaust perpetrators but adds insult to injury by bestowing their highest national honors to those who are proven murderers of Jews,” Hosier concluded. “If the Lithuanian government is able to effortlessly lie about history’s greatest crime, then it begs the question: what won’t they lie about?”

On three separate occasions dating back to February 26, 2018, the Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania (LGGRTC) falsely claimed that the United States Congress and the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) “completely exonerated” Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis for culpability in the murder of Jews in Lithuania. In response to inquiries and objections from senior members of Congress about these false claims, Lithuania responded that these members of Congress were “just politicians” and that their opposition has no merit.

ICAN’s initiative to educate Congress about Lithuania’s campaign to deny and distort certain facts about the Holocaust will be launched alongside the publication of “The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather was a War Criminal” written by Silvia Foti, available on March 9, 2021.

2021-02-01

Unpleasant Surprise at the Genocide Center: Historian Warned over Doubts Expressed Publicly

Photo: Ceremony to commemorate victims of occupation, genocide and Soviet repression. J. Stacevičius/LRT

by Modesta Gaučaitė-Znutienė, LRT.lt

You speak up, you receive a warning. That’s what happened to a Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania (Genocide Center) historian who openly criticized the current situation there. The director of Genocide Center says the warning was issued because of unprofessional behavior.

LRT.lt reminds readers we have written before about doubts expressed by Genocide Center employees regarding attempts to politicize the Center’s activities as well as regarding the decision to present the status of freedom fighter to deputy general director Vidmantas Valiušaitis. Now it turns out historian Mingailė Jurkutė has received an official warning for publicly airing her concerns.

Received Letter from Advisor to the Director

Historian Monika Kareniauskaitė who no longer works at the Center shared a post on social media Thursday saying she still thinks the Center is one of the institutions working in the field of memory studies with the greatest potential. Nonetheless, she observed problems and poor practices which didn’t affect her alone. Kareniauskaitė said if she had been only one to suffer in this situation, she would’ve kept silent, but her colleagues were coming up against the same things.

2021-01-292021-02-12

MP Rakutis Quits Commission Chair over Holocaust Comments

Delfi.lt, BNS

Conservative Lithuanian MP Valdas Rakutis has resigned as chairman of the parliament’s Commission on the Battles for Freedom and State Historical Memory following criticism of his statements about the Holocaust.

“Asked by the leadership of the Homeland Union/Lithuanian Christian Democrat [Conservative] Party and parliamentary faction, accepting political responsibility, and not wanting the very important work of the Commission on the Battles for Freedom and State Historical Memory to be made more difficult by this statement of mine, and also following the Western political tradition, I have decided to take the honorable step and to withdraw from the post of chairman of this commission,” the MP said in a statement released Friday. “I hope this step will help calm unnecessary tension both within the country and abroad with our important strategic partners, and will allow for further discussion to develop in a constructive direction,” he said.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

2021-01-292021-02-01

Statement by LJC Chairwoman on Recent Holocaust Denial by Lithuanian MP

You Are Quiet Again, as You Were in 1941

A comment on the silent state and the vociferous Rakutises

The Lithuanian Jewish Community, along with tens of thousands of Lithuanian Jews who were captured on the streets, locked in ghettos, marched to pits and shot and buried there, often close to their own hometowns, or shtetlakh, as Jews call them, where for centuries they had lived in common with Lithuanians–we are again guilty. Member of parliament of the Republic of Lithuania Valdas Rakutis in his commentary has said nothing new, and only repeats the mendacious and misleading narrative which has gone on for decades: We ourselves, the Jews, are guilty for the extermination of 95% of the Jews who lived in Lithuania before World War II.

I have met many such Rakutises, they always say the same thing. It is horrific that today these Rakutises also speak confidently in the parliament of the Republic of Lithuania, they are published and quoted, and again and again they blame those who were escorted by their neighbors to collection points in 1941, to synagogues, and from there to margins of forests and gravel pits, for the horror of the Holocaust.

It is said that all those who remained looked on in silence as the columns of Jewish men, women and children were marched along the streets of the towns in broad daylight. And now we have the same sort of situation: there isn’t much reaction at all to the lie of these Rakutises. The majority remain silent. There are some soft noises from his fellow party members, a few observations and speculations that maybe “Rakutis was mistaken,” but nothing even close to the precise and sharp uncompromising reaction demonstrated by the foreign embassies to Lithuania. The German, Israel and US ambassadors to Lithuania were among the first to condemn clearly and publicly Rakutis’s statement. The European Jewish Congress also responded as did the Jewish communities living abroad. The words by the Lithuanian MP didn’t slip by unnoticed by any of the Western states, where they react without excuse or compromise to open or hidden attempts to distort history and to expressions of anti-Semitism.

2021-01-292021-02-10