Francine Klagsbrun
Special To The Jewish Week

Watching “Antique Roadshow” on PBS the other night, I was intrigued by one of the items on display. It was a doll someone had inherited, which the show’s expert evaluated at several thousand dollars in today’s market. It had been manufactured, he said, in the early 1900s by Kammer & Reinhardt, a well-known German doll-making company, in business from 1886 to 1932. It was the cutoff date that caught my attention—could this have been a Jewish company that closed down as the Nazis rose to power? The company’s logo on the doll’s back confirmed my suspicion. It showed the initials K and R separated by a Star of David. That star set my mind racing. Did the company’s owners end up wearing the proud symbol of their firm as the oppressive yellow star that marked Europe’s Jews during their darkest days?

This week we commemorated Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, when, between November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi thugs smashed thousands of windows in Jewish storefronts and houses all over Germany and Austria. It struck me as I contemplated, yet again, the horror of those days, how instant had been my reaction to the 1932 closing date of the German doll company, immediately assuming because of that date that the company was Jewish-owned. Those of us who were alive during the Holocaust years, even as children, will always make such associations, always filter 20th-century events through the lens of that century’s Jewish catastrophe.

And what of our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren? It’s been said many times that as Holocaust survivors pass on, we have a greater responsibility than ever to keep their stories alive. But as the 21st century unfolds with its own stories of atrocities and desperate refugees, we also have to make sure that, while deeply sympathetic to suffering everywhere, succeeding generations of Jews understand the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its impact on all of Jewish life.

The Lithuanian version of the Economist IQ publication has published an interview with Nobuki Sugihara, the son of the famous war-time Japanese diplomat who rescued Jews from the Holocaust in Kaunas against instructions from his ministry. The youngest Sugihara son was in Lithuania partly to attend the premiere of a new film about his father called Persona Non Grata: The Chiune Sugihara Story.

Ieva Rekštytė asked him “What impression did you come away with after the premiere at the movie theater?”

Nobuki Sugihara responded: “The film was beautiful visually, the actors were good, but in no way are all the historical facts in it true. You have to realize that this is entertainment, after all, and not a film intended to expand knowledge. For example, my father wasn’t so soft and sentimental as he’s made out to have been. Further, his supposed lover Irinia plays a major part in his life in the film, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of her. The impression is the film was created in a hurry, not even as a cinematic production, but as a television serial. I think the Japanese audience (to whom, most likely, the film is oriented) will like it, but it’s unlikely the international viewer will take an interest.

Full interview in Lithuanian here.

Lithuanian Jewish young people held a small protest against the commemoration of Jonas Noreika/General Vėtra on the wall of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences building. THey hung banners with images from the ghetto where Litvak Lithuanian citizens were sent by order of Noreika.

The organizers of the protest said they are trying to bring attention to how commemoration of Noreika is shameful to the European city of Vilnius.

“I and other young people are not trying to anger or offend anyone with our initiative, we simply want to inform people, passers-by, of the controversial memorial plaque to Noreika which has been much discussed lately. I believe history must be presented objectively so that our generation and future generations who haven’t and hopefully will not experience personally what war means will understand the mistakes of the past and learn from them, European Jewish Student Union board member Amit Belaitė said.

VILNIUS, November 9, BNS–Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky has called an assessment of actions by Lithuanian officer Jonas Noreika during World War II released by the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania “contradictory.”

At the end of October the center announced Noreika hadn’t taken part in the mass murder of Jews in Lithuania during World War II, but that the Nazi occupational regime had involved him in the ordering of affairs connected with the isolation of Jews.

“It appears to us, the Lithuanian Jewish Community, that this assessment of the actions of Jonas Noreika is very contradictory,” the statement Faina Kukliansky issued said. She said: “the imprisoning Jews in ghettos, or any other kind of ‘isolation,’ or ‘ordering of affairs connected with the isolation of the Jews,’ is nothing other than the extermination of Jews.”

Mr. Hajime Furuta, governor of Gifu Prefecture, center, discusses Sugihara initiative.
photo courtesy Lithuanian Foreign Ministry.

Lithuanian foreign minister Linas Linkevičius met the governor of Gifu Prefecture Hajime Furuta in Vilnius October 30 where Mr. Furuta presented an application made by Japan to have documents connected with the activity of Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

“Lithuania is prepared to contribute to this wonderful initiative and our country and Japan are looking at ways to work together on this,” foreign minister Linkevičius said.

The mayor of Yaotsu, the town in Gifu Prefecture where Sugihara was born and raised, Shingo Akatsuka, who initiated the UNESCO application, accompanied governor Furuta to Lithuania. His town hosts a memorial museum with much space devoted to Kaunas, where Sugihara operated, and Lithuania.

The Lithuanian foreign minister said: “Chiune Sugihara represents one of the most important cultural and historical connections between Lithuania and Japan.”

Controversial Lithuanian military officer Jonas Noreika didn’t participate in the mass murder of Jews in Lithuania during World War II, but the Nazi occupational regime did involve him in matters connected with the isolation of Jews, according to the Center for Research on the Genocide and Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania.

The center drafted this report following a demand by a group of public figures for a plaque bearing Noreika’s name to be removed from the library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, claiming he collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of Lithuania. The plaque commemorates Noreika as an anti-Soviet fighter.

The center’s report was released to the public but addressed to the Government chancellor, the mayor of Vilnius and the Academy of Sciences chief librarian. It reads in part: “during the German occupation Jonas Noreika did not participate in operations for the mass extermination of Jews in the districts of Telšiai and Šiauliai.”

The document cautions Noreika’s actions “cannot be judged categorically.”

The Order of Malta and the Jewish communities of Lithuania and Munich, Germany held a concert and reception in the Hercules Hall at the Munich Rezidens palace, with proceeds and donations collected during the concert going to support still-living rescuers of Jews.

Lithuanian ambassador to Germany Deividas Matulionis attended the event on November 2 and delivered a message from Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė, the patroness of the event.

Every year on the last Sunday in October members of the Kaunas Jewish Community and others gather to remember the victims of the so-called Great Action at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas. The largest mass murder operation to kill Jews in the Kaunas ghetto was carried out from October 28 into October 29 in 1941. Approximately ten thousand people were murdered during the single operation, including about 4,300 children.

Ninth Fort Museum director Jūratė Zakaitė spoke first at the ceremony, followed by Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas. Žakas as well as Kaunas deputy mayor Vasiliy Popov, deputy Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Yehuda Gidron and Russian embassy attaché Svetlana Lepayeva spoke about how we must never forget the atrocities committed and must talk about the subject with young people, including humanity’s apparent inability to learn from its mistakes and parallels with racist crimes today. Kaunas Jewish Community member Julijana Zarchi, a Holocaust survivor and Soviet deportee, shared her experiences and insights.