Rachel
Margolis may be the most tragic Holocaust survivor on the
planet.
She has stiff competition, to be sure, but Margolis’s recent experiences are
almost too surreal and painful to be believed. After the
war—during which her parents and brother were murdered—Margolis
decided to rebuild her life in her native city of Vilna
(now Vilnius), the capital of Lithuania. For more than
40 years, she taught biology at Vilnius University. After
the Soviet Union collapsed and Lithuanian democracy permitted
it, she helped found the city’s only Holocaust museum and
became one of its stalwart presences, returning to Lithuania
to lecture each summer even after relocating to Israel
in the mid-1990s.
Now, at 88, Margolis is being
defamed as a war criminal. Her crime? Surviving the Vilna
ghetto to join the anti-Nazi resistance in the forests
of Lithuania.
Margolis is one of a group of
elderly survivors who have become pawns in a sinister game
of Holocaust obfuscation by local authorities in the Baltic
states—which, though they are among the smallest nations
in Europe, had the highest rates of Holocaust genocide
in Europe. A more complex phenomenon than Holocaust denial,
obfuscation does not deny a single Jewish death at the
hands of the Nazis. Instead, it uses as a starting point
the idea that the Nazi genocide was not a unique event
but rather a reaction to Soviet “genocide” (and antecedent
to further Soviet genocide) in which the same elements
of Lithuanian society that often sided with the Nazi invaders
were persecuted and imprisoned by the Communist regime,
whose officials included Jews.
The “double genocide” movement
has gained the support of government and political parties
in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, which have invested
substantial treasure to persuade the entire European Union
to accept the equality of the Nazi Holocaust and Soviet
crimes. Their biggest success has been the Prague Declaration
[1], issued from a conference on “European Conscience and
Communism” in June 2008, which demands that Europe “recognize
Communism and Nazism as a common legacy”; that Communism
be assessed “the same way Nazi crimes were assessed by
the Nuremberg Tribunal”; that a single “day of remembrance
of the victims of both Nazi and Communist totalitarian
regimes” be declared, thus effectively eliminating Holocaust
Remembrance Day; and that European history textbooks be
“overhauled” so that “children could learn and be warned
about Communism and its crimes in the same way as they
have been taught to assess the Nazi crimes.”
Signs of the movement’s success
are visible throughout Lithuania. The Museum of Genocide
Victims [2] on Vilnius’s central boulevard mentions the
word Holocaust only sparingly and glosses over events at
a place called Ponar in Yiddish (now known as Paneriai),
where 100,000 unarmed civilians, some 70,000 of them Jews,
were murdered, mostly by local Lithuanian militia. Instead,
Lithuania’s Holocaust museum is devoted entirely to Soviet
crimes. At a recent exhibition on the Ukrainian famine,
a huge poster featured a woman telling visitors: “In Auschwitz
we were given some spinach and a little bread. War is terrible,
but famine is even worse.”
Two years ago, on Lithuania’s
independence day, neo-Nazis marched [3] down the capital’s
central boulevard chanting “Juden raus,” or “Jews out,”
and brandishing a specially modified Lithuanian swastika.
(It has since become illegal [4] in Lithuania to display
Nazi or Soviet symbols.) Only after heavy pressure from
local embassies—including those of the United States and
other Western powers—did the country’s leaders condemn
the march, a week after it occurred. This year, on March
11, “Juden raus” was replaced by the slogan “Lietuva Lietuviams,”
or Lithuania for Lithuanians, and it is not a fringe movement.
The permit for the march was issued to Kazimieras Uoka
[5], a signatory on Lithuania’s March 11, 1990, declaration
of independence and a member of parliament from the country’s
ruling coalition, the right-wing Homeland Union Lithuanian
Christian Democrat Political Group. Top officials said
not a word until the Norwegian ambassador, Steinar Gil,
protested on March 19, noting that 50 members of the country’s parliament had protested a gay-rights march but not one objected to the neo-Nazis.
The country’s prime minister, Andrius Kubilius, replied
on March 23, saying, “There are skinheads and neo-Nazis
in every country, and they sometimes take a walk or chant
something.”
Local authorities and government
agencies have also instigated campaigns of slander and
legal threats against elderly Jewish Holocaust survivors
whose experiences fighting in the forests with Communist-backed
partisans against the Nazis would appear to threaten the
viability of the “double genocide” theory.
“The only good Jew for them,”
said Berl Glazer, 85, believed to be the only elderly Orthodox
Jew left in Lithuania, “is a dead Jew.”
***
It took Shmuel Shragge, an 84-year-old
former truck driver, three sentences to sum up the perversion
of history that it has taken me—a Brooklyn-born professor
who settled in Lithuania to set up the Yiddish-studies
program at Vilnius University—close to a decade to understand.
Shragge and his wife, Basye, 81,
a retired medical doctor, are among the last of the prewar
tribe of Litvaks, the Jews of Lithuania, whose seven centuries
of history include some of the greatest achievements of
European Jewish culture. On a recent visit to their modest,
immaculate Soviet-era apartment in Kaunas, once known as
Kovno and now Lithuania’s second-largest city, Shragge
revealed what was for him one of the most horrific memories.
He stood up, walked across the
room and picked off the top sheet of a stack of plain white
paper. Before sitting back down, he abruptly tore the piece
of paper in two and let the halves glide down to the floor.
“That was one of the first atrocities I saw right at the
beginning, before the Germans came, in the hours and days
after war broke out here on June 22, 1941,” he said. I
looked up at him, confused.
“The Soviet army was fleeing the
German bombardment,” he explained. “But it would be some
days before the Germans arrived. They took a young Jewish
girl on the street and sawed her in half, like that piece
of paper, and left the two halves to rot in the middle
of the street, near the center of the city.”
Who was “they,” I asked? “They
are the local Lithuanian ‘freedom fighters’ who were wearing
the white arm bands of the Lithuanian Activist Front, who
got the Holocaust going here by starting to murder Jewish
civilians throughout the country before the Germans even
arrived. Today they are honored as ‘heroes against the
Soviets’ as if the Soviets were running from them.”
But maybe these first Holocaust
murders were directed against Jews who had been sympathetic
to, or collaborators with, the Soviet occupiers who had
taken over Lithuania a year before? “Oh no, those guys
ran away together with the Soviet army,” he answered. “The
massacres of Jews started with old rabbis and young women
as the main targets.”
Today, Shragge said, relations
with his Lithuanian neighbors are excellent, though he
added that there is a lot of anti-Semitism in the country.
I asked him who the anti-Semites are. “The big shots,”
he said. “The government, editors, professors, television
people. Instead of wanting to understand what actually
happened and to teach it truthfully to young people today,
they are obsessed with mixing everything up and claiming
that Nazism and Communism were equal. But you only have
to scratch them to hear that all Jews were Communists and
got what they deserved, and that Communism was the real
genocide here.”
Since independence, the Lithuanian
government has avoided returning prewar communal property,
making it arguably the only country in the European Union
to fail to enact restitution to the Jewish community. However,
egged on by Emanuelis Zingeris, an ambitious Jewish member
of parliament and a member of the dominant right-wing party,
the state has also been toying with ideas to develop the
Vilna ghetto as a Jewish-themed tourist park. Supporters
of the project call it “Fragments.” Opponents, principally
in the Jewish community, dub it the “Dead Jew Disneyland
Park.” The state has also funded Jewish-themed statues,
cultural events, and plaques designating historic buildings.
Lithuania’s contradictory “Jewish
affairs policy”—which it shares with its Baltic neighbors,
Latvia and Estonia, and with right-wing nationalist factions
in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary—originates in
the desire to airbrush the Holocaust out of history. This
wish is intimately intertwined with Eastern Europe’s special
kind of anti-Semitism, which maintains a love for Israeli,
American, and other Western Jews, as well as for the prewar
Jewish heritage but loathes present-day Jewish communities.
At the heart of that loathing is the sin of memory: Local
Jews know that the few Jews who survived did so thanks
to the Soviet Union, while local nationalists sided with
Hitler and carried out much of the killing.
The presence of so few local Jews
is, in part, what has made it so easy for the double genocide
theory, and its corollary of Holocaust obfuscation, to
take root. Ignored by both the Jewish and Western worlds—with
the important exception [6] of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
[7]—the double genocide movement has begun to spread to
major international organizations. Last July, the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe issued the Vilnius
Declaration [8], which included a number of the most noxious
elements from the Prague Declaration. The declaration takes
the assumptions of the double genocide movement as a given
by referring to “two major totalitarian regimes, Nazi and
Stalinist, which brought about genocide.” Moreover, it
calls explicitly for a combined “Europe-wide Day of Remembrance
for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism,” which, observers
point out, would inevitably replace Holocaust Remembrance
Day.
Shamefully, the United States
was among the nations that voted for ratification of this
deliberate distortion of history, which is intended to
whitewash the crimes of local right-wing elements in Eastern
Europe during the Holocaust by eliminating the memory of
the Holocaust itself. When I spoke to several visiting
U.S. congressmen and senators during their visit to Vilnius
for the conference, it was obvious that they did not have
the vaguest idea about the implications of U.S. approval
of the declaration. Among them were Senators George Voinovich
and Benjamin Cardin, who had spoken out forcefully in support
of the Jewish position on restitution of communal property
and against anti-Semitism. But the bigger issue, the revision
of European history to delete the Holocaust, went unnoticed.
***
Holocaust obfuscation is the perverted
product of the attempt to encourage the states of the Baltics
and Eastern Europe to confront the history of World War
II—including local collaboration with the Nazis. In the
late 1990s, as part of their European accession bids, Eastern
European states found themselves pressured by NATO and
the European Union to commemorate the Holocaust. In response,
the three Baltic states each set up “red-brown commissions,”
panels charged with studying both Soviet and Nazi crimes.
The Lithuanian commission, with the Orwellian name the
“International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes
of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania
[9],” has the most notorious history of all. Housed in
the prime minister’s office, the commission succeeded in
attracting Israeli Holocaust scholar Yitzhak Arad, who
is the founding director of Yad Vashem [10], a Holocaust
survivor, and a hero of the anti-Nazi partisan resistance.
In joining the group, Arad was
given assurances of academic independence. But in April
2006, the Lithuanian daily Respublika called Arad a war
criminal for having fought with the anti-Nazi Soviets.
Within months, the state’s prosecutors began an investigation
into Arad. After an international outcry, part of the investigation
was dropped in the fall of 2008. Prosecutors issued a statement
calling on “the public” to provide more evidence, citing
an anonymous “expert historian” who attacked a book Arad
had published in 1979. Observers were puzzled. Arad quit
the commission and is now listed on its website as having
his “membership suspended.” In protest against the entire
enterprise, another member of the commission, British historian
Martin Gilbert [11], resigned.
But this turmoil at the commission
was only the beginning. On May 5, 2008, following demands
made earlier that year in the daily Lietuvos Aidas, state
prosecutors sent armed police to look for two Jewish female
Holocaust survivors, both veterans of the anti-Nazi partisan
resistance. One, 87-year-old Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky,
is a librarian at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute [12].
The other was Rachel Margolis.
As a researcher at the local Holocaust museum, Margolis
had made a sensational rediscovery of the diary of a Christian
Pole named Kazimierz Sakowicz, who witnessed thousands
of murders at Ponar. Sakowicz reported that the volunteer
killers were mostly locals. For this discovery and the
subsequent publication of the diary in 1999 (Yale University
Press brought out an English edition [13] in 2005), Margolis
had become a target of hatred for those who adhere to the
ideology of a “double genocide.”
Both women had been incarcerated
in the Vilna ghetto, and both lost their parents and siblings
in the Holocaust. Both escaped the ghetto on different
dates in September 1943, and both joined Soviet-sponsored
anti-Nazi partisans in the forest. It was this last fact
that enabled prosecutors to allege in “pre-trial investigations”
that the two women should be considered war criminals for
having fought with the Soviets.
Like Arad, Brantsovsky and Margolis
were investigated for war crimes without any charges or
specific allegations, just innuendo based on published
Holocaust memoirs. “At least the anti-Semites finally began
to read our memoirs,” Margolis told me.
The defamation campaign against
Lithuanian Holocaust survivors reached a peak at the end
of May 2008, when prosecutors told the media that the two
women could not be located. This gave rise to Internet
posts claiming “the Jews hide their own criminals.” But
Fania Brantsovsky works at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute
at Vilnius University, a minute’s walk from the presidential
palace, and Rachel Margolis is easily reachable in Rechovot.
Both were found in minutes during the course of reporting
this piece.
When confronted, chief prosecutor
Rimvydas Valentukevicius, from the Division of Special
Investigations at the Prosecutor General’s Office of Lithuania,
told [14] Swedish journalist Arne Bengtsson: “We are investigating
criminal activities, which could be crimes against humanity.
The information has to be checked. It is a normal procedure.
I see nothing political in that. Why is there so much interest
in them? Is it only because they are Jewish?” In reply
to this oft-repeated prosecutorial rejoinder to press inquiries,
Shimon Alperovich, 81, chairman of the Jewish community
of Lithuania, wrote in a widely circulated public letter:
“The prosecutors in Lithuania do not cease to persecute
anti-Nazi Jewish partisans. The Prosecution Service’s claims
that ‘hundreds of witnesses are being questioned’ are belied
by the fact that only Jewish names are ever heard in the
media: Yitzhak Arad, Fania Brantsovsky, Rachel Margolis,
and others.”
Thankfully, there has been one
fortunate wrinkle to this story. For those who believe
in double genocide, it is important to have a paper trail
of investigations into “Soviet Jewish partisans” to “equal”
investigations into Nazi war criminals—and, in Lithuania,
this effort has recently gone spectacularly wrong. For
the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union,
Western embassies in Eastern Europe began to honor persons
hounded by state prosecutors. The Irish ambassador, Donal
Denham, boldly hosted a reception at his residence within
weeks of police questioning Brantsovsky. Then-U.S. Ambassador
John Cloud issued Brantsovsky a certificate of honor. The
British and Norwegian ambassadors recruited Brantsovsky
to lead walks through the former Vilna ghetto for the Lithuanian
capital’s diplomatic corps. The president of Germany awarded
Brantsovsky the Federal Cross of Merit last October. Within
minutes of the award’s presentation, Lithuania’s main Internet
news portal [15] published a vicious attack calling Brantsovsky a mass murderer.
The state’s prosecution service
will neither charge nor clear Rachel Margolis for her “crime”
of surviving the Vilna ghetto, putting her in a legal limbo,
which in effect makes it impossible for her to visit the
country where she was born and where her parents are buried.
“Tell your readers,” she told me, “that the anti-Semites
will never succeed to turn history upside down, because
the free world knows the truth. They know who the Nazis
were and they know who the victims were. It’s really very
simple.” She adds one more thing, from her home in Israel:
“Tell them that I want to return once more to see my hometown,
Vilna.”
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