Attempts by Baltic states to equate Nazi and Soviet WWII-era
crimes has detractors saying these nations are avoiding
their past by claiming Jews also committed genocide.
VILNIUS – The eerie silence at Paneriai, a village 25 minutes
outside this Lithuanian city where 100,000 were killed during
World War II – 70,000 of them Jews – is deafening. Seventy
years ago, in three years between July 1941 and August 1944,
just over 30 percent of Lithuania’s 220,000- strong Jewish
community was killed and shoved into mass graves, the largest
of which measures 10 meters in diameter. The adjacent railway
was the main mode of transportation for the intended victims,
but some were marched the 10 kilometers from the Vilnius ghetto.
Men, women and children were lined up and shot by the German SS Einsatzgruppe
and the Ypatingas Burys, a Lithuanian killing squad consisting
mainly of volunteers. The mass killings were documented by
SS officer and Einsatzkommando leader Karl Jager in a series
of entries later called the Jager Report, where a typical
log read:
“On my instructions and orders the
following executions were conducted by Lithuanian partisans:
4.7.41 Kauen-Fort VII 416 Jews, 47
Jewesses [Total] 463
6.7.41 Kauen-Fort VII 2,514 Jews”
Another meticulous record of events
was kept by Polish-Lithuanian journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz
in the form of a diary between 1941 and 1943. Sakowicz and
his wife lived in Ponary (Polish for Paneriai) in an apartment
adjacent to the forested areas where thousands were executed.
He wrote down his eyewitness account on sheets of paper,
which he placed in bottles, sealed and then buried. The account
was first published in Polish in 1999 and in English in 2005
as Ponary Diary 1941-1943: A Bystander’s Account of a Mass
Murder, edited by Lithuanianborn Yitzhak Arad, who served
as chairman of Yad Vashem.
The separate sheets of paper were
painstakingly put together over the course of several years
by Dr. Rachel Margolis, a Lithuanian-born Holocaust survivor
and author of A Partisan from Vilna, who found the first
batch of entries while working at the Jewish State Museum
of Lithuania years after the war ended.
Margolis now lives in Israel, but
until two years ago she made yearly visits to her native
Vilnius. In 2007, she received a letter from acquaintances
in the city telling her that uniformed people from the Lithuanian
prosecutor’s office arrived at her registered address looking
for her. They said she was wanted for questioning in regard
to a battle that took place between Jewish partisans and
villagers of Kaniukai in 1944 – a battle in which she denies
involvement. Since then she has not gone back to Lithuania
for fear of being arrested or taken in for questioning.
“I’m too old for this,” Margolis,
who will be 89 this year, told The Jerusalem Post in a telephone
interview. “My life is here now, my daughter lives here,
I will soon have more grandchildren.”
Margolis, Yitzhak Arad and two others
have been the targets of a campaign started in 2006 in Lithuania
to investigate those who joined the partisans for alleged
war crimes against Lithuanian civilians during World War
II.
“This is outrageous,” says Dr. Efraim
Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem
and coordinator of Nazi war crimes research worldwide for
the center. “Not a single Lithuanian war criminal has been
punished in Lithuania and they are going after elderly Jewish
people?”
Some 15 suspected Lithuanian war criminals
were found in the United States in the 1990s, says Zuroff,
of whom only three stood trial in Lithuania: Aleksanzras
Lileikis, commander of the Saugumas, the Lithuanian security
police, Kzys Gimzaukas, his deputy, and Algimantas Dailize,
a Saugumas operative in Vilnius. The three were stripped
of their US citizenships and deported in the early- to mid-90s,
but due to some serious foot-dragging – and to avoid looking
“unpatriotic” – Zuroff says they only stood trial in 2000,
2001 and 2006 respectively. They were never arrested because
by that time they were deemed medically unfit and were not
required to attend legal proceedings. Of the three, only
Dailize was convicted of accessory to murder and sentenced
to five years’ imprisonment – which he never served.
“These were show trials,” says Zuroff.
“Lithuania was fairly newly independent and just becoming
a member of the EU and NATO, and it wanted to show that it
was up to par, but it turned the whole judicial process into
a farce.”
“They are doing this in order not
to have to talk about the Lithuanians’ battle against the
Jews, how they shot the Jews. My parents, my whole family
was shot by Lithuanians. They don’t want to talk about that,
but they want to show that the Jews did them a lot of harm,”
Margolis said in a 2009 interview with Dovid Katz, founder
of the Web site Holocaust in the Baltics (www.holocaustinthebaltics.com)
and of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University.
Brooklyn-born Katz, who is of Lithuanian
heritage, moved to Vilnius in 1999 to start the Yiddish Institute
and only began his Web site – which houses an impressive
collection of entries, statements, documents, links and photographs
in Lithuanian, English and Yiddish related to the Holocaust
in the three Baltic states – in September 2009.
“I started the site because I felt
uncomfortable bombarding people with e-mails. With zero technical
knowledge, I began to publish everything online,” Katz told
the Post. “I am dedicated to fighting this trend of Holocaust
obfuscation and anti-Semitism in the Baltic states.”
Zuroff and Katz maintain that there
is systematic Holocaust distortion, misinformation and miseducation
in the Baltic states, and particularly in Lithuania.
“Lithuania had 220,000 Jews before
the war started. By the end of 1944, 212,000 were killed
– that’s 91% of Lithuania’s Jewish community. That’s one
of the highest kill rates in Europe, except for Estonia,
which only had 1,000 Jews,” says Zuroff, “The Nazis, while
very effective, did not do this on their own. In Lithuania,
Jews were killed by their neighbors before the first Nazi
ever set foot in the country. They don’t talk about that.
They don’t take responsibility.”
Indeed, Nazi propaganda painted local
Jews as communists, adding fuel to the already existing anti-Semitic
fire in the country, and according to Leonidas Donskis, a
Lithuanian MP in the European Parliament, “quite a large
segment of Lithuanian society is still inclined to consider
Jews as collectively responsible for the mass killings and
deportations of civilians, as well as other atrocities committed
during the Soviet occupation,” he told CNN in June.
“The most problematic right now is
the Prague Declaration,” says Katz, referring to the Prague
Declaration on European Conscience and Communism of June
3, 2008, which seeks to have European parliaments recognize
the communist atrocities in the same way Nazi ones were.
The declaration states that “Europe
will not be united unless it is able to reunite its history,
recognize Communism and Nazism as a common legacy and bring
about an honest and thorough debate on all the totalitarian
crimes of the past century,” and calls for the “recognition
that many crimes committed in the name of Communism should
be assessed as crimes against humanity serving as a warning
for future generations, in the same way Nazi crimes were
assessed by the Nuremberg Tribunal.” It also calls for the
“establishment of 23rd August, the day of signing of the
Hitler-Stalin Pact, known as the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact,
as a day of remembrance of the victims of both Nazi and Communist
totalitarian regimes.”
The document has 27 founding signatories
from officials around Europe, including Germany, the Czech
Republic, Sweden and the United Kingdom. It is also signed
by European Parliament member Vytautas Landsbergis, a former
dissident and president of Lithuania, and Emanuelis Zingeris,
a Jewish member of the Lithuanian Parliament and chairman
of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the
Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania,
also known as the International Historical Commission for
short.
This attempt at equating Nazi and
Soviet crimes has been called the “double genocide” theory,
in what many see as an attempt to shirk responsibility by
claiming Jews also committed genocide against Lithuanians,
so essentially everyone’s “even.”
“This is part of a campaign to be
portrayed as the victims also,” says Zuroff.
WHILE UNDOUBTEDLY Lithuania suffered
under the Communist regime – the Soviet occupation of the
country in 1940 was so brutal that many welcomed the Nazis
in 1941 and as the Soviet army reoccupied the country in
1944, hundreds of thousands were killed, deported or imprisoned
– the parallel does not stand, argues Zuroff.
Zingeris maintains that the equivalency
charge is false and that the Prague Declaration is misunderstood.
“The Czech Republic is very pro-Israel.
Lithuania is pro-Israel. This accusation of anti-Semitism
and such is wrong. A Soviet- Nazi conspiracy has no place
here,” he told the Post in his office at the Seimas (the
Lithuanian Parliament) in Vilnius.
However, he concedes that some of
the wording in the declaration can be viewed as problematic
and, as such, insists that there should be a declaration
underlining the differences between Nazi and Soviet crimes.
He claims that an amendment was implemented in February at
the conclusion of the Crimes of the Communist Regimes conference
in Prague to reflect the differences. Article seven of this
document found online – which makes no mention of the Prague
Declaration or who the signatories are – states: “…Communism
needs to be condemned in a similar way as Nazism was. We
are not equating the respective crimes of Nazism and Communism.
They should each be studied and judged on their own terrible
merits.”
“Victims of Soviet crimes have a right
to be remembered. There was so much hidden during the Soviet
years, Lithuanians know little about their own history,”
says Zingeris. “Israelis should include in their memory those
Jews killed by Joseph Stalin. I see no danger in commemorating
the victims of these two evil regimes on the same day [August
23]. There is already an international Holocaust Day.”
As chairman of the International Historical
Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and
Soviet Occupation, founded in 1998, Zingeris plays an important
role in Holocaust education and research in Lithuania. The
commission he heads is charged with publishing educational
materials, research projects and other findings and founding
“tolerance centers” in Lithuanian schools, of which there
are now 67.
“Anti-Semitism is a problem,” says
Zingeris, “We have been sending teachers to Yad Vashem for
training and we publish materials to show the extent of Lithuanian
collaboration in the killing of Jews during WWII.”
IN 2002, Lithuania became a member
of the Task Force for International cooperation on Holocaust
Education, Remembrance and Research and in 2003 a National
Holocaust Education Program was drawn up and implemented
by the International Commission. In 2007, the Commission
signed a cooperation agreement with the Teachers’ Professional
Development Center through which teachers attend Holocaust
seminars at Yad Vashem and in Lithuania.
Ronaldas Racinkas, the executive editor
of the International Historical Commission, says Holocaust
education is mandatory in the fifth, sixth, eighth and 10th
grades in Lithuania but that it is up to the teachers to
decide how much time to spend on any given topic. “We provide
supplementary materials and encourage teachers to spend more
time on such subjects,” he tells the Post. “We also encourage
them to become part of our Tolerance Centers network and
adopt our Holocaust education program, through which we try
to develop a system of values. Teenagers in our programs
go on organized trips to Paneriai and other places where
Jews were killed.”
There are over 200 such sites in the
country and Racinkas and his team encourage all schools to
visit them in their locations “as not everyone can make to
Paneriai.”
The high rate of Lithuanian collaboration
during WWII is a sensitive subject, he says, adding that
their program makes it a point to address the issue head
on, showing the negative aspects, as painful as they are.
“It is our moral responsibility to do so. The problem is
that Lithuanians, unfortunately, still perceive the Holocaust
as a tragedy that happened to the Jews. But the Jews are
part of Lithuania, we have 600 years of Jewish history here.
This was a tragedy that happened to all Lithuanians, not
just Lithuanian Jews,” says Racinkas.
There are now approximately 4,000
Jews living in Lithuania, most of them in Vilnius.
“We are trying to show that the Holocaust
wasn’t just about numbers, it’s about empty streets now where
once it was rich with Jewish culture,” he adds.
DOVID KATZ is unimpressed with Zingeris,
Racinkas and their efforts. “Emanuel Zingeris is hated in
the Vilnius Jewish community. He is the man who is ‘fixing’
the Holocaust for the Lithuanians in exchange for political
gain. He is betraying the memory of the 200,000 Lithuanian
Jews killed during World War II.”
Katz’s sharp criticism of Zingeris
and the Lithuanian government may be the real reason his
contract at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute was not renewed
and ends this month, he suspects.
“It is also my view that they went
after Rachel Margolis because of her role in getting the
Ponary Diary published. I know of others who are finding
themselves in similar situations.”
These are serious charges which Lithuanian
Ambassador to Israel Darius Degutis strongly refutes. “No
one will arrest Rachel Margolis or anyone else if they go
back [to Lithuania]. Any legal action against Margolis, Arad
and others has been stopped,” he tells the Post.
“Let’s look at what Lithuania has
done to reconcile. This prime minister [Andrius Kubilius]
was the first to approve the compensation law [for victims
of the Holocaust] which is now making its way through the
Parliament. This government has set up a special commission
for the preservation of the Vilnius Jewish quarter. Our Holocaust
education is one of the best in Europe according to the OECD,”
says Degutis.
It should also be noted that Yad Vashem
has recognized 728 Righteous Among the Nations in Lithuania,
not an insignificant number for a small country.
Degutis adds, “When speaking about
Stalinism and Nazism, Lithuanians and eastern Europeans need
to be more sensitive when using the term ‘genocide.’ I have
no problem saying that I am ashamed of what some Lithuanians
did in the past. We need to be more explicit when we say
we suffered under Stalinism. It is not about comparing the
two regimes, it is about properly evaluating each of them.”
Zuroff claims that the Lithuanian
government could be doing much more. “For example, September
23 is Holocaust Day in Lithuania, the day of the forced evacuation
of the Vilnius Ghetto in 1943. If a message of acknowledgment
is there on their part, why not choose October 28 when, in
1941, 10,000 Jews were murdered by Lithuanians in Kaunas?
They have to think of the message they are sending.”
“The Prague Declaration must be rescinded,”
adds Katz.
“But things don’t happen in one day,”
counters Degutis. “Critics such as Efraim Zuroff and Dovid
Katz are too reactionary. They won’t focus on anything positive
that we do.”
Last month, the Lithuanian government
announced that the Lithuanian PM has set up a task force
for the development of a Litvak Heritage Forum which would
“unite all Litvaks across the globe into a community.” The
Simon Wiesenthal Center blasted the move and accused the
Lithuanian government of “trying to enlist Jewish support
for its ongoing campaigns of Holocaust distortion and promoting
a false equivalency between Communist and Nazi crimes.”
“Such an initiative is the equivalent
of forming an Armenian support group for Turkish efforts
to deny the Armenian genocide,” said Zuroff in a press release
on the matter.
The Association of Lithuanian Jews
in Israel, the world’s largest organization of Jews of Lithuanian
descent (Litvaks), called for a boycott of the new initiative
on Tuesday. Association chairman Josef Melamed commented:
“Our association understands the Lithuanian government’s
true intentions: muster Litvak support for a false narrative
of World War II that minimized the extensive complicity of
Lithuanian Nazi collaborators in the mass murder of the Jews
in Lithuania and outside her borders.”
“This is an outrageous case of national
identity theft,” adds Dovid Katz.
SO IS Lithuania doing enough to battle
its Holocaust demons? Zuroff doesn’t think so.
“You can’t say that Lithuania doesn’t
talk about the Holocaust. It does. A lot. But it omits and
distorts very critical parts,” says Zuroff.
In the fall, the Simon Wiesenthal
Center will release its annual report on the worldwide investigation
and prosecution of Nazi war criminals, of which the initial
findings were published on Holocaust Day in April. The full
50-page report includes details about the number of convictions,
indictments and ongoing investigations of Nazis in European
countries and a most-wanted list. The Center also gives out
grades based on performance over the last year. In 2006,
Lithuania got a B for its conviction of Dailize but when
the courts refused to implement the punishment “we were astounded,”
says Zuroff. Since then, the country has gotten an F consistently.
Darius Degutis feels that there is
still room for hope.
“If we work at building on the positive,
we can achieve much more. I would like to see them trust
our intentions and not resort to automatic criticism every
time we make a move.”
jpost.com
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