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Call for Lithuanians to admit role in Holocaust

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JORDAN MOSHE

With these words, Lithuanian writer and journalist Rūta Vanagaitė addressed more than 200 viewers in a virtual lecture on Tuesday evening this week.

Hosted by the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, she and Nazi hunter and historian, Efraim Zuroff, recounted their quest for the truth about the Holocaust in Lithuania, and the true extent of atrocities committed on Vanagaitė’s native soil.

“Countries are trying to change the narrative of the Holocaust to deny their own roles,” said Zuroff. “This isn’t a matter of Holocaust denial, but distortion. It’s happening around the world, and we have to deal with the truth of collaboration with the Nazis.”

Authors of Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust, Zuroff and Vanagaitė make an unlikely pair. Vanagaitė was motivated by her recent discovery that some of her relatives had played a role in the mass murder of Jews. Zuroff has for years worked to bring Lithuanian war criminals to justice and compel local authorities to tell the truth about the Holocaust in their country.

Together, they have travelled across Lithuania and Belarus in search of neglected graves, interviewed eyewitnesses, and discovered the lost history of hundreds of Jewish communities.

Zuroff said that in every country occupied by or allied with Germany during World War II, the Nazis typically rallied the local population and enlisted its help with carrying out systematic extermination.

“Every person they could convince to join them freed up a German somewhere where they were needed more,” he said. “They were preparing to launch a mass-murder operation and when they came to Lithuania, they didn’t know the language or the geography.

“Sadly, they often found willing and zealous helpers. These people played a crucial role in implementing the Final Solution and helped to annihilate Jews.”

Collaborators from countries in Eastern Europe differed from those beyond it, he stressed.

“Outside Eastern Europe, locals mostly helped the Nazis by implementing the initial stages of extermination, but their roles ended when the Jews got to the train stations. Within Eastern Europe, however, local helpers were incorporated into the system of mass annihilation.”

When these countries were liberated by Russian forces and became part of the Soviet Union, communist ideology sought to manipulate certain facts about the war and the genocide.

“Within Eastern Europe, it was never referred to as a world war, but as a great, patriotic war of ideologies,” said Zuroff. “The Soviets had helped the Allied forces defeat the Nazis, and as a result, they got away with making little information about the Holocaust available, and never acknowledging the tragic fate of the Jews.”

Where mention was made of victims who had been murdered, Jews were added to other figures and categorised as victims of fascism.

Said Zuroff, “What does this hide? It conceals the identity of Jewish victims and hides the perpetrators. Not just the Nazis, but locals who collaborated with them.

“Why didn’t they want to tell the truth? They didn’t want to acknowledge the Jews, nor do anything to recognise Jewish peoplehood.”

Any acknowledgement of guilt would also undermine the bonds created by socialism, a union with which many Jews were affiliated.

“If they were bound through communism, how could Ukrainians murder their Jewish neighbours?” asked Zuroff. “It didn’t fit the narrative, so it was only in 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed that the truth of what happened could be revealed and countries could face the reality that their own people had been among the murderers.”

More than 220 000 Jews lived under Nazi occupation in Lithuania, 212 000 of which were killed. Ninety percent of them were shot at sites near their homes, while only 10% were sent to camps later on.

Said Zuroff, “Most of them were killed by Lithuanians, something hard to deal with. On the other hand, countries had to start recognising the Holocaust in order to gain access to the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and protect themselves from the Russian Federation. They had to “make nice” with Israel.

“How could they deal with the Holocaust and avoid the truth?”

Sadly, this remains a conundrum today.

“Holocaust-remembrance ceremonies in Lithuania will lament how tragic it was that Nazis came and murdered Jews,” said Zuroff. “The aim is to minimise or hide their own crimes, create false symmetry between communists and Nazis, and insist that killing under communism be called genocide.

“What we found in Lithuania is sad, disheartening, and infuriating.”

This is why Vanagaitė is determined to continue her work with Zuroff.

“Sometimes Jews think that we Lithuanians are antisemites,” she says. “The truth is we’re indifferent. For almost 65 years, I didn’t care. My children don’t care, nor do my friends. I made it my mission to fight indifference.

“We Lithuanians believe that any one of our people who murdered Jews must have been a degenerate. I learned that they were normal people. I need to write these stories so that people know.

“My mission with Efraim as a Lithuanian is to record the truth. People often don’t like what I say – my books have been taken out of shops, and they tried to break me.

“I want to prove that I cannot be broken. I’m for the victims. I share the truth, tell about the victims and perpetrators, and become strong through it.”

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3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. Joel Levy

    Jul 16, 2020 at 8:59 am

    ‘Intriguing and heart felt that people need to take responsibility after so many years for their actions.  Where can I get a copy of the book ?  Regards’

  2. rosalie donadio

    Jul 16, 2020 at 3:14 pm

    ‘I was raised by maternal grandparents, from Birze; my grandmother lost her brother and all his family. And yet as a child (during WWII) when she braided my hair, I heard stories (in  Yiddish) about the trees and brooks .. and how sad the birds were in the winter after all the leaves had fallen but were happy when the first warm breezes returned as did they. She had no toys, was barefoot until the cold return but loved her childhood and all those siblings, most of whom came to the U.S. (a few to S.Africa).  When I learned it was not just the Einsatzgruppen but the Lithuanian neighbors … I was disheartened as I grew up with Poles, Russians and a few Lithuanians: they didn’t seem "different" to me .. we lived on the same block in the same neighborhood. All the women shared the same concerns about their sons overseas and interacted with one another compassionately devoid of "tribal" consciousness. I only learned to love from my Litvak  grandmother and to judge by character and nothing else. She could neither read nor write in any language and yet my sense of justice, tolerance and compassion came from her. I wanted to return (while still able to travel) to see Birze, but my Israeli cousin talked me out of it; he told me it is a graveyard and the world she described no longer existed. So I do cry for the Jews (men, women and many children in that open pit who died painfully) and their "neighbors" who carry still that hate in their hearts. It is a heavy weight and bitter in taste. Apparently, this is the state of the world we live in: toxicity and hatred in full supply and as a species we may pay bitterly for this inability to either "see" or "act" … religion is impotent, politics impotent and the character I was taught about early in life: non existent!

  3. Joel Levy

    Jul 20, 2020 at 9:06 am

    ‘where can i get the book in South Africa ?’

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