The Jewish Community of Lithuania issued an eloquent public statement on 7 Sept 2010 (English translation here), following the proliferation of comments from high society circles of politics, academia and the media which sanitize and in some instances glorify the Nazi-collaborationist Provisional Government (see for example here and here).

Often lurking just under the surface is the closely related question of the 1941 ‘L.A.F.’ (Lithuanian Activists’ Front), whose campaign of murder of Jewish civilians in effect launched the Lithuanian Holocaust. They too are glorified by various antisemitic historians and by the state sponsored Genocide Museum in the capital’s center.

The barbaric rampage of murder was underway before the arrival at these sites of Nazi German forces in late June of 1941 (background here; information on specific towns here). The far-right establishment has been looking for a quick sanitization of fascist heroes (recast as ‘brave anti-Soviet partisans’) in anticipation of the 70th anniversary of the events in 2011.

The state-sponsored Genocide Museum in the center of Vilnius fails to even mention the L.A.F.’s murderous role in initiating the Holocaust locally, referring to its members exclusively as anti-Soviet rebels (failing to mention only the ‘detail’ that the Soviets were fleeing the German Nazi invasion, not them).

For background on the L.A.F. and P.G. see extracts from Joseph Levinson’s 2006 Shoah in Lithuania ― 4 meg PDF here; low res here]. Recent debates include the rejoinder by Lithuania’s Liberal MEP Leonidas Donskis to Professor Kestutis Girnius, a Holocaust Studies educator in Vilnius, after the latter tried to sanitize the 1941 Provisional Government. Among Lithuanian historians, Liudas Truska and Valentinas Brandišauskas have steadfastly and courageously defended the historic record against the establishment’s attempt to turn Holocaust perpetrators into national heroes. Over the years, Milan Chersonski, editor of the Jewish Community’s periodical, Jerusalem of Lithuania, has consistently exposed the efforts to glorify the murderers of Lithuanian Jewry (his December 2009 article here).

During the recent debate, MEP Professor Leonidas Donskis has eloquently countered the glorification efforts often disguised as ‘reevaluation of historic perceptions’ and the like (see e.g. Prof. Donskis’ reply to Girnius).

30 September 2010

by Dovid Katz

That a truly great historian of our times can, on very rare occasions, stumble into a meticulously laid trap is no more than to say that we are human and fallible. Or that water is wet. There are many points of view among historians, as there should be, about Hitler and Stalin and the comparative study of their evil works. Analogously, there are competing narratives about myriad aspects of the second world war – not least, the forever intriguing negative counterfactual of “What if it hadn’t happened?” concerning the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August 1939, and, Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941.

But a master historian, and Timothy Snyder is one of the best, always includes, almost as if by a higher inspired intuition, the key to unlock the very trap he may on a rare occasion be failing to avoid. In this case, it is the perspicacious line:

“Entering the lands that they had conceded to Stalin in 1939, the Germans used NKVD crimes as a propaganda justification for the bloody massacres of Jews in summer 1941, in which Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Poles and others took part.”

What I have learned as a researcher of Yiddish who has lived in Lithuania for 11 years is that the obsession with finding some excuse – preferably that excuse – for massive local participation in the Holocaust is very much alive today among the elite classes of politicians, academics (especially historians) and media people throughout the region. And make no mistake, in the Baltics we are talking not just about “collaboration” with the Nazis, but “participation” in the frightening sense of thousands of volunteer killers being on hand to gleefully do most of the Nazis’ killing, in effect of their own neighbours, in the three Baltic states and some other regions. At the same time, one must not for a moment forget the incredible courage of those Balts who did the right thing and saved a neighbour, notwithstanding the danger of imminent death to themselves and their loved ones.

After Baltic independence from the collapsing Soviet Union two decades ago, bold truth-tellers emerged to confront even the darkest spots of their nations’ history. And which of our nations does not have dark spots? In the case of these long-suffering and newly independent states, it naturally took remarkable courage and a deeper love of country (and all the peoples of one’s country) to tackle such painful matters head on.

But then, something went wrong. The three Baltic states in the late 1990s set up state-sponsored commissions to study Nazi and Soviet crimes, but not in an open and democratic spirit. This was a project of ultra-nationalist revisionism with an active political agenda that meant much more to the politicians than this or that historical volume produced for minute readerships. That political agenda was in short, to rewrite the history of the second world war and the Holocaust by state diktat, into a model of “double genocide”. Holocaust denial was, in fact, never an option in a region with hundreds of mass graves. Instead, a new and more worrying “Holocaust obfuscation” movement took off, with a lot of government support in the region. It tries to reduce all evil to equal evil, in effect to confuse the issue in order to write the inconvenient genocide that is the Holocaust out of history as a distinct category.

The steps taken are eerily Orwellian in a well-planned sequence (but not, let it be stressed, a conspiracy: all of it was very public to anyone interested enough to follow events here in the Baltic region). The notion “genocide” was redefined by legislation to include deportation, imprisonment, loss of freedom and much more. This, then, made it possible (in local terms – necessary) to argue that, with the new definition in play, Nazi and Soviet crimes were obviously “equal”. The “slight inconvenience” of the Holocaust then fades away naturally into the new grand paradigm of double genocide in which everybody was killing everybody, in the ultimate postmodernist mush.

Not to mention that the (understandably) Russia-fearing countries that were under Soviet yoke for so long are also not “uninterested” in a big new stick with which they hope to beat Russia down in western eyes to the status of a genocidal equivalent-to-the-Nazis regime. In other words, the policy is being driven not only by ultra-nationalism (“We have a perfect history”), antisemitism (“the Jews were basically communists and got what they deserve”), and anti-Russianism (“they are the same as Hitler”), but by a perceived set of current geopolitical concerns that should not (whether right or wrong) be converting history into a one-opinion discipline with the foregone conclusions being dictated by the state’s apparatchiks.

Here in Lithuania, the powers-that-be have carried all this to absurdity. From 2006 onward, prosecutors, who had the most abysmal record of pursuing Nazi war criminals deported by the United States after extensive legal proceedings, somehow managed to find the energy to pursue Jewish survivors of the ghettos who fled into the forests to join the anti-Nazi resistance. There were no British or American troops in these parts, and yes, the Soviets were the only hope for the tiny number of escapees of the Nazi death machine during the years 1941-45 when the United States, Great Britain and the USSR led the allied coalition against Hitler. None of these Holocaust survivors was charged with anything specific – because there is nothing to charge them with. These were rather campaigns to change history, part of an expensive, extensive effort, slowly but surely, to change the narrative of history to suit the local ultra-nationalists.

It all reached a low point in May 2008, when police came looking for two women survivors in their late 80s, and prosecutors went on to tell the press that they could not be found. To this day, these kangaroo investigations have not been dropped, and there has still been no apology to the two women.

But that is not the half of it. In June of 2010, the Lithuanian parliament passed and the president shamefully signed into law a bill that would impose up to two years’ imprisonment for anyone who might deny or underestimate Nazi or Soviet genocide. In other words, if a historian will say “Soviet crimes in Lithuania were horrific but they do not rise to genocide; there was only one genocide here, that perpetrated by the Nazis and their partners,” he or she is potentially liable to prosecution. Now, Timothy Snyder would be the last to want colleagues of other opinions to have to pay for their ideas with jail time. (Ironically, just such things operated in the Soviet Union – and this is one of the examples of democracy deteriorating to something that is Soviet in form, nationalist in content, and conveniently western in its well-spun presentation to naive foreigners.) It is doubtful whether any historians will, in fact, be charged, tried or imprisoned. What the law has accomplished, however, is to silence nearly everyone into acquiescence to the state-imposed version of history. A very sad state of affairs in a European Union and Nato country.

But this is not a localised Lithuanian, or even a Baltic issue alone. It is part of a new far-right mood sweeping big swaths of the “new accession” states in the eastern regions of the European Union, a phenomenon elucidated by Paul Hockenos in Newsweek last October (“Europe’s Central Disappointment”). In fact, the Lithuanian “jailtime-for-disagreeing-with-the-government-about-history law”, though in the works for over a year, was only enacted right after the new rightwing government in Hungary enacted a similar law (the Hungarian statute imposes a maximum sentence of three years in jail).

But the rightwing-motivated revision of history (to downplay Hitler’s role and play up Stalin’s in order to wipe out the eastern stain of Holocaust participation) is no longer even just an east European game. Using newfound clout in the European Union, the nationalist camp has come up with a plan to get all of the European Union to accept their “double genocide” model. It started in a serious way with a conference in Tallinn, Estonia, in January 2008, ominously called “United Europe, United History”, which promulgated the nonsense that the continent’s unity depends on everybody accepting the same revised history of World War II and the Holocaust (in effect, Double Genocide), or else.

In June of that year, a much larger event produced the “Prague Declaration”, which insists all of Europe agree that Nazism and Communism are a “common legacy” and that a Nuremberg tribunal-grade tool be used to assess communism. The revisionists want all Europe to enact a single commemoration day for victims of Nazi and Soviet crimes. Indeed, this would make the focal point of the second world war history the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, by law rather as a matter of opinion, and of necessity relegate Holocaust commemoration day rapidly to oblivion. Back to Soviet-style mind control, the declaration even demands an “overhaul of European history textbooks” to reflect the revised red-equals-brown history. For shame.

Now Professor Snyder is absolutely right to call for a much-increased attention to the lands occupied by the Nazis after their June 1941 invasion of the western Soviet Union, where a million Jewish civilians were murdered, with massive local help, by the end of 1941 in “the Holocaust by bullets”. But where he is unfortunately aligned with the current political trends into the far-out is in the acrobatics of trying to make Soviet evils of 1940-41 “somewhat equal” to that. They are not equal.

The Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles and Ukrainians are still thankfully with us in 2010, as great nations with deservedly inspirational futures, precisely because there was no genocide. There were horrible crimes, but not genocide. East European Jewry is not there anymore, beyond a tiny and vanishing remnant, because there was genocide. Moreover, as Snyder must know, a Nazi victory in the east, with all that was being planned for the various “inferior races of the east” would not have left these nations ready for independence in 1991.

Lithuania’s one Liberal MEP in the European parliament, philosopher Leonidas Donskis, an incalculable credit to his country and all Europe, has exposed the “Inflation of Genocide” as a semantic and philosophic lynchpin of the series of errors and deceptions underway. I then proposed this definition:

“Genocide is the mass murder of as many people as possible on the basis of born national, ethnic, racial or religious identity as such; with intent to eliminate the targeted group entirely and internationally; without allowing the victims any option to change views, beliefs or allegiances to save themselves; and with large-scale accomplished fulfilment of the goal. Genocide leaves in its wake an extinct or nearly extinct group within the territory under the control of the perpetrators.”

Returning to the actual history of the second world war, Snyder, turning to the important point of local collective memory, happens to be in concord with the Baltic ultra-nationalists who want the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, rather than the genocide of the Holocaust, to be the psychologically central sin of the century; to be sure, the master historian and the local nationalist hijackers of history are coming to it with altogether different tools and motives. But what I can testify, after many years of talking to Lithuanians, Latvians, Belarusians, Poles, as well as Jews, is that, believe it or not, there is a common memory of the war here having started in 1941 – while the events of 1939 continue to be recalled as a nearly bloodless changeover of regimes that was either despised or cherished depending on one’s ethnicity (as politically incorrect as that may sound).

And finally, it is not possible to ignore Snyder’s certainty that “Jews could not help but see the return of Soviet power as a liberation. Soviet policy was not especially friendly to Jews, but it was obviously better than a Holocaust.” The liberating power was, in short order, to become an oppressive power, as has happened not once but many times in history. But in 1944, the USSR did liberate these lands from Nazi dominion, and they did bring freedom to the tiny remaining remnant of the targeted-for-extinction races. From the day the Holocaust started here, in June 1941, the Soviets were often the only hope of escape for members of a doomed race, whether by fleeing eastward before Nazi control was firmly established in the first week after 22 June that year, or, by evading the ghettos to link up with the Soviet supported anti-Nazi partisans in the forests.

Genocide is different from the other crimes of the era, and for this reason, the Holocaust was unique, not just for Jews but for all peoples of good will who want to prevent other genocides in the future. It is, moreover, frankly possible and even constructive for the surviving majority, restored to deserved independence and membership in the greatest unions of democratic states in history, to show non-ethnocentric understanding about the genocide of a minority that had contributed mightily to their country for some six centuries beforehand.

It is strange how things have moved so far down the track, with a massively financed effort by east European governments to cleanse their Holocaust records with a bag of sophisticated artifices, to the point out that even great scholars can sometimes fail to see something very simple: those who liberated Auschwitz (or for that matter, the lands of eastern Europe) are just not the same as those who committed the genocide here. Period.

LSI Chief Analyst Dovid Katz discusses Foreign Secretary William Hague’s recent statement that “Human Rights are key to our foreign policy”:

01 September 2010

by Dovid Katz

The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, aptly wrote in his August 31^st Telegraph op-ed, that “Human Rights are key to our foreign policy”. I am delighted to read that. At the same time, it is perhaps important to point out that the issue of human rights pertains not just to the Congo and North Korea. It is the responsibility of every one of us right here in the European Union, which has in recent years expanded to include states from the former Soviet sphere where things are not always as simple as they seem. Various national programmes are not seldom Soviet in form, ultranationalist in content, and Western in presentation to onlookers.

The problem is, in short, this. Far-right ultranationalist elites who are “as moderate as the rest of us” on nearly all other issues, are in command in much of the new-accession eastern reaches of the European Union, and they know how to present themselves as centrists. In what could be seen perhaps a nod to the BNP, they cannot openly rant against Jews, Russians, Roma and Gays (among others) as such in the EU, and so they have invented a political stand-in: the rewriting of 20^th century history to delete the Holocaust and Hitlerism as unique category (without denying a single death), and proclaiming that a spurious new historical model called “Double Genocide” (in Eurospeak: “equal evaluation of totalitarian regimes”) must become the only available history in every textbook throughout the European Union. Between the lines are countless references to Russians and Jews as the villains of World War II history. This nonsense, implying that those who liberated Auschwitz are the same as those who committed the genocide there (even more nonsensical in my view: the claim that this single version of history is needed to “unite” Europe) was enshrined in the June 2008 Prague Declaration, which has been decried by the dwindling ranks of Holocaust survivors. The declaration claims that the Nazis and Soviets committed equal genocide. Its adherents routinely rubbish the entire anti-Hitler war effort of the Allies, including Great Britain, the United States and from 1941 to 1945, the USSR. Of course, the evils of communism need to be studied and exposed, and various noble European resolutions confront that reality head-on.

It was MP John Mann, founder of the All-Party Group against Antisemitism, who exposed the Prague Declaration even before it was proclaimed. Right after its precursor conference in Tallinn, Estonia, he rose in the Commons in January 2008: “On 22 January, in Tallinn, Estonia, five MEPs from five different countries met to launch a group called Common Europe—Common History. It has the same theme—the need for an equal evaluation of history. It is just a traditional form of prejudice, rewritten in a modern context. In essence, it is trying to equate communism and Judaism as one conspiracy and rewrite history from a nationalist point of view. Those are elected MEPs.”

Fast forward to 2010.

On March 11^th, Lithuania’s independence day, hundreds of upscale fascists marched through the centre of the country’s capital, Vilnius, protected by police. Some sported “redesigned swastikas” and white armbands. The permit for this march was obtained by a ruling party member of parliament. On March 16^th, their brethren in Riga, the Latvian capital, glorified the Latvian Waffen SS legion at the city’s Liberty Monument. And in Estonia, an analogous celebration was held on July 31^st to commemorate the country’s Nazi SS division. That little bit of cleverness—the swastika modified —became quite unnecessary recently. A Lithuanian court ruled— to no public remark from foreign embassies —on May 19^th that the swastika is part of the country’s historic legacy and not a Nazi symbol.

The Lithuanian government has still not withdrawn disgraceful kangaroo “war crimes investigations” into elderly Holocaust survivors who are heroes of the free world for fighting Hitler among the partisans in the forests of Lithuania. Two 88 year old women, Dr Rachel Margolis and Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, are being sent to eternity as “war crimes suspects” neither charged nor cleared. It is a carbuncle on the face of European justice that must not be allowed to stand.

Western democratic values are the core issue. There was stunning silence when Hungary’s new right-wing government passed a law in June ordaining jail-time punishments for those who would deny or even downplay alleged Soviet equality to Nazi genocide. Within weeks, Lithuania’s parliament passed, and its president shamefully signed a similar law. To clarify, if I say “Soviet crimes were awful, but do not comprise Genocide within Lithuania, there was only one Genocide here, the Holocaust”, I am liable to arrest and conviction. What I can report, as a resident of Vilnius for most of the past eleven years, is that even if nobody is ever charged or convicted, the feeling of freedom of speech has been crushed. Every last one of my Lithuanian-citizen friends and colleagues who used to speak up has stopped speaking up. Some have suffered career damage or job loss, others have caved. Many opt for westward migration.

Let me not hesitate to say that during my eleven years living in Vilnius I have been treated splendidly by the delightful and good-humoured Lithuanian people. This is not about everyday folks, it is about a worryingly motivated, politically able and popular group of revisionists whose ultranationalist poison is spreading rapidly in the East, and now taking straight aim at us here in the West, starting with the Prague Declaration and the concomitant demand for all Europe to (in effect) replace Holocaust Remembrance Day with a new Red-Brown day on August 23.

Alas, the UK is not isolated from the spread of this new narrative, with the then Labour Government signing up to the OSCE’s ‘Vilnius Declaration’ peppered with Prague Declaration material in July 2009 and of course the Conservatives’ high profile dalliance with the European Far Right that led to Nick Clegg’s memorable ‘nutters and antisemites’ phrase in one of the general election leaders’ debates last spring.

Enough is enough. Let us here in Britain unite, right across the party divide, to tell our eastern EU partners that it’s just not on. We must speak up and encourage others to follow if we want human rights to remain key to our foreign policy.

Dovid Katz, chief analyst at the Litvak Studies Institute (Vilnius), has drafted an alternative to the Prague Declaration. His websites are: http://www.holocaustinthebaltics.com/ and http://www.dovidkatz.net/.

photo by Ricky Ben-David

Baltic states Equate Nazi and Soviet crimes

article by Ricky Ben-David for The Jerusalem Post

Listen to “Remembering the Litvaks” on RCI HERE.
July 20, 2010 interview with LSI founder Mikhail Iossel on Radio Canada International

Instead of reversing its offensive policies, the Lithuanian government in July 2010 launched a PR offensive which brazenly hijacks the very name of our people, the Litvaks. This had been attempted previously, with a “Litvak Foundation,” whose director, upon resigning, went on to publish on Lithuania’s main news portal an article with disturbing racist overtones, in July 2009, accompanied by an unpleasant antisemitic image.

And now, one year later, in a July 15th 2010 news release, Lithuanian prime minister Andrius Kubilius announced “a working group for creating a Litvak heritage forum.” His chancellor David Matulionis boasted that the website would be up very quickly because “there are rich Litvaks who support the idea,” betraying the effort as yet another half-baked, naked scheme to persuade naive foreigners (the proverbial “Useful Jewish Idiots,” to put it bluntly) to invest in Lithuanian government PR projects in the absence of any real change in government policy. The attempted usurpation of the term Litvak for such distasteful purposes is deeply offensive to Holocaust survivors and their families, and it must stop.

The Litvak Studies Institute hastens to welcome the Lithuanian government into partnership as soon as the aforementioned policies are reversed. The LSI’s Dovid Katz, for 11 years the professor of Yiddish at Vilnius University, and editor of the Holocaust in the Baltics website, has now proposed the following seven confidence-building measures which would cost the Lithuanian government very little and win it so very much. The LSI’s institutional version of this text follows:

(1) Condemnation by leading elected officials of the ongoing anti-Semitic “war crimes investigations” into Holocaust survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance and are heroes of the free world (background here), coupled with abandonment of these sham investigations, apologies to the aged survivors harassed by the prosecution, and, urgently, a top-level invitation to 88-year old Dr Rachel Margolis of Rechovot, Israel, to enable her to visit her native city of Vilnius without fear of arrest or interrogation. This should be accompanied by expressions of regret over the same prosecutors’ failure over two decades to punish even minimally a single Nazi war criminal in Lithuania until it was too late, an issue now highlighted by the great Lithuanian author and humanist Tomas Venclova. This aspect of the sad affair started with the public rehabilitation of Nazi war criminals shortly after independence.

(2) Abandonment of the state’s financing of the campaign to obfuscate and mitigate the Holocaust by means of its Double Genocide campaign, both domestically, and in the European Parliament.

(3) Action to rein in the thriving anti-Semitic activity in the country, which includes mass media hate material worthy of 1930s fascist countries, court rulings that legalize swastika displays, and anti-Semitic exhibits in the state-sponsored Genocide Museum in central Vilnius, among other such egregious examples.

(4) Commitment to preserve as a world heritage site Lithuania’s last Jewish anti-Nazi underground fort which is rapidly disappearing.

(5) Commitment to maintain the Green House (Holocaust Museum) under its current independent leadership, to halt the shameful campaign of harassment against its bold and acclaimed director, and to abandon plans to eliminate the Yiddish language titles of exhibits therein.

(6) Action to repeal the recent legislation that would punish (with prison sentences up to two years!) those who would not agree to a historic evaluation equating Soviet and Nazi crimes by regarding the former, in Lithuania, while being brutal and widespread, as not fitting the definition of the term Genocide. Genocide against the Jews was unique in the sheer singularity of its murder of nearly the entire population of the country’s Jewish citizens (see Donskis 2009; Katz 2009). This law is an affront to the European Union and to elementary principles of democracy and open society. At the same time, state operatives should be required to halt their campaign (which has included removal from employment) against persons who disagree with the state’s antisemitic and Holocaust-obfuscating policies.

(7) Rapid and honorable settlement of communal property restitution with the Jewish Community of Lithuania, and abandonment of the many ruses underway to divert restitution to dead-Jew tourism and/or foreign pretenders enlisted by government bodies.

Changes in policy will result in rapid and inspiring progress in Lithuanian-Jewish friendship and reconciliation. PR shams in the absence of such elementary changes, on the contrary, will only make the situation worse. The Litvak Studies Institute urges the Prime Minister and government of Lithuania to enact these seven confidence-building measures without delay, thereby paving the way for an inspiring and enduring Lithuanian-Jewish friendship.

—LITVAK STUDIES INSTITUTE

http://www.bernardinai.lt/straipsnis/2010-07-14-tomas-venclova-as-dustu/47325

In particular, he writes (and many thanks to Darius Ross for the translation):

“There is nothing new in our relations with the Jews. The anger at Efraim Zuroff continues, there are attempts to substantiate the ‘double genocide’ theory, and we demand: ‘Don’t dare call us a nation of Jew-killers.’ Lithuanians are not a nation of Jew-killers. But, unfortunately, the practice of the last few years does provide a basis for calling Lithuanians a nation of advocates for Jew-killers. We can think what we want about Efraim Zuroff, but he’s right when he says Lithuanians, unlike the Croats, have never penalized/sentenced any Jew-killers. Though it has never been articulated, the position of the courts and of society at large is that all such cases needed to be quietly sabotaged. We are not mature enough to grasp that it ought to be taboo to exculpate and lend support to a criminal only because he is an ethnic Lithuanian (who holds himself to be a patriot) and his victims and accusers are not Lithuanians.”

photo: Julia Blaukopf

Although the groundbreaking, Vilnius-based Litvak Studies Institute (LSI) is a complex, multifaceted organization, and a highly ambitious undertaking, with a richly diverse cultural, academic and civic agenda—indeed, as per its statement of intent, its goals include (but are not limited to): serving as a resonant voice for contemporary Lithuanian Jewish issues; providing a great variety of resources about Litvak culture and the global diaspora of the Jews of Litvak descent; offering a broad spectrum of projects and initiatives (such as the annual publications, public-affairs advocacy, Lithuanian Yiddish programs, literary conferences, heritage tours and Holocaust survivor assistance); and countering the re-emergence of anti-Semitic trends in the region (as manifested, in particular, in Holocaust revisionism and the theory of “Double Genocide”)—the essential animating idea lying at the heart of it is not terribly complicated and can be summed up in rather clear-cut terms: revitalizing, reinvigorating the Jewish life in the onetime Jerusalem of Lithuania, Vilnius (Vilna, a place of profound significance to many generations of Jews in all corners of the world) as a means to restoring and preserving the full measure of basic historic fairness with regards to the Litvak heritage.