Lithuania's selective amnesia

The Third Estate has an interesting piece by one of their writers who's currently travelling in Lithuania. He's visited the so-called "Museum of Genocide Victims" in Vilnius and has noted that through some oversight, certain years have been excluded from its historical record. These reflect Lithuanians' selective memory concerning their history since 1939.

"(M)any different myths (have been) created. The myth of the Workers’ State and the fabulous development it promised, the myth of the proud ethnic Lithuanians against the degenerate Jews and Gypsies or the cunning Russian occupiers, the myth of the salvation of the free market from state planned paralysis, and many others. But what is of particular interest, and particular concern, is the creation of the post 1991 national myth. If the stories the country’s museums tell is anything to go by, there is a deeply problematic story being told.

"‘Museum of Genocide Victims’ in Vilnius is a clear example of it. This is a museum housed in a former KGB building, which offers an account of the history of the period 1940-91 which is as exaggerated as it is incomplete. For a start you would expect something called the ‘Museum of Genocide Victims’ to have something to say about Genocide; but there is nothing. The museum’s story begins in 1939, has a brief gap from 41-44, and starts again in 1944. During this period, 300,000 Lithuanians, 200,000 of them Jews, were executed by death squads or in camps. This accounted for 94% of Lithuania’s Jewish population. These figures are acknowledged, but despite the fact that they dwarf the numbers imprisoned, executed or deported by the KGB the story of the holocaust in that country is not told"

The author notes in passing that this obliteration of memory is related to a resurgence of fascism. In every instance, fascism requires the creation of false history. This is true for several reasons: to create a false golden age which must be reattained, to create false demons which must be fought, and to erase the fascists' own bloody fingerprints.

Lithuania has been a victim both of Nazi and Soviet occupation. About that, there can be no dispute. The question is whether those who choose only to remember the crimes of the Soviets will succeed in resuscitating the demons of the right.

Read the rest here: Lithuania – New Myths and Old. (Hat tip: Harry's Place)

On a personal note: I once met an Estonian woman who claimed about her homeland "we were very accommodating to our Jews". (It actually sounded more like "vee vurr werry accommodating...") I found her view surprising considering that Estonia's Jews were completely wiped out -- for the most part killed by local militias. She went on to tell me at great length how difficult it was for her to leave Estonia and flee to Germany to escape the Soviets.

Did I mention that my grandfather came to the U.S. from Estonia? That's what started that particular conversation. I noticed that this woman's last name had an odd blend of vowels. I asked what kind of name it was. Estonian. I said my granddad came from there. "Oh. What's the family name?" "Chasan." "That doesn't sound Estonian." "It's Jewish." "Oh. Vee vurr werry accommodating to our Jews."

Congress calls for Lithuania to preserve Snipskes Jewish cemetery in Vilnius; Ron Paul casts the sole "NO" vote.

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a resolution calling upon the government of Lithuania to preserve the ancient Jewish cemetery of the Snipekes area of Vilnius. (For background, read here and here and here.) The resolution states that the cemetery, which came into existence in the 15th Century, is a sacred site which should remain undisturbed in perpetuity. Referring to prior Soviet desecration of a portion of the site, it states that although

construction of a commercial building on the site disgraces the cemetery, it does not change its status.

Referring to the work of an international team of scientists who have determined that the site currently threatened with development was an integral part of the original cemetery, the resolution calls upon Lithuania to

give serious consideration to the recommendations being prepared by the international experts group on the basis of the geophysical survey of the Jewish cemetery located in the Snipiskes area of Vilnius, Lithuania, and to take steps that guarantee the permanent preservation of the cemetery site, including the possibility of placing the land under government ownership.

After the initial findings of the experts, released over the summer, indicated that the disputed site was part of the cemetery, the Lithuanian government initially contested the findings of the experts, claiming that human remains found on the site had not been interred in the cemetery.

This resolution passed with 414 "aye" votes, 18 absent members, and only one vote of "nay". That vote was cast by Representative Ron Paul of Texas' 14th Congressional District.

The resolution now goes to either the Senate or to conference committee for final review before a Senate vote.

for more, see GovTrack: H. Con. Res. 255: Expressing the sense of Congress regarding the United States commitment to preservation of religious and cultural sites and condemning instances where sites are desecrated.

Lithuanian Jews survive against the odds; fight back against anti-Semitism

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed several recent articles dealing with Lithuanian anti-Semitism (read here) and Holocaust denial (read here and here and here). Lithuania, as most of you know, was the home to a thriving Jewish community until the Holocaust, during which 95% of Lithuania's Jews were killed by Nazis and collaborators. Of course, this tragedy still has repercussions. I'd like to recommend that those interested in this subject read the following.

First, a wonderful blog called Surviving History (read here), which details a tour of Lithuania's Jewish communities and historical sites. The intimate tone of the recounting of this tour helps bring that community and its past back to life; it's all about the people who keep that community alive against all odds.

Second, I'd also like to very strongly recommend that you read Yaffa Eliach's "There Once Was A World" concerning Eishyshok, the shtetl located on the Polish-Lithuanian border which was her family's home. (Read here and here.) That book is a neglected masterpiece by a brilliant historian writing about a subject she knows well and cares deeply about. Dr. Eliach, through her personal connections, was able to compile documents and photographs and conduct interviews of former residents of Eishyshok. As a historian and author, she suceeded in rendering a complete portrait of that community in human scale.

Third, I also recommend Rootless Cosmopolitan (read here), Rokhl Kafrissen's blog, and Rokhl's column of the same name in the under-appreciated magazine Jewish Currents. She has a syndicated article on Lithuania which you can read here. (Note: Rokhl's blog is not to be confused with another blog by the same name, here.) Jewish Currents, like the Jewish Daily Forward, is associated with the Workmen's Circle / Arbeter Ring. If you're interested in what's going on in the Jewish community, you should be a regular reader of the Forward.

Fourth, from the most recent edition of Jewish Currents, the following is a must-read piece written in response to the recent misguided by the Lithuanian government to exonerate Lithuanian collaboration with the Nazis by accusing Jewish WWII partisans of collaboration with the Soviets.

from Jewish Currents ‘Investigating’ Jewish Partisans in Lithuania (by

Sara Ginaite)

Sara Ginaite, 1944

Recent actions by the prosecutor general in Lithuania, who seems to have been pressured by some to discredit Jewish anti-Nazi partisans, are regrettable. Three elderly Jewish partisans are today being investigated in connection with events at the end of January, 1944 — a military action against an armed village, Koniuchy (now Kaniukai), in the Rudnicky forest area, in which thirty-eight villagers were killed.

Lithuania declared independence in 1918 and became a democratic republic. If Lithuania had been allowed to select its own future, I would surely not be writing this article today. Unfortunately, Lithuania suffered from two cruel annexations.

During the Nazi occupation (1941-1944), over two hundred thousand Jews in Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian henchmen, totally destroying a vibrant community once famed as a center of Jewish culture. Among the victims were almost all of my extended family.

During the periods of Soviet repression (1940-1941 and 1944-1991), over 74,500 Lithuanian citizens perished, including Jews, Russians, Poles and people of other faiths and ethnicities. Many more were oppressed.

About twenty years have now passed since Lithuania freed itself from Soviet occupation and once again became an independent, democratic republic. Its informal, unspoken position has been not to prosecute either the Nazi war criminals or the Soviet oppressors:Lithuanian courts have convicted only two or three of those who participated in killing the Jews and two or three active members of the Ministry for Internal Affairs of the Soviet regime. Taking into consideration the huge number of victims, it looked somewhat strange. Yet the majority of Lithuanians have agreed with this pragmatic approach. It hardly makes sense to begin the prosecution of Nazi war criminals today, since almost all of them are dead — and the Soviet collaborators are too old.

In this context, it is hard to understand the strange new action of opening, in 2008, a pre-trial investigation of the anti-Nazi partisans’ wartime actions. It is also very strange that the prosecutor did not explain the aim of the investigation and his special and very public attention to the Jewish partisans. All this has alarmed me, as a former partisan. It has alarmed, as well, many other Jews around the world, especially Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans of the Allied forces. It has made us suspicious that the prosecutor intends to prosecute (or, at least, intimidate or publicly defame) those who suffered the most and are guilty the least.

Jews did not join the partisans as a normal act of choice. We were forced to fight the Nazis to save ourselves from extermination. We took the gun in our hands in a desperate situation, when our parents, brothers and sisters were murdered, when children were grabbed from their mothers and sent to their gruesome death. We fought in order to survive; we fought against fascism, which was our enemy, the enemy of all democratic forces and the enemy of Lithuania.

The activity of the Jewish partisans was self-defense — in the face of the most overwhelming instance of genocide in human history. In contrast to Lithuanian collaborators, who volunteered to put to death their unarmed civilian Jewish neighbors, and Soviet collaborators, who also volunteered to kill and oppress the Lithuanians, the Jewish partisans’ aim was not to kill anyone, not to ‘inherit’ the property of a murdered people, but to fight our common enemy. However, in a military action, you cannot avoid civilian casualties and death. That is the ugly reality of war, particularly a war of partisans who live in the forest and do battle against a world power.

During the events in Koniuchy, I was not in the Rudnicky forest. I was on assignment to return to the Kaunas (Kovno) Ghetto to prepare a group of ghetto fighters to escape to the forest. I cannot comment, therefore, on the details of the event. I can say this, however: In our own interest, we tried to keep friendly relations with the villagers in the Rudnicky forest. We were never encouraged to harass or hurt them. In order to survive, we did have to collect food wherever we could, often from hostile villagers, but we tried as far as possible to seize food from German food storage areas or transports of food headed for Germany.

But we didn’t always have the luxury of choice. If not for the war, I would have preferred to eat together with my family the dinner prepared by my mother, not to risk my life confiscating a cow from a local peasant. Such a confiscation, and the attack that followed by hostile villagers, during which two of our partisans were killed and a third captured and handed over to the Nazi-controlled Lithuanian police, is described in my book, Resistance and Survival.

There were many villagers, hostile to the partisans, who were organized into armed groups, supplied by the Germans. Yes, they were villagers, but no, they were not unarmed civilians. Such a conflict was most likely the reason for the tragedy in Koniuchy.

Prosecutors can easily turn into agents of injustice if they begin campaigns on ethnic or political grounds that have little to do with the work of identifying specific crimes and seeking to bring to a fair trial their alleged perpetrators. I invite the general prosecutor to put everything into its rightful context and not pursue a policy that appears to be based on ethnic targeting. The first step is to stop and ask: Why now, in 2008, schedule the pre-trial investigation of the circumstances of the event in Koniuchy, instead of examining the murder of 74,500 Lithuanian citizens during Soviet rule — and, yes, into the issue of who took part in the murder of two hundred thousand Jewish citizens of Lithuania during the Holocaust? Any request for bringing to justice the Nazi war criminals and the Soviet oppressors and killers is described as “too late.” Strangely, however, it has just become not too late to use the Lithuanian justice system to discredit those who fought against the Nazis.

How can one not be humiliated by this selective justice, which is, in practice, directed exclusively toward the few surviving Jewish partisans? Investigation of the Koniuchy case is not justice. It is a manipulation of justice, with the goal of forming a negative image of the Jewish partisans and of Holocaust survivors generally.

A state prosecutor need not allow himself to become the instrument of some Lithuanian factions who support the idea of collective guilt and collective responsibility. But it looks as if the prosecutor has surrendered to pressure and has begun this useless investigation knowing perfectly well that he is not going to charge any concrete person with any concrete alleged crime.

The proceedings will only heighten tensions between Lithuanians and Jews, and pave the way to hatred and accusation. The defacing of the Vilnius Jewish Community Center with swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans on August 10th is a disturbing example of what may follow. Perhaps certain organizations and the extreme right-wing press welcome such an outcome, but I doubt that this is so of the Lithuanian government

Over sixty years have passed since the defeat of the Nazis, and almost twenty since the restoration of the independent democratic Lithuanian Republic. According to my understanding, significant motivations for conflict and tensions between Lithuanians and Jews do not exist anymore. We have to face the reality: Virtually all those who committed genocide against Lithuanian Jews are dead.

At the same time, no one shouldforget the contribution of the Jewish community to the development of the first Lithuanian Republic between the two world wars. Jews were a most loyal ethnic minority in Lithuania. Serving in national infantry battalions, Lithuania’s Jews actively participated in the country’s 1918-1919 battles for independence. They defended Lithuania’s interests and political aims during the Polish ultimatum of 1938 and the Klaipeda (Memel) crisis. Jewish organizations and many Jewish authorities helped to enhance Lithuania’s international stature and contributed to the development of its culture and economy.

Unfortunately, the seeds of anti-Semitic poison left by Hitler managed to survive and are still active in Lithuania. The best way to overcome the old and contemporary prejudices and hostilities is to reach a better understanding and mutual respect. I urge the prosecutor to resist those urging him to pour more potent drops of poison onto Lithuanian-Jewish relations. He should abandon these absurd proceedings and assure the last of the last Holocaust survivors, internationally, that they are still welcome to visit their native country without fear of interrogation or “interviews.”

It is high time to pass the investigation of Lithuania’s 20th-century history to historians and educators, not to prosecutors and judges.

Sara Ginaite, a native of Kaunas, was incarcerated in the Kovno (Kaunas) Ghetto and lost almost her entire family in the Holocaust. She escaped into the forests and joined the anti-Nazi partisans. After the war, she was a professor of political economy at Vilnius University for almost twenty-five years before emigrating to Canada in 1983. She published ten books in Vilnius and another two in Toronto,where she taught social science at York University. She was instrumental in arranging for Yad Vashem to honor a Lithuanian family that saved a Jewish child during the Holocaust and has recently negotiated exchange student agreements between Vilnius and Toronto Universities. Her best-known work on the Holocaust is Resistance and Survival: The Jewish Community of Kaunas, 1941-1944 (2005).

There is growing concern in the Lithuanian Jewish community over incidents such as the vandalism pictured here, which occurred at the Vilnius Jewish Community Center on Aug. 10.

Lithuanian Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism still rampant. President promises change.

Regular readers of this blog have noticed several posts relating to the small Baltic state of Lithuania and its horrendous record of official Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. (Read here and here and here). The government of Lithuania has been engaged in a campaign designed to silence or discredit eyewitnesses and scholars who have revealed Lithuanian collaboration in Holocaust atrocities.

This campaign is of the same type as much contemporary anti-Semitism. Rather than seeking to portray Jews as worthy of oppression, it targets Jews as oppressors. In this instance, Jews who reveal Lithuanian collaboration are slandered as collaborators in Soviet oppression of Lithuanians.

Now comes word from the blog Rootless Cosmopolitan that at least one recent chapter of official Lithuanian Holocaust denial may be coming to a close (read here), largely as a result of the intervention of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (read here). Of course, it remains to be seen whether the Lithuanians truly cease this attempt to rewrite history and persecute those who witnessed it.

Below, I've posted a brief article written by the cousins of Rachel Margolis, one of the Lithuanian Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who has spoken up about the role of Lithuanian collaborators. In addition to being a survivor and eyewitness to the Holocaust, she is a scholar who has uncovered other eyewitnesses. It is her role as scholar which brought her to the attention of the Lithuanian security service. Below that, I've posted an excerpt from an article published recently in Haaretz dealing with the same set of facts.

The book mentioned below, Ponary Diary, 1941-1943: A Bystander's Account of a Mass Murder by Kazimierz Sakowicz is available from Amazon here. Excerpts are available from Google Books here. More background, featuring photographs of Rachel Margolis, is available in this article (pdf). This piece from BBC News (read here) also provides some useful background to the case.


from the Cleveland Jewish News:

From hero to harassed: Lithuania’s campaign against Holocaust survivors
BY: BUDD MARGOLIS and MARJORIE MARGOLIS

Our cousin Rachel Margolis is not in her native Vilnius this summer, as she has been in summers past, to teach visitors from around the world about Lithuania’s role in the Holocaust.

Despite the fact that the Lithuanian prime minister honored her three years ago as a war hero, the Lithuanian government is now turning on her and the country’s other few surviving Jews.

As a member of the EU, Lithuania is obligated to research and reconcile its role in the Holocaust. However, it has failed to convict a single one of its citizens of the war crimes documented in the Sakowicz diary, an eyewitness account by a non-Jew of the mass killings of Jews and Poles at Ponary, Lithuania. (See related article on p. 39.)

Instead, Lithuanian prosecutors are culling the memoirs of survivors like our cousin Rachel to find evidence of deaths of Lithuanian citizens at the hands of pro-Soviet partisans. (Rachel wrote a memoir recounting her escape from the ghetto and her experiences as a partisan.)

This is the government’s shameless attempt to divert attention away from its failure to ever seriously punish a single mass murderer.

Against this European context, the local shenanigans against survivors have unfolded. In 2005, Holocaust survivor and resistance fighter Yitzhak Arad, who for 21 years was director of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, was persuaded to join a Lithuanian commission investigating Nazi and Soviet crimes. A short time later, a blatantly racist newspaper article accused him of “war crimes” based on passages in his book The Partisan. On the heels of that, an equally racist prosecutor followed suit.

The same pathetic sequence unfolded again on Jan. 29, 2008. a blatantly anti-Semitic and vicious article appeared in a daily newspaper in Vilnius misquoting and misusing a passage in our cousin Rachel’s memoir (published in Russian) as “evidence” against Fania Brantsovsky, now 86 and librarian of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University.

In response to these outrageous and unwarranted claims, the Yiddish institute organized a certificate of honor for Brantsovsky, as did the American Embassy in Vilnius. Both were awarded to her on April 30.

Five days later, however, men in dark suits came to Rachel’s home looking for her as a “witness against Fania.”

Even more recently, on Aug. 9, erev Tisha b’Av, which marks the fall of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, the Jewish Community Center in Vilnius was vandalized. Anti-Semitic grafitti was scrawled on the walls and windows of the building.

Lithuania’s hatred for its few remaining Jews grows worse and worse, seemingly daily.

Incredible! The country with the worst Holocaust record in Europe, while failing to punish any of the mass murderers of its Jewish population, has decided, in 2008, to continue its campaign of defamation, harassment and intimidation against the tiny handful of Holocaust survivors who are alive precisely because they joined the anti-Nazi partisans and fought valiantly against the German war machine in the forests outside Vilna

But you haven’t heard the greatest absurdity: The European community has bestowed on Vilnius the status of “Capital of European Culture” for 2009. Alas, a more apt description would be Capital of European Racism, Anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial.

We do not want the Lithuanian government to benefit from the injustices it has committed. We do want the interrogation, defamation and harassment of people like Yitzhak Arad, Fania Brantsovsky, and Rachel Margolis to stop; we want these bona fide heroes to be welcome in Lithuania so that they can continue their Holocaust education of others.

Budd Margolis is a native Clevelander, and his cousin Marjorie Margolis joined him and other Cleveland teens on two teen tours led by his father Henry Margolis, director of the Cleveland Bureau of Jewish Education in the ’70s.

Lithuanian Nazi war criminals

Algimantas Dailide- Former operative of the Saugumas (Lithuanian Security Police), Vilna District. A Cleveland-based realtor, Dailide remains in Cleveland.

Aleksandra Lileikis (died mid-trial)

Kazys Gimzauskas (suffers from Alzheimer’s)

All three were denaturalized and ordered deported, but for various reasons were never punished.

Haaretz had this to say about Rachel Margolis' run in with the Lithuanian security service (read here):

A few months ago, Lithuanian policemen and agents from the security service knocked on Rachel Margolis' door in Vilna. Fortunately she was not home, and was thus saved the humiliation of an interrogation. Margolis, almost 90, was a Jewish partisan during World War II, and is finding it difficult to recover from the trauma even now, when she is living in her daughter's home in Rehovot.

"My sin in the eyes of the nationalists and the anti-Semites in the Lithuanian government," she says, "was that I was a partisan and fought against the Nazis and their collaborators."

The Lithuanian policemen and agents wanted to interrogate her about her memoir, in which she told about her partisan colleagues who in January 1944 attacked the village of Koniuchy (or in Lithuanian, Kaniukai).

The Lithuanian partisans, who operated under the aegis of the Central Partisan Command of the Soviet Union, had information that there was a German garrison in the village. After the fact, it turned out that the Germans had abandoned the place. In the battle that ensued, 38 villagers were killed, including women and children. In independent Lithuania, with a tendency to rewrite history after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, they describe this attack as a "massacre," and a special prosecutor opened an investigation.

Margolis says she was not even in Lithuania at the time of the attack, and was active in another partisan unit in White Russia.

"I wrote a book about the war, and in it I mentioned in a few lines that I had heard from partisan friends about the attack," she says.

In the book she mentions another partisan friend who was among the attackers, Fania Brantsovsky, and another partisan, Sara Ginaite, both of whom are also suspects and wanted for interrogation.

"That's Lithuanian chutzpah," says Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israeli branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. "To date, Lithuanian governments have not punished a single Lithuanian war criminal. In spite of our considerable efforts and the large amount of information we have given them, they handled three cases with astonishing slowness. Not one of the three served a single day in prison. On the other hand, they're not ashamed to persecute and harass Lithuanian partisans who fought the Nazis. What is common to all these cases is that they're all Jews. Instead of punishing Lithuanian criminals who collaborated with the Nazis and murdered Jews, they're harassing the partisans, Jewish heroes."

Perhaps the height of chutzpah was the attempt by Lithuania to investigate Dr. Yitzhak Arad, a Holocaust historian and one-time partisan, a former brigadier general and a chief education officer in the Israel Defense Forces, and the chairman of the board of Yad Vashem.

The Lithuanian claim against Arad was that he served in a Soviet security services, the NKVD, which engaged in murder and looting, and that he was involved in the murder of innocent Lithuanians. In the Lithuanian newspaper, Republika, they even published an article two years ago entitled "The expert with blood on his hands."

Arad explained that the Lithuanian claims against him were false. The Foreign Ministry and Yad Vashem sharply protested the Lithuanian demand, and refused to cooperate with the request.

Here's a thumbnail of the what Rachel Margolis uncovered about what happened at Ponary:

The Polish journalist W. Sakowicz, noted in his diary:

Bonfires burn near the station - They were kindled by policemen. Again a train from Vilna – they have arrived. The people were driven out from the carriages, and immediately a small batch was taken to the pit. The ones with poorer clothes on weren’t even undressed.

They were driven to the pit, and shooting began immediately.

Another batch of people were standing nearby and, on seeing what had happened to their nearest, began to yell. Some started running. A little lagging behind the others with her hair dishevelled, a woman is running pressing her child to her breast. The woman is chased after by a policeman, he smashes her head in with the rifle butt, the woman collapses

The policeman seizes the child by its leg, drags it to the pit. Among those participating in the Ponary massacre of 5 April 1943 was SS Sergeant Wille. “While shooting,” noted a German Security Police report, Wille “was attacked by a Jew” and wounded “by two knife blows in the back and one blow in the head.”

He was immediately taken to the military hospital in Vilna. “His life is out of danger,” the report continued, and added: “A Lithuanian policeman was fired at while some fifty Jews tried to escape, and he is badly wounded.” In Vilna the poet Shmerl Kaczerginski was standing not far from the ghetto gate. “I saw a young fellow sneaking in,” he later recalled, “bloody, weary, disappearing quickly into a doorway.”

In the security of someone’s home, the young man then pulled of his clothes, washed away the blood, tied up his wounded shoulder and whispered to those who had crowded around him: “I come from Ponary.” Kaczerginski added- “We were petrified. The young man told them: “Everyone – everyone was shot!” The tears rolled down his face. “Who”, he was asked. Did he mean the four thousand who were being sent to Kovno? Yes.”

In 1944 at the Ponary execution site Szloma Gol was among seventy Jews, and ten Russian prisoners –of – war suspected of being Jewish, who as members of a “Blobel Kommando” , had to dig up and then burn the bodies of those who had been murdered during the years 1941 – 1943.

Each night the eighty prisoners were forced to sleep in a deep pit to which the only access was by a ladder drawn up each evening. Each morning, chained at the ankles and waist, they were put to work to dig up and burn tens of thousands of corpses. These eighty prisoners were supervised by thirty Lithuanian and German guards and fifty SS men. Their guards were armed with pistols, daggers, and automatic guns – one armed guard for each chained prisoner.

Two and a half years later Szloma Gol recalled how, between the end of September 1943, when their work began, and April 1944:

We dug up altogether 68,000 corpses. I know this because two of the Jews in the pit with us were ordered by the Germans to keep count of the bodies – that was their sole job. The bodies were mixed, Jews, Polish priests, Russian prisoners-of –war. Amongst those that I dug up I found my own brother. I found his identification papers on him. He had been dead two years when I dug him up, because I know that he was in a batch of 10,000 Jews from the Vilna ghetto who were shot in September 1941.

The Jews worked in chains, anyone removing the chains, they were warned, would be hanged. As they worked, the guards beat and stabbed them. “I was once knocked senseless on to the pile of bodies,” Szloma Gol recalled, “and could not get up, but my companions took me off the pile.”

Then I went sick.” Prisoners were allowed to go sick for two days, staying in the pit while the others worked. On the third day, if they were still too sick to work, they would be shot. Szloma Gol managed to return to work. As the digging up and burning of the bodies proceeded, eleven of the eighty Jews were shot by the guards – sadistic acts which gratified the killers, and were intended to terrorise and cow the prisoners.


But inside the pit, a desperate plan of escape was being put into effect – the digging of a tunnel from the bottom of the pit to a point beyond the camp wire, at the edge of the Ponary woods.

While the tunnel was still being dug, a Czech SS man alerted the Jews to their imminent execution, “They are going to shoot you soon”, he told them, and “they are going to shoot me too, and put us all on the pile. Get out if you can, but not while I am on guard.”

One of the sixty-nine surviving prisoners, Isaac Dogim, took the lead on organising the escape. Dogim had been placing the corpses in layers on the pyre one day, when he recognised his wife, his three sisters and his three nieces.

All the bodies were decomposed, he recognised his wife by the medallion which he had given her on their wedding day. Another prisoner, Yudi Farber, who had been a civil engineer before the war, joined in the preparations for the escape.

On 15 April 1944 the prisoners in the pit at Ponary made their bid for freedom. Forty of them managed to get through the tunnel, but a guard, alerted by the sound of footsteps on the pine branches, opened fire.

In the ensuing chase twenty- five Jews were shot, but fifteen managed to reach the woods, later most of them joined the partisans in the distant Rudniki forest. Five days after the escape, the remaining twenty-nine prisoners were shot.

Lithuanian militiamen in Kovno round up Jews, June 25-July 8, 1941

Shooting at the edge of a pit

Ponary near Wilno (Vilna)/Vilnius, Lithuania,
Jewish victims of execution before the mass burial, 1943.

The President of Lithuania, Valdas Adamkus, has apologized for the recent investigation and promised Dr. Shimon Samuels of the Wiesenthal Center that the case is closed. Here's the Simon Wiesenthal Center's press release:

Vilnius, 7 August, Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus today received the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Director for International Relations, Dr.Shimon Samuels, at the Presidential Palace in Vilnius. Samuels raised the following issues of concern in the Jewish-Lithuanian context: -the poisonous political climate conflating the fate of Jewish Holocaust victims mass murdered in Ponar with that of Lithuanians exiled to the Soviet Gulag
-- the subsequent antisemitic media attacks and judicial harassment of elderly Jewish partisans, Fania Brantsovskaya and Rachel Margolis - as also Yad VaShem Chairman emeritus, Dr.Yitzhak Arad
-- the restitution of Jewish community property and the dispute over the Jewish cemetery
-- the lack of Holocaust education

Now a member of European and Western international organizations, Samuels urged Lithuania to comply with their provisions on tolerance and anti-racism,with a special historic responsibility to join the campaign against resurgent antisemitism at the UN Durban Review Conference in Geneva next April. The Centre, likewise, called on Lithuania to "celebrate the anti-Nazi resistance by both Jewish and non-Jewish partisans." Samuels acknowledged the President's statement denouncing Skinhead violence,the banning of Nazi insignia and his wreath laying at the AMIA Jewish Centre bombsite on his State visit to Argentina. "Mr.President, all these measures are eclipsed by the offense to the Jewish partisans," continued Samuels, "as a respected international statesman and Ambassador of Goodwill of UNESCO, our Centre calls on you to invoke your moral authority for prompt closure on this issue...the United States Congress has just registered its own discontentment." "Next month's 65th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto is perhaps a fitting occasion for a Presidential major statement honoring the anti-Nazi resistence by inviting Fania, Rachel and Dr. Arad as guests of the State," concluded Samuels. President Adamkus responded by condemning the Holocaust as, "the most horrible crime of the twentieth century," adding, "Lithuania, a small country, lost its leading Jewish intellectuals and doctors to the Nazi genocide and its leading citizens to the Soviets." He added, "I recognize the crimes committed by my fellow Lithuanians. This group destroyed our image...our Righteous Gentiles, though few, showed what should have been our true principles. These were moments of which I am ashamed." "Regarding the cemetery, it was first desecrated by the Soviet Sports Palace in the 1950's. The open space in front of it - even if privately owned - is to be sequestered and dedicated to Jewish memory for generations. Our Prime Minister agrees that it must be untouched." "On the partisans, I have spoken with the Attorney General, the Arad case is closed. Neither are the two women suspects. If they would give their expertise in a historical investigation, that would be welcome." Samuels advised that this formula would be construed as continued implication in a judicial process and requested a public statement confirming the definitive closure of this painful crisis. The Centre thanked the President looking forward to the implementation of these oral commitments.

Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus (L) with Dr. Samuels.	With Fania Brantsovskaya

Lithuanian desecration of Jewish mass-grave from Holocaust halted

Nations which participated in the Holocaust and subsequently suppressed that history are having a problem. The bones of their victims keep on turning up unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places.

As you read these reports, keep in mind the following which I reported on this blog recently (read here). According to Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israeli branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center:

"To date, Lithuanian governments have not punished a single Lithuanian war criminal. In spite of our considerable efforts and the large amount of information we have given them, they handled three cases with astonishing slowness. Not one of the three served a single day in prison. On the other hand, they're not ashamed to persecute and harass Lithuanian partisans who fought the Nazis. What is common to all these cases is that they're all Jews. Instead of punishing Lithuanian criminals who collaborated with the Nazis and murdered Jews, they're harassing the partisans, Jewish heroes."

from JTA:

Construction plans at the site of a Jewish mass grave in Lithuania have been scrapped. A site near Marijampole where tens of thousands of Jews were killed during the Holocaust recently had been sold to a company that had begun demolishing buildings at the site, disturbing the remains there.

Bones began to appear after concrete pavement at the site was dismantled. Heavy rains sometimes would wash new bones to the surface.

Jewish community leaders asked that the town halt work at the site, and Lithuanian authorities said this week the construction work would cease.

A local newspaper, Lietyvoa Zinios, reported that the remains that had risen to the surface would be buried with the cooperation of Jewish community leaders.

The site is located behind a czarist-era military town near Marijampole. Most of the Jews and other victims of the massacre there were killed by Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators on a single day: Sept. 1, 1941. The site had been marked by a memorial, and the bodies had remained under heavy slabs of concrete and buildings.

more from the Baltic Times:

Authorities of the Lithuanian Jewish community and municipality administration of southern Lithuanian city Marijampole agreed there will be no more digging in the location of mass extermination of Jews. The remains of the killed will be buried, Lietuvos Zinios daily reported.

According to the Marijampole Municipality official in charge Gedeminas Kuncaitis, mass killings of inhabitants on the bend of Sesupe behind a military town built during the reigning of the tsars, took place in 1941.

On September 1st of that year alone, Germans, with the help of some Lithuanians, killed over 5,000 inhabitants here, most of whom were Jews, also killing some Lithuanians and Marijampole's inhabitants of other ethnic origins.

"Approximately some 8,000 people were killed here. The killing site is marked by a memorial, but there are no burial grounds of the victims in the area that is identified in documents as a protected Jewish extermination territory, as they all buried under the buildings of the former military town and its vicinities. This was confirmed by archeological inquiries conducted in 1996", Kuncaitis said.

According to the chief specialist, officers had erected a few military equipment storehouses and an ammo warehouse, and made embankments on the massive killing sites during the Soviet times. After the occupational army left Lithuania following the restoration of its independence, the said buildings were given over to the State Property Fund.

A company owned by Vidas Kalasinskas and Daiva Kalasinskiene bought the buildings this year for demolition. Officials of the Municipality of Marijampole issued a permit for taking down the buildings without prior coordination with specialists of the Department of Cultural Heritage. Human bones were found when tidying up the area and dismantling the concrete pavement. Even though construction works were halted at once and bones lying around on the ground were all gathered, any larger downpour of rain washed new bones afloat to the surface.

According to Kuncaitis, no more demolition works are planned on the burial ground site of massive Jew killings, even though a part of it is still covered in concrete. "It is about a meter thick there, therefore it will be impossible to dismantle it without heavy machinery. It hasn't been decided what to do with embankments made by Russian officers, which also contain the remnants of a large number of people's remains.

An excellent thumbnail sketch of the town is provided by the “Marijampole” chapter from Pinkas Hakehillot Lita translated by Yad Vashem and made available online by the Jewish Geneology website. The following is an excerpt dealing with the massacre:

On Sunday, June 22, 1941, German airplanes bombed Marijampole at dawn and destroyed the center of the city. Some 20 civilians, most of them Jews, were killed. Those made homeless in the bombing found shelter with other Jewish families. The German army entered Marijampole on the following day, June 23, 1941, after they had surrounded the city and blocked the roads leading eastward. Most of the Jews who fled the city were forced to return. Many were murdered by Lithuanians who ambushed the returning Jews. Very few did succeed in fleeing to the Soviet Union. Even during the first days of occupation many Jews were arrested on various and sundry charges. All those arrested were subsequently murdered in a forest 4 kilometers from the city in the direction of Vilkovoshok (cf)[Vilkaviskis]. Every morning Jews were required to leave on various work details; the men in clearing bomb damage and the women in farm work and domestic service. The elderly, including the town's rabbi, R. Heller, were occasionally required to sweep the local streets. Some of the Jewish youth who actively opposed the Germans and their Lithuanian helpers were murdered and some were hanged at the market square.

On July 15, 1941, the Lithuanian regional governor issued an order that prohibited Jews from being found on certain streets, at the local bathing areas, city parks, coffee houses and restaurants, libraries, and other public places. They were forbidden from purchasing food from street vendors, markets, or on the road, but were restricted to stores at fixed hours, which were set by the governor. They were not permitted to make use of services offered by non-Jews and they were required to wear yellow stars on both the front and back of their clothing. One day a group of Jews was brought to the courtyard of the synagogues and were forced to remove the Torah scrolls from the arks and all the other sacred texts from the shelves, gather them into a pile, and set them on fire. That same month an order was issued that required the Jews to abandon their homes and gather in the synagogues and some adjacent houses. In this packed area, it was easier for the Germans to rob the Jews, take them for forced labor, and abuse the young women at night. The Germans would occasionally choose strong young men for forced labor and then murder them on the city's outskirts.

In August, the Germans forced the Jewish youth to dig trenches behind the barracks along the Sesupe River. They knew that these trenches were meant for the Jews. When they told their parents, there were strenuous efforts made to prevent [their mass murder] but to no avail. At the end of the month Jewish communal workers were summoned to the Lithuanian governor who informed them that a large ghetto would soon be established in the cavalry barracks and that all the surrounding area was to be turned over to the Jews. To further mislead them, they were told by the Germans that as long as the war continued, they would be permitted to control the economic and social aspects of their lives [in the ghetto]. The Jews packed their belongings and in a long procession made their way in the direction of the barracks. When they arrived, the men were separated from their families and squeezed into the stables. The following days the men were subject to severe mistreatment that the Germans referred to as 'sporting activities.' Jews from Kazlova-Roda (cf) [Kazlu-Ruda], Ludvinova (cf) [Liudvinavas], and other surrounding localities were also brought to the barracks. On August 30 they were joined by the Jews of Kalvarija. On Monday, 9 Elul, 5701 (September 1, 1941), the Jews of Marijampole were among the 7,000 to 8,000 Jews and 1,000 members of other nations who were murdered in the valley next to the Suspe River. They were all buried in the eight trenches previously dug. Each trench was 70 meters long and 3 meters wide. The mass executions continued from 10 o'clock in the morning until 4 o'clock in the afternoon. The majority of the murderers were Lithuanians and among them were many high school and university students. The men, stripped completely naked, were brought to the trenches in groups of between 100 and 200. They were forced to lie in rows and were shot from above by machine guns. When the turn of the women and children came, chaos reigned. The drunken murderers pushed their victims into the pits and smashed the skulls of the children with clubs and spades. Eyewitnesses among the Lithuanian workers who were brought the following day to cover the trenches said that the earth there continued to move for days. Two Jewish families committed suicide -- Dr. David Rosenfeld poisoned himself, his wife and his daughter. Cantor Lansky did likewise with his wife and three children.

The site of the mass graves near the military barracks and the Monument at the site. The inscription in Yiddish and Lithuanian says:

"Here blood was spilled of about 8000 Jewish children, women, men and of 1000 people of different nationalities, that the Nazis and their local helpers cruelly murdered in September 1941"

Lithuania hunts elderly Jews, not Nazis

from Haaretz


Chasing down Jewish partisans - not Nazi collaborators
By Yossi Melman

A few months ago, Lithuanian policemen and agents from the security service knocked on Rachel Margolis' door in Vilna. Fortunately she was not home, and was thus saved the humiliation of an interrogation. Margolis, almost 90, who was a Jewish partisan during World War II, is finding it difficult to recover from the trauma even now, when she is living in her daughter's home in Rehovot.

"My sin in the eyes of the nationalists and the anti-Semites in the Lithuanian government," she says, "was that I was a partisan and fought against the Nazis and their collaborators."

The Lithuanian policemen and agents wanted to interrogate her about her memoir, in which she told about her partisan colleagues who in January 1944 attacked the village of Koniuchy (or in Lithuanian, Kaniukai).

The Lithuanian partisans, who operated under the aegis of the Central Partisan Command of the Soviet Union, had information that there was a German garrison in the village. After the fact, it turned out that the Germans had abandoned the place. In the battle that ensued, 38 villagers were killed, including women and children. In independent Lithuania, with a tendency to rewrite history after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, they describe this attack as a "massacre," and a special prosecutor opened an investigation.

Margolis says she was not even in Lithuania at the time of the attack, and was active in another partisan unit in White Russia.

"I wrote a book about the war, and in it I mentioned in a few lines that I had heard from partisan friends about the attack," she says.

In the book she mentions another partisan friend who was among the attackers, Fania Brantsovsky, and another partisan, Sara Ginaite, both of whom are also suspects and wanted for interrogation.

"That's Lithuanian chutzpah," says Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israeli branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. "To date, Lithuanian governments have not punished a single Lithuanian war criminal. In spite of our considerable efforts and the large amount of information we have given them, they handled three cases with astonishing slowness. Not one of the three served a single day in prison. On the other hand, they're not ashamed to persecute and harass Lithuanian partisans who fought the Nazis. What is common to all these cases is that they're all Jews. Instead of punishing Lithuanian criminals who collaborated with the Nazis and murdered Jews, they're harassing the partisans, Jewish heroes."

Perhaps the height of chutzpah was the attempt by Lithuania to investigate Dr. Yitzhak Arad, a Holocaust historian and one-time partisan, a former brigadier general and a chief education officer in the Israel Defense Forces, and the chairman of the board of Yad Vashem.

The Lithuanian claim against Arad was that he served in a Soviet security services, the NKVD, which engaged in murder and looting, and that he was involved in the murder of innocent Lithuanians. In the Lithuanian newspaper, Republika, they even published an article two years ago entitled "The expert with blood on his hands."

Arad explained that the Lithuanian claims against him were false. The Foreign Ministry and Yad Vashem sharply protested the Lithuanian demand, and refused to cooperate with the request.

However, they are some in Israel who believe that neither the Foreign Ministry nor Yad Vashem are acting with the determination expected of them, and are demonstrating weakness. There are voices who believe that Israel should lower its diplomatic contacts with Lithuania if it continues harassing Jewish and Israeli partisans. One of the critics is Zuroff.

"In the State of Israel, they prefer to let Jewish organizations do the dirty work and fight against the rewriting of history in Lithuania," Zuroff said. "The State of Israel and those involved in the issue should have made it unequivocally clear to the Lithuanian government that it is crossing all the red lines."

Another harsh critic of Israeli policy is historian Prof. Dov Levin, an expert on Lithuanian Jewry. Levin chronicles in his books how more than 200,000 Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, mainly by the Lithuanian collaborators who were eager to engage in murder without the German Nazis having to convince them.

Levin, himself a partisan in Lithuania and a member of the Yad Vashem council, was opposed to the decision about 10 years ago by the Foreign Ministry and Yad Vashem to cooperate with Lithuania in the study of the history of World War II. His view was not accepted, and a joint international committee of Israeli, Lithuanian and other historians was established.

The committee, actually two subcommittees, is studying the murder of the Jews in the Holocaust in Lithuania as well as the murder of Lithuanians, during the period of the Soviet occupation of the country from 1940-1941 - as part of the infamous 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - as well as the Soviet period from 1945 until independence in 1991.

By doing so, the committee is unfortunately helping the Lithuanians equate the two historical developments. Levin believes that Yad Vashem should have severed any connection with the Lithuanian government and ended its activity.

"I told Yad Vashem, 'stop kissing up to the Lithuanians, it's kissing up to evildoers,' " he emphasizes. Levin says that in a protest move, he recently decided to return the decoration of honor he received in 1993 from the Lithuanian president. He also decided not to visit Lithuania again. "In the past I went there but now it disgusts me."

The Lithuanian ambassador to Israel did not respond to Haaretz.

'Good diplomatic ties'

The deputy general director of the Foreign Ministry, Pinhas Avivi, said that "the ministry takes the persecution of the Jewish partisans very seriously, and we have made that clear to them by every means and at every opportunity. But we do not believe that there is a reason to destroy our relations with Lithuania and to harm the good diplomatic ties between the two countries."

Yad Vashem responded: "To say that we are 'soft toward the Lithuanians' in the affair of Dr. Yitzhak Arad is groundless slander by someone who perhaps is not familiar with the entire picture. Regarding our participation in the committee, it is important to emphasize that in light of the historical revisionism that is evident in the investigation against Arad, we consider it very important that teachers from Lithuania come to Israel, to Yad Vashem, to study the subject of the Holocaust and how to teach it in their classrooms."