Call for Lithuanians to admit role in Holocaust

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.”