Standing up to Lithuania is a matter of honour

There’s the 80-name list of the Lithuanian murderers of my family in Birzai (50 were neighbours); there’s the epic, disputed, and mysteriously buried Melamad List of the more than 21 000 Lithuanian murderers who mercilessly destroyed the great Jewish civilisation of Yiddish Lithuania; there’s the list of the glorious 918 Lithuanian rescuers, people of unimaginable moral courage who will forever be honoured in Jewish memory; and finally there’s the list of Litvak Jews who almost pleased their mothers and changed the world.

You know, there were so many world famous Litvak writers, doctors, scientists, intellectuals, humourists, Nobel winners, activists, artists, and Torah geniuses that it takes about three minutes to roll the names in the film, and then at some speed. And these were only what Wikipedia yielded. Just last week, I learned that the late great Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the man who changed my own life, was Litvak through his mother.

Any other people or nation on earth would boast about this until the cows came home. But not us, not the Jews. We kvel furtively, privately, fearfully. Indeed, I know my “list of brilliant Litvaks” induces a significant wave of ethnic buttock clenching – “Okay, already! Very nice. But do you have to be so… public?! So boastful! Especially these days!” (See what the glorious Jackie Mason has to say about this.)

I had no choice. My film J’Accuse! is perhaps above all a demand for Jewish honour. So the list is in, and proudly so. And from what I gather, the Yidden are loving it. Good. We should be proud, we should stand tall, especially when confronted by deliberate insult.

The Noreika insult beggars belief. Let me summarise: the Lithuanian government, via its Orwellian Genocide Centre, has manufactured a crude mythology based on lies in order to hero worship a notorious mass murderer, petty thief, and polemical antisemite. Jonas Noreika murdered as many as 14 500 Jews in conditions of unimaginable cruelty, and his guilt has been known for decades. Most recently Noreika’s own extraordinary granddaughter, Silvia Foti, has axiomatically blown apart the pathetic denialists in Vilnius. Her book, Storm in the Land of Rain and her devastating testimony in the film, J’Accuse!, has left them looking naked, nasty, and ridiculous.

That’s their problem. I’m more concerned by the Jewish response to this demand for honour. Why does honour matter so much? It matters, primarily, because Torah matters. It matters because Jewish ethics and concepts of justice matter. It matters because Jewish Lithuania – that phenomenal, extraordinary civilisation – matters. It matters because every human life matters. It matters because Jews, Jewish civilization, and Jewish survival matter. And it matters because of the deranged cruelty with which we were annihilated.

These are some of the Jews Jonas Noreika dehumanised then murdered.

The rabbis and old men tied to horses by their beards and dragged to death for public entertainment;

The young girls of Plunge dragged from their homes and raped to death in drunken parties in the woods, then dismembered;

The 74 high school girls from Plunge tricked into a Christian conversion then mockingly executed along with everyone else and thrown into a pit;

The old, frail men burned or beaten to death in the Demon Dance drinking game;

The men, women, and children of Plunge starved for three weeks in their own synagogue amid the stench of rotting bodies and human waste, then massacred;

Please imagine that these victims were black. Or Irish. Or American. Or Muslim. Or anyone who has pride in their identity. No other nation on earth would accept such an insult.

But we Jews accept this Lithuanian insult with barely a murmur of protest. Worse still, important players in our community gobble up their trinkets, gongs, favours, and G-d knows what even as they carry on brazenly Holocaust-lying to our faces. Do these important Jews bring up the subject of Noreika and Foti at all? Do they feel it’s unimportant? And precisely on whose behalf do they talk?

Honestly, many of us simply cannot understand it. Perhaps someone with close ties to Lithuania can explain, and of course we’ll listen respectfully. But patrician silence is no longer an option: the devastating testimony of Foti in her forensic book, Storm in the Land of Rain, and in J’Accuse! make this an urgent discussion.

It comes to this: do the Jewish people support the Holocaust truth-teller or the Holocaust liar?

In my view, there really is no choice. If we don’t honour ourselves, no one will. And who could possibly blame them?

• Michael Kretzmer is a United Kingdom-based filmmaker and former journalist who is determined to fight for justice in Lithuania.