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Chasia Langbord Shpanerflig. Zhetl (Diatlava) 1921 — Vilnius 2017. Photo © DefendingHistory.com
VILNIUS—At Sabbath services at Vilnius’s Choral Synagogue this morning, word began to spread that Vilnius’s oldest surviving veteran of the Jewish Partisans, Chasia (Khásye) Langbord Shpanerflig, had passed away at the age of 96.
MEP Vytautas Landsbergis, former speaker of the Lithuanian parliament and leader of the Lithuanian independence movement in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, unveiled his latest polemic at a ceremony cum press conference held on the first floor of the Signatarų Namai building in Vilnius’s Old Town on September 11, 2012, the historic site where Lithuanian independence was proclaimed from the balcony to the street below sometime around February 16, 1918.
This small book—there’s only 22 pages written by Landsbergis, the rest is a motley collection of supposedly historic documents—is an attempt to answer criticism of the Lithuanian Government and Catholic Church’s ceremonial reburial of Lithuanian Nazi puppet prime minister Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis and other concurrent celebrations in the spring of 2012.
Vytautas Landsbergis is one of the giants of the late twentieth century. Along with Poland’s Lech Wałęsa and then-Czechoslovakia’s Václav Havel, Landsbergis led his people from foreign domination to freedom and democracy. Nothing these gentlemen might later on have said or done to their own legacies, particularly in the subsequent century, can detract from their singular achievements in contributing to the downfall of the Soviet Union and the freedom of the subjugated nations on its western periphery.
This comment is a response to the statement recently published by the Lithuanian Human Rights Association (LHRA).
What’s genuinely sad, with regard to the pathetic document in question — among other things of similar revealing character, to be sure — is the realization that none of those self-sufficient, accomplished, educated, and supposedly respectable people, the LHRA leadership, are likely to exist in a vacuum. They are surrounded by the concentric circles of friends, colleagues, students… fellow human-rights (!) activists — presumably, at least to some significant extent, sharing their views on those vile and treacherous, kinless-cosmopolite Jews’ international conspiracy to humiliate Lithuania by, you know, constantly guilt-tripping and browbeating the poor little innocent freedom-loving country into remembering and finishing the unpleasant business of accounting for this one, admittedly unfortunate, event of past long gone.
Professor Mikhail Iossel, founding director of the Litvak Studies Institute (LSI), has given a major radio interview on salient Litvak issues to RCI — Radio Canada International. The sound track of the interview is available here. For more information, see coverage on the LSI site.