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OPINION

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VILNIUS—The Seimas (Lithuania’s parliament) hosted a “history conference” on June 19th dedicated, in the opinion of this journal, to far-right Holocaust revisionism seeking to whitewash and deflect from the outbreak of mass murder of Lithuanian Jewish civilians on June 23rd 1941 in Kaunas and dozens of other locations. Thousands of Jews were killed before the arrival or setting up of authority of the invading Germans. The murderers, who donned white armbanders, generally declared themselves to be members of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), which in its prewar leaflets had made its intentions re the Jewish minority of Lithuania crystal clear. The various “declarations” on June 23rd were in concord with the spirit of abject loyalty to Adolf Hitler and to the imminent removal of the Jewish minority. (There was no statement or version that said “We will protect all our nation’s citizens, whatever their ethnicity”…)

In the opinion of virtually every Lithuanian Holocaust survivor interviewed, the magnificent six-century record of tolerance and enlightened coexistence, including the years of the successful interwar Lithuanian Republic, were in a single day, June 23rd 1941, replaced by the eruption of barbaric mass murder that is all too well documented. The far right’s history department, sometimes rewriting history on an industrial scale with support from certain state agencies (most infamously, the “Genocide Center”), has attempted to “fix” this by ignoring the facts and claiming that the LAF led an “uprising” which drove out the Soviet army and restored independence. That is of course utter nonsense. The Soviets fled Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history, not the local white-armbander Jew-killers. As for independence, it was only a few weeks later that the Germans confirmed that there would be no independence, that Lithuania was part of the new “Ostland”. Had the Nazis won the war, they would have made good on their plans to resettle the country. There would been no Lithuania to become independent decades later.

Shamefully, the Seimas conference program (as PDF and below) did not include a single paper with a contrary opinion.

Not a single paper on the outbreak of mass murder that in the view of survivors was the de facto outbreak of the Lithuanian Holocaust, in which some 96% of Lithuanian Jewry perished (that figure established by Dina Porat among other major historians).

Not a single paper on the Kaunas Pogrom. In other words the local Hitlerist forces that initiated the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry are being made into national heroes for an “uprising” that did not occur, because an “uprising” is a revolt against powers that be. When the Soviets were in power (until their panicked fleeing on 22 and 23 June 1941), the LAF did not shoot a rabbit.

It is noteworthy that the major media outlets avoided covering the event, no doubt understanding the damage to the image of modern, democratic Lithuania that such fascist-glorifying events can cause. There was however a glowing report in the far-right Lietuvos aidas.

The occasion this year is the 85th anniversary of the outbreak of the Holocaust. A decade and a half ago, when the Seimas was poised to mark the 70th anniversary, the “dualism” came to light with an English page dedicated to commemoration of the Holocaust, and a Lithuanian page dedicated to glorifying the local perpetrators. But back then, the great Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis was around to rapidly expose the plans for a pseudo-academic conference intended on perpetrator and collaborator glorification. Who will play that role today?

Readers are invited to visit Defending History’s section on the legacy of June 23rd 1941, the publications on these pages of Lithuanian scholars Evaldas Balčiūnas and Andrius Kulikauskas, of the late Leonidas Donskis, and the testimonies of survivors slowly being excerpted from the corpus of the LYVA (Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive) project. In recent years, readers of English have been able to access the massive postwar Koniuchowsky testimonies in translation.

What remains to be seen is whether the Seimas and government will succumb to far-right demands for a permanent “Collegium” to commemorate and glorify the events of June 23rd 1941 (see last year’s discussion). Any true friend of beautiful, tolerant, democratic modern Lithuania will rush to frankly point out the folly, and the damage that a small well-heeled ultranationalist elite is causing. It is one thing for the far-right Holocaust revisionists to have their dark corners of the media and internet. It is another for the Seimas to succumb and, as it were, legitimize the twenty-first century incarnations of Holocaust obfuscation, distortion, minimization and denial.

The program of the Seimas conference this year (video is online):