BOOKS | BOOKS IN THE DEBATE | LITHUANIA
REVIEW ARTICLE
by Roland Binet (De Panne, Belgium)
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Human feelings are now as candles without wick burning from inside.
(from a poem by Avrom Sutzkever, a tribute to Yiddish teacher Yankev Gershtein who perished in the Vilna Ghetto on September 27, 1942 (quote from Rudashevski’s Diary)
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Professor emeritus Saulius Sužiedėlis of Millersville University of Pennsylvania begins this major new book by characterizing its long and productive journey. “This study is the result of years of interaction with historians, journalists, and writers from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the United States, Poland, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Israel. Inspiration and encouragement emerged from discussions among the eleven-member Sub-Commission on Nazi Crimes, part of the Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania” (p. vii). Sužiedėlis’s opus on the Jews in Lithuania and their almost complete disappearance during the war years is a meticulously researched, coherently chronicled and impressively documented opus, tackling many themes, issues and problems with a staggering abundance of facts, figures, quotes, opinions, and anecdotes. Chunks of it read almost like an autopsy report on places and massacres rather than on an individual’s remains. I find it overall to be an exceptional, very well written, and significant contribution.
But I also find that it is flawed. Let us say that 98% is very accurately reported, and 2% subject to a pervasive underlying Baltic nationalist bias. Those proportions hold up until the final chapter which is a study in biased reporting, and should not detract from the academic quality of all the others. An author of a major scholarly work on the Holocaust in a given country is under no obligation to add a chapter on the debates of recent decades in which he was himself a combatant. But if he does, it must be held up to scrutiny.
In the preface, Sužiedėlis writes that the Jews had not been killed because they had been Jews: “For the Nazis, Jews as a group really were guilty — not because they simply existed, but because in Hitler’s eyes, they were, by their very nature, a constant threat to the ‘Aryan’ peoples of Europe and were certain to continue posing an existential danger in the future” (p. x). On September 1, 1939, Hitler let Czechoslovakian foreign minister František Chvalkovský know what he had on his mind: “The Jews will be destroyed by us. The Jews have not done the Ninth of November 1918 in vain, that day will be avenged.” In fact, Hitler had always thought that the Imperial German army had not been defeated on the field in 1918, it got “stabbed in the back with a knife” (der Dolchstoß), due to weak-hearted politicians of which left-wingers and Jews should have to bear the responsibility. Some of the Imperial German government ministers had been Jews, hence his hatred starting in 1919. See his letter of that year, revealed in June 2011 by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, where Hitler wrote about “Beseitigung” of the Jews. A German word that implies physical removal.
As for the statement, also in the preface to the book under review, that “most Jews who died in the Holocaust were not killed by their neighbors in any literal sense” the first question it begs is whether the reader is meant to implicitly accept this as true of Lithuania (where it is tragically true, if one includes in the concept “neighbour” fellow citizens of the same neighborhood, town or area, all the more so if one includes The First Week, in late June 1941; more on this below). As for the more general issue, two quotes come to my mind on the precursor situation: (1) “The Jews did not live separately from the Christian population […]. Those cities were founded on cohabitation […] that makes of the genocide when it happened a community event, both cruel and domestic” (translated from the French: Anatomie d’un Génocide, by Israeli historian Omer Bartov). And (2) “Although it was the German invasion that provided the overall institutional and psychological framework for the genocide, it was the actions of the willing neighbors that contributed to its totality” (Alexander Prusin in his The Lands Between).
Salient omissions include the complete (or at least truly representative) texts of the propaganda leaflets and statements the of the LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front) before the Nazi invasion, and the first telegram of which the Provisional Government sent to Berlin. There is little allowance for the view that these written documents provide incontrovertible proof of a call to actual genocide, and are not just periodic antisemitic claptrap. This goes to a question deeper than chronological or taxonomic history. That question is very simple: What do the words mean?
Besides the issues surrounding the First Week, when thousands of defenseless Jews were murdered by local Lithuanian “activists” before the Germans arrived (or took over), there is also undercovered narrative concerning to the nearly three-year long process of cruel slaughters in the pits of Ponar (Ponary, Paneriai). Much more detail is called for on who the volunteer killers were and how and why they carried out their nearly daily operations. But Sužiedėlis does manage to revise downward the total number of victims, reducing them to 50,000 (instead of the well-known figure of 100,000, of which 70% were Jews).
The author is firmly on one side of the “Historikerstreit” and this can be seen from the bibliography and the missing essential works. Mein Kampf is not listed in the abundant bibliography, nor are any of the renowned biographies of Hitler (e.g. Joachim Fest, Ian Kershaw, Alan Bullock), nor Martin Gilbert’s indispensable Descent into Barbarism – a History of the Twentieth Century, 1933-1951 nor his classic The Holocaust – A Jewish Tragedy. Nothing on Stalin or any of his well-known biographies. Other quite essential works are missing and seem to have become unmentionable: the Black Book by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, and works by Goldhagen, Arendt, Guido Knopp, the classical work Anatomie des SS Staates, Poliakov’s on antisemitism, Michaël Prazan’s on the Einsatzgruppen, or the Black Book of Communism. But it does reference (in the final chapter) the 2008 Prague Declaration,¸the de-facto constitution of the Double Genocide revisionist movement spearheaded by right-wing East European historiography, of which the Lithuanian government’s aforementioned commission has been a primary engine.
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THE FIRST CHAPTER is “Tradition, Accommodation, Conflict: Jews and Lithuanians from the Grand Duchy to the End of the First Republic (pages 1-89, 256 footnotes). This epos, covering over six centuries of mostly harmonious coexistence between the founding fathers of the people and leaders of the Grand Duchy and the central European Ashkenazic Jews who came fairly early to establish themselves in that land, tells us the history of Lithuania from the earliest times until the eve of the occupation of their country by the Soviet Union in 1940. This chapter is gracefully crafted and well written with a richness of details on many levels. It starts in fact with a grandiose quotation from historian Algimantas Kasparavičius: “The greatest tragedy of Lithuania’s twentieth century occurred not in June 1940 when the nation lost its freedom and statehood, but one year later.” Purists might frown on the detached way of phrasing it and the fact that it was a tragedy for Lithuania and not for the Jewish victims, but the Lithuanian appreciation of the history, culture and history of its minorities is necessary if there is to be understanding of what was lost. Sužiedėlis follows with the moving thread of the very human story of the young Jewish poetess Matilda Olkinaitė (1922-1941); some of her poems had been published in 1989 by Dr. Irena Vesaitė (1928-2020), a major intellectual who played an influential role in Lithuanian-Jewish affairs.
Under Russian czarist rule, the Jews had suffered pogroms and upsurges of violence as for example in 1831 during the Polish-Lithuanian insurrections. They had become victims of choice to pogroms, for having been thought of as supporting the government. Sužiedėlis also retraces much of what happened with the Jews in the religious and secular spheres. Lithuania, for the Jews, became a vibrant spiritual battleground as, over the centuries, different religious movements clashed, gained acceptance or rejection. Apart from the incontrovertible radiance of the Gaon of Vilna, the author helps us discover the great divide between Hasidic movements and their Misnagdic opponents. The Haskalah also provoked dissent and modernization, and a wider area of combative mood between all hues of the religious and secular spectrum. The cultural and literary output of all these movements enriched the religious and secular life of the Jews far beyond Lithuania’s borders. The epithet Litvak for Lithuanian Jews has its own long, proud and storied history.
The author devotes ten pages (pp. 25-34) to antisemitism in Lithuania harking back to the toll collectors, with quotes including vile insults, further references to antisemitic writings. He relates more modern and still more evil forms of antisemitism after the independence of the country and during Antanas Smetona’s period of power, pointing out correctly that the president repeatedly came out against antisemitism and was beloved by man or most Jews. He mentions too that some of the antisemitic writings became more strident after Hitler became Kanzler in Germany. There are diverging opinions related to economic and educational discrimination. Sužiedėlis confirms that despite the demands from the Verslininkai in the 1930s, under Smetona, for a larger representation in the economy of ethnic Lithuanians (the process known as “Lithuanization”), “the government never seriously considered such actions.” He also affirms that there had been no quota in the education sector, just “compulsory Lithuanian entrance examinations.” Yet, historian Karen Sutton says that there had been a numerus clausus in the civil service in her major book on the Holocaust in Lithuania. Martin Gilbert writes in his introduction to Avraham Tory’s Kovno Ghetto diary that Tory got a degree in law but was barred from practice as a lawyer or in the judiciary.
The year 1939 augured inauspiciously for Lithuania. First, the Nazis had seized Klaipėda. At the start of the war in Poland, at the start of September 1939, many refugees thronged Vilnius — at first still Polish — with inter-ethnic violence (also against the Jews) as a consequence. But order was restored when the Soviet Union took possession of the city. The Red Army departed on October 10, on the same day that the Lithuanian government signed the Mutual Assistance Treaty allowing the Soviet Union to creep onto Lithuanian soil by means of military bases, a ruse in advance of the USSR’s fake elections and takeover of the country in June of 1940.
Then another secret storm would be brewing with the creation of the LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front – Lietuvių aktivistų frontas), whose publications demonized Poles, compared Jews to rats, proposed a system of “authoritarian democracy” and advocated a “pro-Axis realignment in foreign policy” as Sužiedėlis puts it, perhaps too gingerly.
Sužiedėlis’s pages on culture are illuminating for the centuries preceding the First World War, and rather weaker for the period of the interwar republic itself. Partly this results from there still not being enough research on the depth and breadth of the rabbinic, Hebrew and Yiddish streams, among others, in that culture. Understandably, the author is interested in figures who would come to acceptance and success in Lithuanian society, such as the popular crooner Danielius Dolskis (1890-1931), and in great depth, the life and times of the aforementioned poetess Matilda Olkinaitė. Readers with Litvak background, who will be asking “But what Moyshe Kulbak, Zalmen Reyzen, Max Weinreich and so many other great interwar Litvaks?” They are missing not by any oversight by the author, but because they lived and worked in Vilna (then Wilno) in the Polish Republic, taking them outside the scope of the Lithuanian Republic’s history. From a Jewish cultural point of view, the interbellum relationships between the Litvaks who found themselves in a number of new republics after World War I (Latvia, Lithuania, northeastern Poland, the Belarusian S.S.R. and more) themselves merit serious new study, outside the scope of Sužiedėlis’s book.
There are different views on the nature of prewar antisemitism in the Lithuanian Republic. Sužiedėlis writes: “But in contrast to the boogeymen of Jewish economic tyranny and Judeo-Bolshevism, racial antisemitism in Lithuania was a marginal phenomenon” (p. 70). The economic emphasis is well-documented and consistent. In an earlier passage, trying to understand this allegedly purely economic antisemitism, so to speak, the author explains: “The economic consequences of majority rule, primarily readjustments towards a more equitable allocation of ownership and rewards within the economy as a whole, cause predictable rifts in Lithuanian-Jewish relations” (p. 52). At the chapter’s conclusion, there is a somewhat perverse juxtaposition between the author’s (correct) observation that the interwar government had a record in many respects laudable, and his (selective) observation that opponents called that government “fascist” while semantically and semiotically turning “Nationalism” (in the actual history a major component of East European participation in the Holocaust) into a kind of good-guy symbol and trying to subtly, and ahistorically, shift blame to the Soviets for the Holocaust: “For its part, the ‘people’s power’ imposed by the Kremlin, which in June 1940 destroyed the Nationalist regime and proclaimed the fraternity of all nations, intensified ethnic animosity (…)” (p. 89). The acrobatics artfully obscure the role of staunch nationalism in the drift to ultranationalism, hatred and dehumanization of the present Others deemed non- or anti-The Nation.
There are, among historians of the Lithuanian Holocaust, contrasting views. Karen Sutton writes that “Lithuanian historians are fond of claiming that Jewish-Christian relations were essentially peaceful right up to the advent of the Nazis. The economic pressures and the deeply seated anti-Jewish attitudes (…) however, demonstrate the disingenuity of this argument.” Yitzhak Arad meticulously analyzed the antisemitism in the territories annexed by the Soviet Union: “Antisemitism in these territories was widespread, mainly religious and economic in nature, and German anti-Semitic propaganda fell on fertile soil. In areas annexed to the Soviet Union in 1939-40, especially in the Baltic States and in Bessarabia and North Bukovina, antisemitism was strengthened by public opposition to the very annexation, which was carried out by brute Soviet force.” In his “Preconditions of the Holocaust” Liudas Truska writes: “Aggravated hostility of Lithuanians towards Jews was preconditioned by a range of reasons, of which two are most important: 1) the differing geopolitical orientation of both nations, 2) a deep moral crisis of the Lithuanian nation in late 30s – early 40s, which was demanding a ‘scapegoat’ and Jews were made to be that scapegoat.”
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THE SECOND CHAPTER is “The Stalinist Cauldron: Lithuanians, Jews, and Soviet Power, June 1940 – June 1941 (pp. 90-155). On the arrival of Red Army troops in Lithuania, Sužiedėlis quotes multiple witnesses who affirmed that the soldiers were welcomed by the Jews: “Images of the ‘Red hordes’ streaming into Lithuania were seared into the minds of an entire generation: Communists and Jews running to meet the Soviet troops with flowers; on the sidelines, the sullen and resentful majority.” At one point he does offer the caveat that “Among the greeters of the Red Army were ethnic Lithuanian leftists who detested Smetona and rejoiced in the dictator’s downfall, but they do not stand out in the diaries and memoirs” (p. 94).
Jewish authors such as Rudashevski and Margolis in Vilna, or Chaika Grossman in another part of Poland invaded by the Red Army, rejoiced and for one good reason, not because they were Communists but because they already knew exactly what the Nazis were doing to the Jews from the start of September 1939 onward. This was no longer a game of which radio or press reports were true. It was, firstly, the utterly unanimous reporting of thousands of refugees arriving and telling horror stories that would never be believed if relayed by just one or the other witness. There is another aspect, now politically incorrect, but the historian must raise above fears of political incorrectness. The Jews realized that under Soviet rule they were suddenly considered as equals under law and were not barred any more from professions and educational institutions. For example, the eminent endocrinologist Dr. Šeinė Sideraitė (1921-2005), a staunch patriot of modern, free and democratic Lithuania, never tired of explaining that as a woman and a Jew she could never have dreamt of entering medical school before Sovietization brought more equal rights than ever before in such spheres as higher education. But hers is not among the type of life stories included in the book. When it comes to Soviet life, there is a rainbow of aspects, in sharp contrast to Nazi genocidal rule.
Sužiedėlis’s narration of events during 1940-1941 is rich with innumerable details, quotes, figures, and implications that must inevitably lead the reader to one inescapable conclusion. The reason for the “maximality” of the Holocaust in Lithuania is, we are told, to be found in the Soviet occupation of the country which exacerbated feelings of hatred towards the Jewish population, based on views, right or wrong, that they had rapidly assimilated to and supported the new Soviet way of life (in most cases very wrong, the Jews suffered enormously under Soviet misrule). This was buttressed by the not-so-discreet hate propaganda from Nazi Germany, not least fascist Lithuanian exiles in Germany. Kazys Škirpa (founder of the LAF) whose reaction to what he saw when he went incognito to Kaunas, already under Soviet regime makes clear that “Lithuanian society, of course, is indignant at this Jewish fawning over the Russians and thus each day is more infected with antisemitism, especially since the Jews, in emphasizing their loyalty to the Soviets, often publicly insult Lithuanians, particularly former government officials” (page 99, quote from July 1, 1940). The author also quotes John Mazionis, a Lithuanian-origin U.S. foreign service officer assigned to Moscow who visited Lithuania to see ailing parents in March 1941. “Hatred of the Reds went hand-in-hand with resentment of what many Lithuanians described as the ‘Jewish Government’” and “the people desire to see the Germans in Lithuania instead of the Reds” (p. 123).
Sužiedėlis furnishes rich and significant detail about the Soviet occupation of 1940-1941, with an array of statements illuminating to the modern reader. Among them is the report of Piotr Gladkov, the Soviet’s deputy commissar of internal affairs in the Lithuanian SSR entitled “On the counter-revolutionary activity of Jewish national organizations” (p. 124), demonstrating the author’s inclusiveness, here inter alia on one of the many ways Jewish people and institutions suffered under the Soviets. That suffering included, of course, the destruction of religious, as well as modern Hebrew and free Yiddish institutions, in favor of an imposed imported flattened-out “Soviet Yiddish” culture.
Humanistically inspiring notes are provided by the story of Chiune Sugihara and Jan Zwartendijk, two foreign diplomats who issued Visas for Life largely to yeshiva students (hailing from interwar northeastern Poland) before and during Soviet rule. The author also devotes a segment to the Soviets’ deportations to Siberia on June 14, 1941, revising an earlier figure of some 30,000 downward to 18,000 including women and children. Those Jews, representing about 9.2% of the deported, mainly survived the war in Soviet captivity.
Sužiedėlis recounts further that in March 1941, the LAF leaders residing in Hitler’s Berlin issued “Instructions for the Liberation of Lithuania” and we can read some examples of their nasty propaganda and appeals: “It is very important on this occasion to get rid of the Jews (…). There is no place for you in Lithuania! The Lithuanian nation, rising for a new life and a new history, considers you traitors and will behave as necessary when handling such dregs” (pp. 140-141). It is interesting, though, to get accounts also from other historians. In his book The Shoah (Holocaust) in Lithuania (English edition, 2006), Joseph Levinson provides a much more extensive series of texts from the appeals from the LAF prior to June 22, 1941. For example: “Enough of the Jews baking their matzos in Lithuanian blood” ; “Judases, your days are numbered”; “After being ravaged and mauled by you, Lithuania is ready to rise up. Freedom will come to us over your corpses”; “In the newly restored Lithuania not even one Jew will have either the rights of citizenship or the means of earning a living”. But Sužiedėlis casually dismisses the evidence that these are prima facie calls to genocide: “There is no evidence that Škirpa and his circle intended the physical extermination of Lithuania’s Jewish population, but the calls for expropriation and expulsion injected a radical antisemitic component into the political rhetoric in the struggle for Lithuania’s independence.” Beyond this crude dose of Holocaust apologetics, there is the author’s seeming inability to get away from the notion that those whose one “actual physical” accomplishment was local initiation of mass murder constituting the onset of the Lithuanian Holocaust can somehow be salvaged as national fighters for independence. That is a notion that continues to plague modern Lithuania, most recently, in 2025, in a misguided plan to situate in the nation’s parliament a “collegium” to glorify the LAF and the ensuing Nazi-puppet “provisional government.”
Revealingly, the author takes on Dov Levin’s comment that “Soviet rule in Lithuania deferred the Holocaust there for twelve months and seven days” (i.e. from June 15, 1940, date of the Soviet takeover, to June 22, 1941, launch of the Nazis’ invasion of the Soviet Union). Suziedelis counters that “it would only make sense if the Germans had attached the USSR in the fall of 1939 or if the Lithuanians had initiated the Holocaust on June 14, 1940” (p. 135, note 136). Leaving math to the mathematicians, there is the unspoken central issue lurking behind these arithmetic lines: Levin’s demonstration of the most barbaric mass murders by local LAFers in forty locations prior to German arrival in the week of 22 June 1941 proved that the Holocaust in Lithuania, in the sense of actual mass murder, was indeed initiated by local Lithuanian killers (more below). Gymnastics in footnotes will not erase that, and arithmetic error or note, the dates of June 22 and 23 have been remembered by Lithuanian Holocaust survivors and their families, virtually unanimously, as the onset of the killing aspect of the Holocaust — its primary feature. Moreover, bearing in mind that Lithuanians and Jews suffered enormously under Soviet misrule (the author himself counts 2,613 Jews officially repressed during the occupation, p. 127), is Levin’s opinion so far-fetched? The reality is that the Soviets carried out atrocious repression. Decidedly not any mass extermination of any of the peoples whose land it occupied in 1939 and 1940.
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THE THIRD CHAPTER is “The Specter of Genocide: Invasion, Insurrection and the Assault on the Jews, June 22 – July 31, 1941” (pp. 157-237, 178 footnotes). On June 22, 1941, a force of 630,000 troops of the Wehrmacht’s German Army North Group invaded Lithuania. Vilna (Vilnius from Oct. 1939 when the Soviets gifted it to Lithuania as Stalin’s trojan horse gift), was reached on June 23 “decorated with Lithuanian flags,” and Kaunas on June 24. With the masterly pen of the gifted historian, Sužiedėlis successfully conveys the ensuing chaos, the bombardments and flying Luftwaffe planes shooting on fleeing Red Army soldiers with collateral losses, both Lithuanians and Jews. He provides ample documentation.
The author cites Alex J. Kay’s comment that “Operation Barbarossa was the first campaign in which the systemic mass murders of Jews and other racial opponents was the order of the day from the very outset” (p. 161). On June 24, 1941, the Germans had decided to clear a 25 kilometer zone of “dangerous and subversive elements” including Jewish males. The author describes the Einsatzgruppen (EG) and tells us that some difficulties which had arisen in the Polish campaign between Wehrmacht and the SS had in the meantime been smoothed out so that now the EG had a free hand (pp. 161-163). There is also a quote from Heydrich’s telegram to SD (Sicherheitsdienst) units, of June 29, 1941: “The self-cleansing attempts of the local anti-Communists and anti-Jewish minded inhabitants in the newly occupied countries should not be hindered.” Sužiedėlis tells us about early massacres by Germans alone or with Lithuanian helpers (in Gargždai, in Kretinga with an LAF unit), then describes in detail the “insurrection” commenting that “many Lithuanians observed fleeing Jews with satisfaction, even contempt” (page 167).
A major issue lurks in the uncritical use of the word “insurrection” for the LAF’s orgy of mass murder of Jews. By definition, an insurrection is against someone in power. This particular effort, however, started when Soviet power utterly collapsed and the Red Army was scrambling, in pathetic disarray, to flee eastward. Perhaps it is one of the deeper flaws in this and other Baltic authors’ work that the massive local participation in the Holocaust is nevertheless seen as part of some healthy, laudable independence movement. Retention of the pretense of “insurrection” for the Nazis’ local henchmen does some disservice to modern Lithuania. What good can come from a policy of trying to whitewash and redeem Hitlerist murderers of thousands of their fellow Lithuanian citizens of one of the country’s oldest minorities?
Sužiedėlis tells us that on June 23, 1941, “the hastily assembled group of activists proclaimed the restoration of Lithuania’s independence, announcing the formation of the Lithuanian Provisional Government.” Heaven help us all if this is “independence”! Among the works that provide the “satanic verse” of the Provisional Government’s first telegram to Adolf Hitler is the inspirationally courageous book by Ruta Vanagaitė (written with Efraim Zuroff), where we read:
Immediately during its first meeting, the Provisional Government sent an impassioned thank-you telegram to Hitler:
“The liberating storm of war having passed through Lithuania, the representatives of the society of free Lithuania send you, the Fuhrer of the German nation, our deepest and real gratitude for the liberation of the land of Lithuania from the all-destroying occupation of the Jews and the Bolsheviks and the liberation of the Lithuanian people, and express the hope that by your genius the Lithuanian nation will be destined to take part in the victorious march led by you to destroy Judaism, Bolshevism, and plutocracy, to defend the individual’s personal freedom, to protect the culture of Western Europe and to implement the new European order.”
(Ruta Vanagaitė and Efraim Zuroff, Our People, 2020 English edition by Rowman and Littlefield, p. 41. Citing Škirpa, Kazys, Sukilimas Lietuvos suverenumui atstatyti: dokumentinė apžvalga [Uprising for the Restoration of Lithuania’s Sovereignty: A Documentary Survey], Franciscan Fathers Press: Washington DC 1973, p. 349)
It is frankly disappointing that Sužiedėlis’s 626 page opus on crisis, war, and the Holocaust in Lithuania did not find room for this text. Nor for the most “literal” of the pre-Barbarossa leaflets. Nevertheless, the author does find space for copious quotes about the Provisional Government’s rationalizations of the earliest stage of local genocide underway, e.g. the directive calling for “expansion of partisan activities in the provinces where there are still residual gangs of Bolsheviks, Communists and Jews” (p. 175). There is of course massive documentation that the thousands murdered by Lithuanian killers during the first week were defenseless civilians. But to the author’s credit, there is no reticence when it comes to exposing the level of hatred in the issues of the LAF’s paper Į laisvę (‘Toward Freedom’) after the First Week, when German forces were fully in control throughout the country.
Sužiedėlis tells us (p. 169) that some LAF men went to the radio station on June 23 “and went on to broadcast the restoration of Lithuania’s independence.” He does not give us the complete text, but in Vanagaitė’s book the full text of the LAF declaration and appeal to the Lithuanians is provided (pp. 37-38). Although the LAF’s appeal does not specifically ask the Lithuanians to murder their Jewish fellow citizens, phrasings such as “the Jew belongs to no nation”; “bloodsucking tick of Israel to insinuate itself into the body of the Lithuanian people’”; “hustlers”; “usurers”; “percentage-gougers”; “builders of taverns”; “most evil Chekists”, “informants”; “torturers”; and particularly the coda, “no Jew will have civil rights or the means for making a living” give us an insight into the true purpose of that nationalist appeal (coming historically during the apex of Adolf Hitler’s power). The author deliberately ignores the power of propaganda and subliminal messages when he states that there had never been an appeal to murder the Jews of Lithuania. For those interested to know more about the duplicity of the LAF and other Hitler vassals, Andrius Kulikauskas’s study provides a more accurate picture than the book under review.
The coverage of the Lietūkis Garage Massacre in Kaunas on 27 June 1941, is careful to include the contradictory reports and opinions more so than on other contentious matters (pp. 185-187); nothing is suppressed. If there was something to quibble about it would be on what the photograph reproduced tells us (p. 185, and in other works at higher resolution, and the other photos surviving). Suffice it say that the image of an adolescent woman looking on at that barbaric spectacle as if it were an outdoor theatre performance is one that can haunt the viewer for life.
Was that normal Lithuanian behavior? Did Sužiedėlis ever ponder why the killing of the Jews in the Baltic States with the enthusiastic help of collaborators had been so barbaric, so despicably beastly, in close proximity with naked or semi-naked victims alive or corpses stacked up as sardines in open pits? Contrary to what happened in Western Europe where none of these atrocities occurred in public, and not with the killings per se being carried out by the local collaborators, in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, or Norway. This is in fact the well-known syndrome of Us versus Them. Sociologist Erich Fromm (Le Coeur de l’Homme) had this to say: “As far as the pathology of collective narcissism is concerned, the most evident and frequent symptom consists in — as is the case with individual narcissism — a lack of objectivity and a deformation of the rational judgment. If one refers for example to the theories of the little white people from the South of the American states on the Blacks or, still, those of the Nazis on the Jews, it is easy to see how distorted they are […]. Collective narcissism demands satisfaction, as does individual narcissism. At some level, that satisfaction is furnished by the common dogma of the superiority of the group to which one adheres, a superiority that has as a corollary the inferiority of all the other groups.”
One of the major lingering issues in the historiography of the Holocaust in Lithuania centers on the number of approximate victims of the “spontaneous” murders of Jews (most simply defined as “without any Germans on site”) during the First Week. Sužiedėlis estimates that 1,000 died in the Kaunas massacres with lower figures in Vilnius, concluding that “a realistic account suggests two thousand Lithuanian Jews died in pogroms, summary executions, and individual murders before the onset of the shootings at the Seventh Fort” but prefacing the assertion with the disclaimer that “it is difficult to gauge the magnitude of anti-Jewish assaults in the smaller towns and countryside” (p. 190). There is no mention of the figures posited by other historians who worked on this very question for years. In his classic The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Yitzhak Arad estimates 10,000 such victims in The First Week (p. 92, note 20). Dov Levin, whom Arad cites, was editor of a massive volume on the outline history of each shtetl in Lithuania, documented mass murder in forty locations within the volume and in an extensive introduction estimated 10,000 such victims, stressing that very many were indeed cases of neighbors from the same town, and included barbaric killings, rapes and massive pillage (Dov Levin, Pinkas Hakehillot. Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities from their Foundation till after the Holocaust Lithuania, Yad Vashem: Jerusalem 1996, p. 91). Sužiedėlis cites Levin and Arad generously on other matters. Not on this.
The author details the first measures taken and published by the Provisional Government (PG) including the “Announcement to an Occupied Land” proclaimed by the German military in July (p. 193), the Nazi propaganda tainted [my words – R.B.] “Statutes on the Jewish Situation” by the soon to be dismissed PG on August 1. The author recognizes (p. 197) that the PG “had failed to publicly and unambiguously protest the ongoing massacres and did provide funds for setting the camp at the Seventh Fort.” But he is of the opinion, regrettably, that “the PG, however brief and ephemeral its power, represented the legitimacy which carried with it an aura of moral authority” (!). These are two things that cannot be true at once. An aura of moral authority? A government that sent a telegram to Hitler thanking him for the destruction of Judaism? A government that on June 25, called on its population to eliminate “residual gangs of Jews”? A government that had funded a camp in Kaunas (where the first mass killings at the Seventh Fort had begun June 29-30) and that on June 30 had funded a ten-day financial advance for the upkeep of the TDA (“self-defense battalion”) there (some of which subordinated to Einsatzkommando 3)? A government that had asked that no killings be made publicly? I have in my day seen cynicism but rarely at this magnitude.
The chronology and salient illustrative episodes are skillfully interwoven to provide the picture of what followed. From the end of June onward, with complete German control, there were thousands of enthusiastic local killers, but they were not spontaneous in the sense noted above, they were working for the Germans who were very much on the ground, there and then. The author cites a German officer who noted on June 29 that Kaunas had gradually become quiet. One day earlier the Einsatzkommando 1b had arrived, the insurgents (LAF etc) were to be disarmed and an appeal was proclaimed to Lithuanians to join the TDA (also known as Schutzmannschaften), as well as a Hilfspolizeitruppe, which would work closely with or under authority of the mobile German killing units (EK). He further describes the first mass shootings at the fort in Kaunas, the first mass killings near Vilnius, in Ponar (Ponary, Paneriai), mentioning Sakowicz’s diary and the YB (“special platoon”) as mass shooting specialist unit in these killing pits. July 11 saw the first killings there, according to Sakowicz.
Sužiedėlis devotes some pages (p. 213 onward) to the situation in the provinces, adding that “contemporary reports make clear that much of the population, energized by the euphoria of liberation from Communist rule, strongly supported the “cleansing efforts,” noting further that the Šiauliai district procurator had late in July cautioned local administrations that “there is not a single city, town or rural county where Lithuanians themselves are not arresting other Lithuanians.” The author further tells us in detail of killings in the border zone and in towns and villages in the provinces, with or without the help of Germans. He continues to follow, with great humanity and fulsome detail the fate of poetess Matilda Olkinaitė, a personage gracefully evoked throughout the book, who was killed in Panemunėlis with some other families in mid-July, by white-armbanded locals (LAF and others who donned the white armband of the killers). Three months after her death, Olkinaitė was formally dismissed from the Faculty of Humanities of Vilnius University (p. 233). The author tells us that women and children had not been victims of mass killings at the beginning, though where women and children were executed on July 7 in Ylakiai, adding that “according to one historian, the perpetrators of Ylakiai were the first to get rid of their former neighbors.” In mid-July, amass extermination of nearly 2,000 Jews including women and children was carried out by auxiliary police in Plungė. Sužiedėlis ends this chapter by stating, correctly, that “it is essential to record and memorialize the numerous examples of widespread killing during the first six weeks of the war and occupation.”
Those interested in reading a more detailed account of the numerous killings of Jews in Lithuania in many small places, in the voice of survivors from whom sworn testimony was taken shortly after the war in DP camps in Germany, should in the first instance read Leyb Koniuchovsky’s collected testimonies now available in English in two large volumes: The Lithuanian Slaughter of its Jews: The Testimonies of 121 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Lithuania, recorded by Leyb Koniuchowsky, in Displaced Persons’ Camps (1946-48), 2020; vol. II: Testimonies of Lithuanian Life by Leyb Koniuchowsky: A Sequel to: The Lithuanian Slaughter of Its Jews (1946-48), 2020. There are four (mostly footnote) mentions of Koniuchowsky’s seminal work in the book under review, but it is surprising not to see this jewel of primary testimony so underrepresented, especially since the significant publication of both volumes in full English translation, in 2020, by David Solly Sandler.
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THE FOURTH CHAPTER is “Concentration and Destruction: The Mass Murder Campaign in Lithuania, August-December 1941″ (pp. 238-322, 160 footnotes). On August 1, 1941, around 90% of the Jews of Lithuania were still alive. Four months later four-fifths would be dead. The German Zivilverwaltung (ZV) got in place with the help of Lithuanian TDA members and district chiefs. While Lithuanian police and civil authorities had already put ghettos in place, these were gradually taken over by the Germans. Sužiedėlis reproduces the letter dated August 7, 1941 from the Lithuanian Chief of Kaunas district to all Heads of Rural Counties and Police Precinct Chiefs ordering the establishment of Jewish ghettos and giving detailed instructions (pp. 242-243). A map of the ghettos is provided (p. 247). Then comes the problem of what to do with the “unemployable Jewish population” often characterized as useless eaters. There is a table of the Jewish population in the provinces, detained in ghettos, camps or temporary detention sites (pp. 248-251). Sužiedėlis states that “there is no written directive that unambiguously establishes the creation of the camps and ghettos as the intended precursor for the annihilation of Lithuania’s provincial Jewry” (p. 251). I can only encourage the eminent author to think again on this point.
Perhaps the author had already relegated to that which is forgotten many of the materials his book presents so well while not being able, or wanting to see the Angel of Death in any of the typical Nazi-style lightly coded formulations. Among them: Letters reproduced in which it was also ordered that “the Jews will feed themselves at their own expense, but at reduced food rations…” (pp. 242-243); the observation that “the massacre of the Jews in Mažeikai foreshadowed the beginning of the end of the Jewry” (August 5), detailing how the slaughter occurred: pits, shootings, drunken shooters later enjoying what they had done in a local restaurant (p. 251). On pages 251-258, he goes on detailing other killing sites, giving us also a short overview of Joachim Hamann and Vytautas Reivytis (pp. 258-260). There is a “Reivytis File” in the Lithuanian Central State Archive containing “a cache of dozens of communications concerning nearly forty predominantly rural communities (…) [that] capture the particulars of the genocidal process at the ground level, particularly the role of the local police, the chain of command, and the day-to-day efforts of the bureaucracy in complying with orders” (p. 251). One even finds, casually interwoven into the narrative prose, that inimitable phrasing, “efforts of the bureaucracy in complying with orders” (p. 258), when we know that they dealt with “Beseitigung der Juden” to make Lithuania Judenfrei. The author also presents a directive from Reivytis ordering detention of all children from fifteen years on up, and women “notorious in their Bolshevik activity” (pp. 261-262). He furnishes us with details of how the rural police authorities worked, their mentality and makes it clear that they were complicit in the destruction of the Jews in their own areas (p. 267). On page 268, one of the rare photographs taken at the Ponar killing site is shown. On the following pages, the author provides meticulous descriptions of other typical actions as taken from the Reivytis files (pages 268-281).
It is to be noted that from August 1941, women and children had been formally included in the killings (of course they had been numerous among the victims during the First Week, but here the discussion is strictly about the German-control period that followed it). A letter dated September 16 from two district chiefs from the Southwestern corner of Kaunas district is reproduced, addressed to the Directorate of Internal Affairs stating that “there are no more Jews. They were handled by the local partisans and the auxiliary police” (Reivytis file, pp. 278-279).
Sužiedėlis continues with his meticulous scholarly narrative and chronology of detailed killings in other regions of Lithuania. An important section (from p. 296) is dedicated to “concentration and muss murder in the cities: Kaunas, Vilnius, Šiauliai.” The history, so ably provided in clear and orderly fashion, starts with the killings in the Seventh and Fourth forts in Kaunas and the creation of the ghetto in Vilijampolė in mid-August, as well as several of the largest mass killings later in the Ninth Fort: 500 men who presented themselves “for intellectual work”; October 4, 1941, the roundup in the small ghetto in Kaunas with nearly 2,000 victims; later (pp. 300-306) the mass roundup of October 28/29 with 9,200 victims executed at the Ninth Fort by Germans and TDA members, of whom 4,273 were children. There is a photograph of some members of YB responsible for slaughters in Ponary (p. 304).
The author describes the analogous scenarios for the Vilna Ghetto with approximately 3,000 victims on September 2, another big roundup at the beginning of October with about 2,500 Jews sent to Ponar, and more than 5,000 at the end of the month including 2,739 women and 1,247 children (pp. 306-313). In the Šiauliai (Shavl) Ghetto established mid-August, there had been nearly 4,500 surviving Jews. In December 1941, Jäger reported there were still 4,500 Jews in Šiauliai, 15,000 in Kaunas and 15,000 in Vilnius. He also added in a report to the RSHA (Reichsicherheitsdiensthauptamt) that his job had been “difficult and nerveracking”; we learn that he lamented that he could not kill the “work Jews” because of the ZV who had spared “working Jews” in the ghettos and their families (with issued Scheine of different colors, p. 319). Sužiedėlis confirms that “witness accounts invariably cite the liberal use of alcohol which helped dampen any feeling for the victims” (p. 317). I suppose the word “dampen” emanates from the author, a psychoanalytic insight for once. I was reminded of Andrew Ezergailis’s major work on the Holocaust in Latvia (reviewed by the present author), where he contends that the Holocaust could not have been envisaged without the use of alcohol. Sužiedėlis presents a listing of the eight principal organizations which “expedited the destruction process” (p. 320). He discusses Arad’s posited three stages of destruction (p. 321). The section ends with linkage to the next part of the history: “Lithuania’s ghettos gave birth to organized Jewish armed resistance, as well as to a remarkable campaign of preserving their cultural/spiritual world, a daunting struggle to remain human in a system designed to dehumanize Jews (p. 322).”
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THE FIFTH CHAPTER is “Survival, Destruction, Struggle: Ghettos and Jewish Resistance” (pp. 323-403, 192 footnotes). The author begins with the Vilna Ghetto. In a cultural howler, he claims that the Jews of Vilna were mostly “Polish speakers who had been separated from the rest of Lithuanian Jewry in the First Republic, which in the view of some Jewish historians [Who? — R.B.] resulted in a lack of ‘a thoroughly Litvak experience’” (p. 326). This is utterly absurd. During the interwar period, Vilna (Wilno, Vilnius, Yiddish Vílne) was the world capital of Litvak culture, and it thrived in the Polish Republic. Moyshe Kulbak’s classic poem Vílne, written while he was a Polish citizen makes it eminently clear in one of the poem’s most famous line, speaking to the personified eternal spiritual capital of the Litvaks: “Be you a bleak amulet in Lithuania anchored.”
Sužiedėlis describes the Judenrat under Jakob Gens after his predecessor had been eliminated by the Nazis, with the creation of a 150-man strong Jewish police force. He also quotes Dina Porat and her negative opinion of Gens’s deputy Dressler and the cruel mentality of many Jewish policemen (p. 329). After describing some actions “when Jews lead Jews to death” on October 23, 1941, the author mentions that Arad qualified Gens’s approach as “the ideology of selective cooperation” (p. 331), adding that Gens had talked with the heads of the work brigade after the first reports of the killings in Ponar, stating that “the stronger, healthier core of the Jewish nation would be preserved as long as possible.” Sužiedėlis also mentions that the Jewish police took part in actions in Belarus to the east. He further relates Arad’s evocation that Gens visited some ghettos outside Vilnius and talked to their Jewish inmates about transfers (pp. 333-334). The author gives us descriptions and short biographies of the most bloodthirsty Nazis overseeing the ghetto. Two apt quotations from Yitzhak Rudashevski’s Vilna diary strongly criticize the Jewish policemen, though this important work is not listed in the bibliography). Jews from outside places were transferred to a labor camp near Vilnius. There are scenes of intended killings in Ponar described as chaotic (pp. 334-335). Then, a report to the RSHA that 4,000 Jews had been killed on April 4, 1943. Later, he tells us about the end of the ghetto, the transports to Estonia and Latvia (± 10,000), the executions of Gens and subsequently his deputy. A small remnant of Jews were still employed at two other sites in town, artist Samuel Bak having been one of them (he escaped on March 27, 1944 ahead of a “children’s action”). There are moving accounts of Irena Veisaitė’s and Samuel Bak’s accounts of their liberation in July 1944 (pp. 339-341).
The section on the Kovno (Kaunas) Ghetto (from p. 341) sets out the narrative from August 1941 with Elchanan Elkes as Judenrat chief and Avraham Tory as secretary. Tory’s diary remains one of the fundamental works. Sužiedėlis’s account covers the Jewish police, mentioning that members of the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps (NSKK) assumed guard duties there. After the “Great Action” of October 28-29, 1941, the ghetto entered an extended quiet period until spring 1943. There were some outside work details as for example in the Aleksotas airbase. Here too, Sužiedėlis portrays the most ferocious Nazis overseeing the Jews, relating how the ghetto was transformed in a Konzentrationslager (KL Kauen) under SS Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm Göcke. Vlasovites’ troops helped to arrest and deport Jews to Estonia (October 26, 1943). Much later, on March, 27 1944, after having arrested, tortured and shot members of the Jewish police, Vlasovites and fellow Nazis entered the camp of Vilijampolė, “dragging away children and the elderly.” A thousand were were sent to Auschwitz, and 800 the next day to the Ninth Fort. On July 5, 1944, a Latvian Waffen SS unit surrounded the camp, and 6,100 Jews were transferred to Germany. Only about 5% of Kaunas Jewry survived. The Red Army captured the city on August 1, 1944.
The section on the Šiauliai Ghetto (pp. 351-355) is equally well documented and clearly presented. By November 1941 there were still 4,764 surviving Jews. There is a detailed overview of the controlling authorities, the Nazis in charge, the Judenrat, as well as the work details and the sub-camps (p. 353). It finally became part of the Kaunas KL (September 1943). In November 1943, SS and Vlasovite troops took 796 Jews, children and elderly, and deported them to an unknown destination and fate (perhaps East Prussia). In July 1944, the surviving Jews were evacuated.
A thoroughly documented narrative is dedicated to the final stage when the last surviving ghetto and sub camps Jews were deported to Estonia, Latvia, East Prussia, the German heartland, to camps and KZ (pp. 355-366). In several pages, the author informs of the places where the remaining Lithuanian Jews had been sent, Mežaparks in Latvia, Stutthof in Germany, Vaivara and Klooga in Estonia. He describes the forced evacuation on foot and in detail the massacre of the work force in Klooga (between 1,500 and 2,000) where the inmates were shot then stacked on pyres to be burned. He also tells us in detail the ultimate fate of the approximately 13,000 Jews who arrived in Stutthof with death by Zyklon B, injections, shootings, and the well-known arsenal of Nazi psychopathic cruelty. The narrative skillfully progresses to the evacuation of the prisoners by death marches or ships.
The final parts of this chapter are quite interesting because the author deals here first with the internal administration the Jews had put in place in the ghettos: justice and health institutions, education, and cultural activities including concerts, recitals of poetry and music, theater. He also tells us about the important work of the Paper Brigade. There is a photo of artist Samuel Bak “who held his first artistic exhibition in the Vilna ghetto at age nine” (p. 377). Sužiedėlis mentions that “later authors, such as Raul Hillberg and Rich Cohen, as well as a few contemporaries, including Shmuel Kaplinski, the commander of the group “Towards Victory” dismissed the notion of cultural activity as part of the struggle against Nazism, arguing that such efforts served, at best, as a distraction, or worse, as a narcotic that turned Jews away from the path of armed resistance.” But he wisely adds divergent views: “we must resist with this weapon to raise the spirit of the ghetto inmates” (Max Viskind, theater director) and “physical resistance could not exist without this spiritual component, and the reverse is also true” (Markas Petuchauskas). I agree with this latter view. To me, reading Rudashevski’s ghetto diary made me realize how important, even essential, culture and education had been for this young boy. If I may say, what differentiated Jews in the ghettos from KZ life: there had been solidarity and a high level cultural life in the ghettos despite the horrifying dehumanizing living conditions and the constant threat of sudden death. The preservation of precious books by the Paper Brigade is such a wonderful example of tenacity, pugnacity and indomitable spirit against life-threatening adversity, against pseudo Darwinian Nazism. Even more so is the storied history of the Ghetto Library that celebrated the borrowing of the 100,000th book on December 13, 1942.
Sužiedėlis devotes many pages to the history of some of the resistance movements. First, “the Anti-Fascist Military Organization” (AMO) in Kaunas with Chaim Yellin as its leader (pp. 381-385), culminating with the escape of 64 prisoners from the Ninth Fort Fire Brigade. The most famous of all, the FPO (Fareynikte Patizaner Organizatsye / United Partisans Organization) receives ample coverage (pp. 385-389). It includes a reproduction of the New Years Day 1942 appeal beginning with the well-known line “Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter.” He details the story of the celebrated leaders Abba Kovner, Yitzhak Arad and Yitzhak Wittenberg, stating of the latter that “his surrender and death became one of the most painful and controversial episodes in the history of the Vilna Ghetto resistance, not least of all for Kovner, who agonized about the tragedy for years afterward.” But the author’s own comment, “It was the misfortune of the FPO that the group was unable to follow in the steps of the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising who had inspired them” was for this reviewer troubling. The “practical success” of the Vilna Ghetto resistance of course lay not in the in-situ battle but rather in the successful training and arming of fighter who would escape to join the partisans in the forests. Among them were Rachel Margolis, whose classic memoir (English edition: A Partisan from Vilna, 2010) is missing from the copious bibliography but merits a potshot in a footnote (p. 399, note 181). Indeed, thanks to Rachel Margolis and other survivors we still have in Vilnius the Green House, officially the Holocaust section of the state Jewish museum, the only museum in the country with a narrative not doctored to suit Baltic revisionism (may it long live). But turning back to the narrative in the book under review, it would have been good to appreciate the eternally moving passages in Margolis’s book: the unspeakable agony of leaving her parents and brother behind in the ghetto as she escaped to join the Jewish partisans in the forests of Lithuania in the fight against Hitler’s occupation of Lithuania.
While this human element in the context of the genocide underway is sometimes missing, the book does provide a taxonomy of the partisan groups and a breakdown nationalities and numbers (pp. 290-392). The partisans were part of the Soviet partisan network during the years when the USSR was in alliance with the United States, Great Britain and the Allies, and in Lithuania, as in all of Eastern Europe, provided the only serious resistance to Hitler’s genocide. The author recounts the difficulties the Jews had to integrate Soviet units, because of antisemitism, even attacks against Jews by partisans. There is a passage about the violence in some regions due to escaped POWs, AWOL German soldiers and bandits. Some villagers organized militias to defend themselves from bandits, including partisans. The author relates Arad’s encounter with a captain from the Home Army, which, considering the danger to them, he felt compelled to kill (p. 396). Sužiedėlis also describes clashes between militias and partisans, evokes the alleged massacres in Kaniūkai and Bakaloriškiai (pp 399-400) by resistance fighters, quoting James Glass: “partisan violence never produced indiscriminate consequences; it focused on specific ends.” There is some coverage of the Jews (and Lithuanians!) who fought with the Red Army within the 16th Division (page 401-402).
The chapter’s final sentence, referencing Abba Kovner and Yitzhak Arad, is: “The partisans from the ghettos could not prevent the annihilation of most of Lithuanian Jewry, but no one should question their contribution to the creation of the State of Israel.” Given his comments elsewhere (more below) on Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky and Rachel Margolis, it seems there is some whiff of dismissal, if not disdain, re the Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, and for this reviewer that is disturbing (see e.g. the one-sided reference to Rachel Margolis’s memoir, p. 399, n. 181). Moreover, the international scandal over the attempted prosecutions and vast defamation of the Jewish partisans, especially, Arad, Brantsovsky, and Margolis, is largely, and inaccurately reduced to some sort of misunderstanding about over their just being sought as “witnesses.” Is twenty-first century history also being rewritten?
In the realm of heroic feats, there are lacunae, perhaps most prominently the fate of the twelve prisoners of the Burning Brigade in Ponar who succeeded in escaping a certain death through a tunnel they had dug. Sužiedėlis could also have perused Soviet citizen, Red Army soldier and POW Youli Farber’s recount of his detention in Naujoi Vilna, his joining of the fire brigade at Ponary at the end of January 1944, and his subsequent escape mid-April 1944.
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THE SIXTH CHAPTER is “Images of Blood: Perpetrators, Observers, Bystanders, Rescuers” (pp. 405-477, 197 footnotes). This chapter is less interesting to this reviewer, so commentary will be limited to some salient descriptions and thoughts.
The author returns to the LAF and the Lithuanian Nationalist Party stating that on one side the “supporters of the New [Hitlerist — R.B.] Europe failed to appreciate the conundrum of offering themselves as junior allies to the third Reich” While “still others never acknowledged that the turn towards Germany had been a morally compromising proposition, let alone a political quagmire” (p. 406). Well, “a morally compromising proposition” might rank among the finest formulations of understatement in the annals of Holocaust historiography.
One revealing, fascinating passage deals with meetings very early in the Nazi occupation that some people had with people in charge as to the fate of the Jews: former lieutenant in the army Jakov Goldberg with the Provisional Government’s finance minister Jonas Matulionis (p. 412) and General Statys Raštikis (not involved in the killings) with General von Pohl (p. 413-415). Both personalities understood that for Lithuanian Jewry the die had been cast.
There is a long part of the chapter devoted to what the Catholic Church thought and did as regards the fate of the Jews, thought not adding much to what is already known. One pearl, however, as ever in the realm of commentary in a humanistic frame, stands out: “In the end, with few exceptions, the Lithuanian clergy were little different than most of the Church hierarchy throughout Europe which considered Nazism as the lesser of two evils” (p. 435). One aspect here is a little hilarious. A little thought experiment might help: Imagine the Church clergy in the Netherlands, Denmark, or my own native Belgium which would have preferred the occupation of their country “as the lesser of two evils”! In further pages, the author very boldly details some of the most heinous extracts from the press at that time: an excerpt from Naujoji Lietuva from August 25, 1941 affirming that “cleansing ourselves from them is a historic necessity” (p. 440). Hequotes the remark of an active TDA Battalion member, as shown in the documentary The Nazis: A Warning from History who asserted that he considered Jews “selfish” and, when asked about the murder of children, replied: ‘”This is a tragedy, a great tragedy (…) It’s a kind of curiosity. You just pull the trigger, he falls, and that’s it. Some people are doomed, and that’s that.” (p. 438). If you see a difference with Ted Bundy, tell me.
Sužiedėlis reiterates that the Lithuanian authorities “did not draft plans for a Final Solution” (Did anyone say they did?) while explaining the genocidal rhetoric of the LAF as advocating “ethnic cleansing (displacement)” noting that physical annihilation is something significantly different, and trying to square the circle by quoting Norman Naimark “that displacement can lead to genocide” (p. 458). Rather blatant obfuscation and evasion, eight decades after the war.
The section “Empathetic Helpers and Righteous Gentiles: Assistance and Rescue” in Lithuania explains the different kinds of recognition by different entities, principally Yad Vashem (924 rescuers named), the Lithuanian state (1,663), and goes into admirable depth in understanding the rescuers. He makes a good case that the warm welcome given to so many Jewish refugees during the final Smetona period from the onset of the Holocaust in Poland (Sept. 1939) to the loss of Lithuanian sovereignty (June 1940) was a contributory factor. What a future study needs to do is to try to recover from memoirs and other sources many of the unknown rescuers from The First Week, who enabled or encouraged neighbors to escape and did other things to help the victims. These incredible people were resisting not on-site Germans but their own people’s violence during that week of onset of the Lithuanian Holocaust in late June of 1941. In all scenarios, there were more Lithuanian righteous rescuers, and research must continue to seek out their humanistically magnificent works.
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THE FINAL CHAPTER is “The Past as Legacy and Conflict: Wartime and Holocaust Narratives in Lithuania” (pp. 478-549, 163 footnotes). A large and controversial part deals with the Prague Declaration of June 3, 2008 and what has been known as the Double Genocide theory. It is the least academic and most propagandistic part of the book, revisiting the fascinating and illuminating conflicts of the last decades with what seems like an unsophisticated adoption of Lithuanian government positions (more exactly, the positions of the state-sponsored Commission cited in the book’s first line). Some of that Commission’s positions (not mentioned in the book) are frankly disturbing, such as a videotaped public statement by its executive director on the state’s attempted prosecutions of Holocaust survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance.
There is failure to mention those who have put forward other opinions (other than, on occasion, by way of personal degradation). There is no mention of the courageous views valiantly published by leading figures of the Lithuanian Jewish community over the decades, among them Shimon Alperovich, Milan Chersonski, Pinchos Fridberg, and Rachel Kostanian. These are scholars, public figures, and Holocaust survivors of diverse backgrounds who disagreed with Lithuanian government policy, not as enemies of the state, but to the contrary, as loyal, patriotic citizens expressing the views of a national minority on matters of history which in this case amounts to the Western narrative. There is no reference to the existence of the storied quadrilingual newspaper Jerusalem of Lithuania (1989-2011), nor of the web journal Defending History (founded in 2009), repositories of work and views that represent other sides of the debate. There is no mention of the work of scholars who hold other views, among them Clemens Heni and Michael Shafir (both authors of major books on these subjects, Heni’s published, and Shafir’s awaiting overdue posthumous publication). There is no reference to the academic papers of Efraim Zuroff, or those by this journal’s editor. There is no fair treatment of views critical of the Prague Declaration (or its ensuing legislation, critiqued by Yehuda Bauer), or, indeed, of the state-sponsored Commission itself, a source of some pain to Holocaust survivors.
It is particularly painful that the work of Lithuanian scholars, and cultural and political figures who have stood up to state views on history, among them Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Saulius Beržinis, Aleksandras Bosas, and Andrius Kulikauskas, remain mostly unmentioned, or more to the point, their major contributions to the debate that is the subject of the chapter remain unmentioned. While the work of the great and lamented Lithuanian thinker Leonidas Donskis is referenced, there is, here too, nothing to alert the reader to those of his works that dissent from government history policy. I feel it as my sacred duty to mention at least some of these, Lithuanians, Jews, and others alike, who have contributed contrary views to the theory propounded by government agencies, including the Commission.
I intend to write a separate paper on the matter of the Prague Declaration and the Double Genocide theory. For here and now, let it be left at one observation. Reading the Prague Declaration I am astonished and dismayed that of the totality of natural and human-made woes striking our planet’s population during the twentieth century should be reduced to two evils, and that the major point should now be insistence that they be considered absolutely equal (the declaration has the word “same” five times). There is no mention of the 2012 Seventy Years Declaration (who signatories include six eminent Lithuanian parliamentarians), the response to the 2008 Prague Declaration in the European Parliament.
Omer Bartov had this to say in his preface to one of his most important books, referencing the “Historikerstreit” of later 1980s Germany.
“The Historikerstreit, as it came to be called, is relevant to the present discussion for two main reasons. First, because it concerned the effort by some German scholars to ‘normalize’ the single most horrifying undertaking of the Third Reich, the Holocaust, by linking it to other cases of genocide carried out by other states at other times in history. Second, because it included an attempt to present the German army’s war in the East as a desperate struggle against an invading Bolshevik-Asiatic enemy who threatened to destroy not only Germany but the rest of Western civilization. Hence the ‘revisionists’ of the Historikerstreit were interested neither in denying the Holocaust nor in refuting claims about the barbarous manner in which the war in the East was conducted by the Wehrmacht, but rather in relativizing them both as ‘unoriginal’ and as ‘necessary’ because genocide had been originated by the very same regime whose alleged genocidal intentions had made fighting a barbarous war necessary, namely, the Bolsheviks.”
(Omer Bartov, The German Army and Genocide: Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civilians in the East, 1939-1944, New Press, 1999; later editions by Hamburg Institute for Social Research, preface)
Does it sound familiar? In fact, in a few words, Bartov, a renowned authority on genocide, has precisely encapsulated the very essence of Sužiedėlis’s present work on the destruction of the Jews of Lithuania. Rich and abundant in research and details but reluctant to apply to Lithuania the apt postwar adage “Not collective guilt, but collective responsibility” and not able to confront the many state efforts to commemorate and glorify local Holocaust collaborators as national heroes (on account of their anti-Soviet stances). Although the chapter mentions a few of the most infamous incidents, it is important to note that there have been many more, far too many to be considered aberrations or coincidences. There is a definite trend to rehabilitate local Holocaust Jew-killers as freedom heroes in a number of East European countries, an undertaking particularly unacceptable in member states of the European Union.
Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania is a book most certainly to be recommended. Not least for its copious, detailed, documented history of the barbaric events that shook the country as from June 23rd 1941 and destroyed six centuries of creative Jewish presence in Lithuania. But certainly not for an understanding of the collective responsibility that should have been assumed by Lithuanian authorities, intellectuals and historians, concerning the worst-ever crime in the history of that land, a land where many neighbors killed their fellow citizens who were Jews, and where the Nazi Final Solution was significantly advanced.
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Related:
Roland Binet section in Defending History
Books in the debate. Books section.
Defending History contributions by Shimon Alperovich, Vytenis Andriukaitis, Yitzhak Arad, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Danny Ben-Moshe, Saulius Beržinis, Milan Chersonski, Leonidas Donskis, Pinchos Fridberg, Clemens Heni, Rachel Kostanian, Andrius Kulikauskas, Dov Levin, Denis MacShane, Michael Shafir, Rūta Vanagaitė, Nida Vasiliauskaitė, Gert Weisskirchen, Olga Zabludoff
Papers by Dovid Katz on twenty-first century East European Holocaust revisionism