LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EUROPE | HISTORY | BLAMING THE VICTIMS | GERMANY | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS | HUMAN RIGHTS

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OPINION

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Please ask your elected officials to contact the German embassy in your country:

Please rapidly mark, fence and protect the ground sacred to Holocaust survivors and their families that now abuts the forest training grounds of the new German Brigade arriving in the Lithuanian forests as part of NATO. The fort, where 100 Vilna Ghetto partisans found refuge and valiantly fought the Nazis, is disappearing by the day, used for late night partying by the barracks builders, and very soon, if not corrected, by thousands of German troops… 

For decades, partisans veteran Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (1922–2024) took thousands of visitors from around the world to this major historic site in the Lithuanian forest. What a splendid opportunity this is for genuine Holocaust education of the young German troops heading eastward. Video of Fania at the fort in 2007.

Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky showing us around the Jewish partisan fort, in her Vilna Yiddish, in 2007 (video). Her last request to future generations. DH’s section on the Jewish partisan fort (also in ascending chronological order).

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Respectfully calling on people of good will to honor the Vilna Jewish partisans who valiantly fought the Nazis. The Jewish partisans’ legacy has in recent years been besmirched by some powerful forces in Lithuania and other parts of Eastern Europe. Please do not remain silent about the German government’s failure to date to publicly commit to honoring, marking, fencing and preserving the still-striking remnants of the last Jewish partisan fort of the Vilna Ghetto partisans that — by the majestic hand of history — sits right next door in the forest to the German Army’s brand new Forty-Fifth Brigade arriving in Lithuania as part of NATO. The bulk of the soldiers haven’t even arrived yet, but builders of their barracks use the site and the underground wooden bunkers for partying and it is rapidly disappearing and becoming a place for used beer cans, firecracker tubes, and other party remnants.

“This ground was sacred to the last Holocaust survivors of Lithuania and far beyond. Will it now be honored by modern democratic Germany?”

Deeper damage to this precious historic site from the German Army’s arrival is already manifest. The deep-forest ambience has been shattered by vast woods clearing and road building not far. The access area is closed on days of shooting practice and a “danger” sign menaces would-be visitors. The sounds of silence are replaced by the sounds of the current German Army’s imminent arrival.

Powerful local forces have helped “fix things” via PR bonanza stunts like having German soldiers scrub an old cemetery elsewhere (with a rabbi flown in from Berlin officiating; where was the rabbi from Vilnius?). Truly very nice, but in this instance a lamentable deflection from the issue at hand. The latest.

Readers are asked to politely and respectfully contact German embassies and consulates internationally on the issue.

There is no suggestion the German Army (or government) has any ill intention here. They are perhaps being misled by a few select ultranationalist Lithuanian state agencies dedicated to “fixing the history” and their ersatz paid-for “official Jewish authorities” (and foreign figures addicted to junkets, honors, photo-ops and medals) who receive benefit from betraying the very people they are sacredly committed to represent. A major German elder statesman drafted a powerful statement, then withdrew it from publication under pressure from political friends in Lithuania.

Our take: Germany needs to stand up to the ultrnationalist Holocaust revisionist elements in the brigade-hosting government. This can still all easily be put right very rapidly. And what a magnificent opportunity for Holocaust education generally, and specifically, for the thousands of German troops arriving “back” in Lithuania. As of now, those we have encountered in Vilnius never heard of any Jewish partisan fort abutting their new forest training base. (Someone had tried to pivot the issue to old Jewish cemeteries which Lithuania has rightly protected by fencing, signs and law from 1990 onward.)

German citizens might ask themselves: Are we sending thousands of German troops “back” to Lithuania to help today’s far right destroy the last vestige of Jewish resistance to the Nazis in the forests of Lithuania?

Mini Photo Gallery

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Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky at one of the underground bunkers at the Jewish partisan fort outside Vilna in the forest where she resided from the day after her escape from the Vilna Ghetto on the morning of its liquidation (23 Sept. 1943) until the defeat of the Nazi occupiers in July 1944. Photo: DefendingHistory.com.

Ireland’s Ambassador Dónal Denham (left) and UK Ambassador Simon Butt visit the Jewish partisan fort in the forests of Lithuania, learning of its remarkable history in the annals of anti-Nazi resistance from survivor and veteran of the Jewish partisans Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (c. 2009). Photo: DefendingHistory.com

Germany’s Ambassador Hans-Peter Annan awarding Jewish partisan veteran Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky the president’s federal cross of merit at the German Embassy in Vilnius in 2009. Left to right: Dr. Shimon Alperovich (head of the Lithuanian Jewish Community), Ambassador Annan, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky and Dovid Katz, then professor of Yiddish at Vilnius University and editor of DefendingHistory.com.