Over the weekend, foreign visitors discovered offensive desecrations at Ponár (Paneriai), the mass murder site of 100,000 people during the Holocaust, among them 70,000 Jews of the Vilna region.
One major monument was spray painted with a swastika and the Russian for ‘Hitler was right’, all in red. It was signed ‘Solomon’, the pseudonym of a ubiquitous graffiti artist who had not been known previously for antisemitic attempts, leading to suspicion that use of the name could be a decoy. It was likewise widely thought that the use of Russian rather than Lithuanian was a decoy, as well as a likely slight directed at the country’s tiny Jewish community, which antisemitic attacks frequently accuse of disloyalty.
- ‘Hitler was right’ (in Russian)
