Evaldas Balčiūnas

Notes from my Life

Posted on 1 January 2023 by Defending History

MEMOIRS | GLORIFICATION OF COLLABORATORS | HUMAN RIGHTS | PERSON OF THE YEAR | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS

I was born in Šiauliai on May 27, 1962. My father worked in nearby Kuršėna. My first memories are mostly from there, especially the hamlet Daugėliai, established thanks to a brickyard, and surrounded by forests and the Venta river. My first ten years we children of the common yard rose up against the construction workers who were demolishing the football stadium that we had built with our own hands. For a six-year-old, I was quite adamant, standing up against a construction company truck. Alas, when my mom discovered my struggles, I was forced to rapidly move my resistance underground.

Evaldas Balčiūnas is Defending History’s Person of the Year 2023

Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Memoirs, News & Views | Comments Off

DH’s 2023 Person of the Year: Evaldas Balčiūnas

Posted on 1 January 2023 by Defending History

PERSON OF THE YEAR | LITHUANIA | EVALDAS BALČIŪNAS | LITVAK AFFAIRS | HUMAN RIGHTS | HISTORY

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In the decade since Evaldas Balčiūnas began informing the English-speaking world, in a series of articles in Defending History, of the details, scope, and pain of his own country pursuing a state policy of glorifying Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators, the phenomenon has moved from local shadows to the bright lights of open and free debate across the democratic world. His 2012 exposé of Holocaust perpetrator Jonas Noreika ultimately led to the publication in America of a bold new book, The Nazi’s Granddaughter by Sylvia Foti. But back here in Lithuania, Evaldas was lugged into court for years and years on kangaroo charges and harassed extensively. The Defending History team was there at each hearing to provide moral support. The day will surely come when Evaldas Balčiūnas — journalist, educator, rebel, author, and historian — will be honored by Jewish and Holocaust history and remembrance groups internationally, by humanists everywhere, and last but not least, by his own country, as its fearless grand ethicist of the earlier twenty-first century.

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Editor’s memoir

Evaldas Balčiūnas

In 2011, when our small Defending History team headed out (as we did each year) to Kaunas to monitor and document the 2011 neo-nazi city center march, an event that glorified Holocaust collaborators, we went for a coffee after the event. There, our mentor who never missed a march before his final illness, Milan Chersonski (1937–2021), the longtime Vilnius Yiddish theatre director and editor for some dozen years of the Lithuanian Jewish community’s quadrilingual newspaper, Jerusalem of Lithuania, told us (in Yiddish, of course): “Look, there is one young Lithuanian who has more courage than the rest of the country combined. He has been writing articles on the tragedy of his country’s government organs glorifying Holocaust collaborators in the public space. And unlike others, he’ll be happy for Defending History to publish them in English translation. Trust me, his articles are more important that all of ours that come from Jewish pens.”

Posted in Bold Citizens Speak Out, Collaborators Glorified, Defending History's Person of the Year, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Free Speech & Democracy, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views | Tagged Defending History Person of the Year, Evaldas Balciunas, Holocaust in Lithuania, Lithuanian Holocaust | Comments Off

Happy 60th Birthday to our Staff Writer Evaldas Balčiūnas, Unique Lithuanian Ethicist

Posted on 27 May 2022 by Defending History

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Happy Birthday, Evaldas!

A major unheralded ethicist of our times

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Lithuania’s most intrepid pursuer of historic truth and its defense. A decade ago, his series “Why Does My Country Honor Murderers?” included his 2012 revelation to the English speaking world on the Holocaust collaboration of “national hero” Jonas Noreika. From 2014 onward he was for years dragged into court in a prosecutorial campaign of kangaroo hearings and harassment. Defending History stood with him with pride. Today his work (selection in English) is sometimes undercredited elsewhere. But not here. Happy Birthday Evaldas!

Evaldas Balčiūnas at the Vilnius court where he was repeatedly harassed for telling the truth about local Holocaust perpetrators and collaborators. Defending History came to each and every hearing to provide support. After years of harassment he was found ‘not guilty’…

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RELATED: Dovid Katz’s personal birthday tribute to Evaldas Balčiūnas.

Posted in Evaldas Balčiūnas, News & Views | Comments Off

Is Walking Down a Street Named for a Murderer Now Considered ‘Holocaust Remembrance’?

Posted on 18 May 2022 by Defending History

Opinion | Collaborators Glorified | Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas | Politics of Memory | Lithuania | History

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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Just another street name in a pleasant part of Kaunas, this year’s Capital of European Culture? Author thinks that “Kaunas and its people deserve better”…

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Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas (1915–1948) is remembered by the Republic of Lithuania for his anti-Soviet guerilla activities after the war but without regard for the three separate periods of his activity in service to Nazi activities to exterminate the Jewish people. He did indeed join the anti-Soviet partisan resistance movement in the spring of 1945. And, before his death, he did become the head of its Tauras County unit. Those who heroize this period of his activities emphasize his efforts in establishing military discipline and order in the county. His critics, in turn, are more likely to make reference to his order to the Žalgiris Detachment, subordinate to the Tauras County, to annihilate Russian (Soviet) civilian settlers (“colonists”) in Opšrūtai, who had been transferred to Lithuania according to the Soviet-Nazi repatriation agreement (often with little or no input from these folks themselves). Thirty-one persons perished in Opšrūtai, including fourteen children. In the partisans’ descriptions of the battle, it is easy to notice that their task was to eradicate all colonists, including children. Those who justify the atrocity against civilians, including children, say that it was necessary to thwart the russification of Lithuania.

Lithuania’s policy of historical memory was quite straightforward on this issue: it built a monument to the partisans of the Žalgiris Detachment in Opšrūtai. Ethnic cleansing of Jews, if done by “our own nationalist heroes” in Lithuania, is still seen, it seems, as acceptable.

Posted in Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas, Antisemitism & Bias, Christian-Jewish Issues, Collaborators Glorified, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Genocide Center (Vilnius), Kaunas, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory | Tagged Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas, Arunas Bubnys, Evaldas Balciunas, IHRA, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance | Comments Off

Dr. Bubnys’s New Book on the Lithuanian Holocaust: More Obfuscation and Far-Right History-Spin to Minimize Local Participation?

Posted on 27 April 2022 by Defending History

Opinion | Books | Dr. Bubnys & Official State Holocaust Research in Lithuania | Red-Brown Commission | Genocide Center | Politics of Memory | Lithuania | History

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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Prolific historian, director of the state’s Genocide Center, and far-right activist. On 23 June 2020, Dr. Arūnas Bubnys addressed an ultranationalist rally celebrating the 79th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion (and onset of the Lithuanian Holocaust), flanked by large posters of Jonas Noreika and Kazys Škirpa, two major collaborators in various phases of the genocide of Lithuanian Jewry (96.4% were killed). In his speech he taunted the (silent) DH observers on hand. See reports here and here, and DH’s section on Dr. Bubnys’s work and positions over the years.

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Arūnas Bubnys’s book The Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces (Holokaustas Lietuvos provincijoje, Margi raštai, Vilnius, 2021) is another publication of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania (ICECNSORL). Up until now, books published by the Commission were academically written and appreciated by a sophisticated readership. Moreover, they were always published in both Lithuanian and English. This book is different. It is available only in Lithuanian. Previously published monographs would also include Commission-approved conclusions; this book has no such thing. As far as I have been able to ascertain, the Commission’s academics did not discuss the book among themselves before its publication. But let’s start at the beginning.

The book is geographically quite extensive: 23 counties and 140 towns are cited. This is really a lot, but it is also quite obvious that the coverage of towns in different counties is unequal. When it comes to Šilutė county in western Lithuania, for example, several camps and fates of individual Jews are mentioned in passing, but no single town is described. For the Marijampolė county, only the fate of the Jews of Marijampolė itself is presented. Šiauliai xounty (15 towns) and Alytus County (12 towns) are the most extensively covered.

Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Books, Dr. Arūnas Bubnys and State Holocaust Revisionism in Lithuania, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Genocide Center (Vilnius), History, Legacy of 23 June 1941, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory | Tagged Arunas Bubnys, Genocide Center in Vilnius, Holocaust in Lithuania, International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes, Soviet-Nazi crimes commission | Comments Off

The Holocaust in Šeduva, a Town in Northern Lithuania

Posted on 4 January 2022 by Defending History

ŠEDUVA | HISTORY | MUSEUMS | POLITICS OF MEMORY | SHTETL COMMEMORATIONS

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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Just like each and every other town in Lithuania, Šeduva (Sheduva) has as the most barbarous episode of it history the Lithuanian Holocaust. It is not easy to tell this story. There are many narratives that contradict each other, with many omitted or unclear episodes. The omissions can be partly explained by the current policy of historical memory in Lithuania, as well as by the authority of some organizations that thsemlves took active part in these horrible events. Narratives that are unfavorable to them are denied, downplayed, or classified as “information warfare” (in other words: “Russia”). I have previously written about the difficulty in asssessing assorted narratives here.

The summary version of of the Šeduva Jews’ massacre that I recounted includes these critical dates:

June 25, 1941: The Nazis occupy Šeduva.

July 22, 1941: Šeduva’s Jews are driven into the town’s ghetto established to incarcerate its Jewish citizens.

August 25t, 1941: The city’s 665 Jews are murdered in Liaudiškiai forest. But a few of the Jewish families of volunteers (veterans) of Lithuania’s War of Independence in 1918 are “allowed” to live, under the condition that they abandon their Jewishness and get baptized. The residents of Šeduva and its vicinity observe the public baptism at the church. A couple of weeks later those baptized are driven to Panevėžys and also shot dead, like all their unbaptized brethren who were not “saved by baptism” for having volunteered over two decades earlier to fight in the nation’s War of Independence. The only one who survived was Ms. S. Nolienė, who was hidden by the priest M. Karosas.

Posted in Evaldas Balčiūnas, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Šeduva (Sheduva, Shádeve, Shádov) and its "Museum of the Lost Shtetl" | Tagged Evaldas Balciunas, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust in Seduva, Lithuania, Lost Shtetl Museum (Seduva, Šeduva | Comments Off

On the Seimas Declaring 2021 to be Year in Honor of Alleged Participant in Lietukis Garage Massacre of 1941

Posted on 2 August 2020 by Defending History

OPINION | GLORIFICATION OF COLLABORATORS | POLITICS OF MEMORY

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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The resolution of the Seimas (Lithuanian parliament) to declare 2021 the “Year of Juozas Lukša” has resulted in heated discussions. They are attentively chronicled by Defending History.

Those who remember the Holocaust and its lessons for history and for life discuss the name Juozas Lukša in conjunction with the LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front) of June and July 1941, including the versions that link him to a barbaric massacre of Jews at the Lietukis Garage in central Kaunas where some seventy innocent Jewish people, caught in the streets, were brutally killed before cheering crowds.

Juozas Lukša looks very similar to one of the murderers in one of the photos (and he was identified by some from a photo of himself after the war). It links him to one of the versions noting that the Garage Massacre was committed largely by prisoners who had been released from a Kaunas jail (we know that Lukša was released from a Kaunas jail). Opponents to those versions claim that Juozas Lukša is innocent and level accusations of slander against those who implicate him. This discussion is not new and there have not really been any new proofs offered on either side since the flare-up of the argument over the last month.

Posted in Christian-Jewish Issues, Collaborators Glorified, Debates on Juozas Lukša, Evaldas Balčiūnas, History, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory | Tagged Evaldas Balciunas, Holocaust in Lihtuania, Juozas Luksa, Kestutis Girnius, LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front), Lietukis Garage | Comments Off

Lithuanian Righteous of the Nations: Were They Hunted Down After the War by the ‘Forest Brother’ Guerrillas?

Posted on 7 July 2020 by Defending History

OPINION | GLORIFICATION OF COLLABORATORS | POLITICS OF MEMORY

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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This is a story of seven Jewish women rescued in Telšiai (Yiddish: Telz). They are: Lija Šapiro (Leye Shapiro), Eta Piker, Nija Miselevič (Niye Miselevich), Maša Richman (Masha Richman), Anna Levi, Zlata Chatimlianskaja (Chatimliansky), and Leja Šif (Leye Shif).

But it is first and foremost a story of “the aftermath”: What happened to the Lithuanian rescuers when the war ended?

Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Evaldas Balčiūnas, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory | Tagged Adolfas Ramanauskas Vanagas, Evaldas Balciunas, Lihtuanian Righteous Among the Nations, Lithuaznian Rescuers during Holocaust | Comments Off

Why Does Lithuania’s Military Academy Disseminate Antisemitic Sentiments?

Posted on 3 September 2019 by Defending History

OPINION | ANTISEMITISM | COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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I agree that the name of this piece is quite shocking. To see what I am talking about, it suffices to look through just one publication, published by the General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania in cooperation with the “Versmė” publishing house. The academy is itself named for an alleged Holocaust collaborator (See my 2013 article), but that is not the topic of today’s piece, save that yet again it turns out that “state agencies just naming something” for a Holocaust collaborator is not seldom itself an ominous portent of institutional and state-sponsored racism. Indeed, the state Military Academy named for one alleged collaborator actually published an antisemitic tome by another, Jonas Noreika, who of course went on to active collaboration with the Holocaust.

Here are several excerpts from this 2016 publication brought out by the Academy that recently made it to foreign book purchasers, that would be universally recognized as antisemitic. The first refers to folks from the different regions of Lithuanians, naturally ignoring that they were for many centuries home to people of diverse origins, religions, nationalities (indeed, the Yiddish language has the term Zámeter for a person from the first named region):

Samogitians, Aukštaitians, Dzūkians, and Klaipėdians!

Your future is full of prosperity and wealth! We must know it well! Because it will depend only on us if we are going to benefit from this prosperity ourselves or give it away to Jews, Germans, and other foreigners that keep invading Lithuania! They see that the highest standard of living in the whole world is going to be here! Indeed! It will not be us migrating to other countries, but others coming to us to earn heaps of money!

Most of the auctioned off farms are bought by Jews! They feel and perhaps know that, in three years’ time or even sooner, that land will be worth tenfold! Indeed!”

Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Collaborators Glorified, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Jonas Žemaitis, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, State Glorification of Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika | Tagged Antisemitism in Eastern Europe, Antisemitism in Lithuania, Jonas Noreika, Jonas Zemaitis Military Academy, Lithuanian Military Academy | Comments Off

Biržai (Birzh), in Northern Lithuania, Honors Holocaust Victims at Forest Mass Grave Site; But City-Center Museum Honors the Collaborators

Posted on 15 June 2019 by Defending History

OPINION | MUSEUMS | POLITICS OF MEMORY | SHTETL COMMEMORATIONS

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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This weekend, the new monument to 2,400 Biržai Jews, massacred on August 8, 1941, will be unveiled in Biržai, a town in northern Lithuania known in Yiddish as Birzh. On that fateful day in Pakamponys forest, German Gestapo officers and their Lithuanian accomplices murdered 900 children, because they were Jewish children, 780 women, because they were Jewish women, and 720 men, because they were Jewish, too. The locals call the site “the Biržai Jews’ grave”.

That day, more than one third of the inhabitants of that old historical city were massacred. A vibrant community was destroyed and trust in Biržai as a safe place to live was wholly undermined. This old wound had not been taken care of properly up until now. There is a memorial stone at the site of the massacre, the site itself is covered with tiles. There is a memorial inscription, too. However, all those people with their lives and their dreams remained but a number in stone. People behind the new memorial decided to fix this, and now we have more than five hundred names carved on a steel wall. This difficult task required a lot of effort. Alongside with the people, the murderers also destroyed the documents attesting to their lives.

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What does the Town’s Official Museum Think?

Posted in Birzh (Biržai ), Bold Citizens Speak Out, Christian-Jewish Issues, Collaborators Glorified, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Events, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory | Tagged Birzai (Lithuania), Holocaust in Biržai, Holocaust in Birzh, Holocaust memorial in Birzai (Birzh) | Comments Off

More Evidence: Did Adolfas Ramanauskas’s Lead a Hitlerist Militia in the Early Days of the Lithuanian Holocaust?

Posted on 13 May 2019 by Defending History

OPINION | GLORIFICATION OF COLLABORATORS | POLITICS OF MEMORY

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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Five years ago, I wrote about the alleged connections of Adolfas Ramanauskas to the persecution of Jews in Druskininkai. Following publication of the Lithuanian version, the English version appeared here in Defending History in 2014. The connections are based in the first instance on Ramanauskas’s own memoirs, published in post-Soviet independent Lithuania, where he boasts that he served as leader of “the rebels’ squad” during the precise days and weeks of June and July 1941 when these “rebels” of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) were in fact unleashing humiliation, plunder, violence and indeed murder against Jewish neighbors (the Soviet army was escaping Hitler’s invasion, not these white-armbanded LAFers). Following upon Ramanauskas’s own memoir and boast came research into the actual police records of the summer of 1941, as well as the postwar Soviet war crimes trials’ transcripts.

When writing that first article in 2014, my goal was not to find or prove something directly compromising. I was simply disturbed by the obvious collision of this heroic myth and its historical circumstances. It was part of my series of articles in Defending History, starting in 2012, that was launched by my essay “Why does the State Commemorate Murderers?”.

LATEST MEDIA:

Algemeiner; BBC; Independent; Simon Wiesenthal Center; Telegraph.

RAMANAUSKAS: A FIVE YEAR SAGA

But then, in late 2017, the Seimas (parliament) of the Republic of Lithuania declared 2018 to be the Year of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. Indignant at the uncritical worship, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s department of East European affairs, brought a copy of my article to the members of the Seimas and was condemned without them even attempting to read it. During that period, I published a second, follow-up article focused on the moral issues.

Successful resistance to the plans of the Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania to erect a monument to Ramanauskas in his native city of New Britain, Conn., were enabled exactly by the facts mentioned in the 2014 piece (that saga can be followed in Defending History). One year ago, the City Council of New Britain “just said No.”

Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Debates on Adolfas Ramanauskas (Vanagas), Debates on the Postwar "Forest Brothers", Evaldas Balčiūnas, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory | Tagged Adolfas Ramanauskas Vanagas, Evaldas Balciunas, Holocaust in Lithuania | Comments Off

The Strange Holocaust Trial in the Lithuanian Capital

Posted on 8 March 2019 by Defending History

OPINION | GLORIFICATION OF COLLABORATORS | POLITICS OF MEMORY

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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Last Tuesday, 5 March 2019, a Vilnius court sat in judgment over an appeal to the state-sponsored “Genocide Center” by Grant Arthur Gochin, a financial advisor in California who is of Litvak heritage and was himself born in South Africa (he did not come in for the trial but was represented by attorney Rokas Rudzinskas and academic specialist Dr. Andrius Kulikauskas). The request in effect asked the Genocide Center (formally “The Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania” or LGGRTC) to revisit their refusal to re-examine the historical certificate they issued whitewashing Holocaust collaborator Jonas Noreika. In support, the plaintiff submitted a big stack of documents from Lithuania’s own archives, and claimed that the Center’s conclusions ignore or misinterpret a whole series of documents and that they are biased in their justification of Noreika and taking into account only “positive aspects” of his activities. The Center explained away some documents signed by Noreika by using other documents that were signed by the German administration much later, but failed to properly name the criteria according to which some witnesses and documents are deemed important and others are rejected. Gochin’s lawyer noted that responsibility for crimes to humanity is not canceled out by the fact that the perpetrator held office and was following orders.

Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Dr. Arūnas Bubnys and State Holocaust Revisionism in Lithuania, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Events, Genocide Center (Vilnius), Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, State Glorification of Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika | Comments Off

My Seven Long Years with Jonas Noreika (“General Storm”)

Posted on 13 January 2019 by Defending History

OPINION | GLORIFICATION OF COLLABORATORS | POLITICS OF MEMORY

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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Editor’s note: Seven years ago, journalist, researcher and ethicist Evaldas Balčiūnas, who was born, raised and continues to live in Lithuania, began his remarkable series of articles on state “heroes” who were alleged Holocaust collaborators (or perpetrators) with his 2012 essay on Jonas Noreika (“General Storm”), published in Lithuanian and the same year, in English in Defending History. As a result, Mr. Balčiūnas (bal-CHOO-nass) was subjected to years of legal harassment and persecution by prosecutors, police, and assorted far-right “plaintiffs” (please scroll down to 22 May 2014 in the Balčiūnas section to follow the saga). The Defending History community is proud to have stood by Evaldas at each of the kangaroo trial hearings in Vilnius, and is delighted that all these years later, talented American campaigners with wherewithal have taken up the cause to major good effect, and have now brought the Noreika matter to the Vilnius courts (see report on 15th January hearing). We hope that our American friends and colleagues will see their way clear to fully crediting Evaldas Balčiūnas’s work (and noting its consequences for him) on the various new websites and blogs established, including, for starters, the excellent online Captain Jonas Noreika Museum.

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The first time I heard of Jonas Noreika was back in 1993. I was chatting with Petras Dargis in the editorial room of the newspaper where I worked, here in Šiauliai, northwestern Lithuania, when a man of short stature came in. He started to scold one of the reporters for his article on Jonas Noreika. These were the times — right after the Soviet system’s collapse — when various colleagues and friends were going through the deepest corners of their memory, looking for all sorts of bits and pieces of their past struggles and sufferings.

This was particularly the case when that which was perceived by some as “their battles” or perhaps even their “glorious episodes” amounted to extraordinary suffering for others. First, Noreika’s comrades came to the editorial office and told of glorious episodes of the (so-called) Uprising of June 1941, incarceration in Stutthof, and the post-war legend of General Vėtra (Noreika’s famous nom-de-guerre which translates: General Storm). The journalist published the story, referring to respectable historical sources.

Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Free Speech & Democracy, History, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Memoirs, News & Views, Prosecutors & Police 'Investigate' DH Author Evaldas Balčiūnas, State Glorification of Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika | Tagged Evaldas Balciunas, Genocide Center Vilnius, glorification of Holocaust collaborators, Grant Gochin, Holocaust in Lithuania, Jonas Noreika, Silvia Foti | Comments Off

Is Lithuania’s Department of Cultural Heritage Really Permitting a Farm, Garden & Drinking Well Inside Old Jewish Cemetery of Radvíleshik (Radviliškis)?

Posted on 17 October 2018 by Defending History

OPINION | CEMETERIES | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH AFFAIRS | LITHUANIA

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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I was taken aback by the news being informally reported. “They came and they fenced off a part of the Radviliškis (Radvíleshik, Radvílishok) Jewish cemetery for themselves,” people told me. This was a well-known Jewish shtetl before the Holocaust. Without further ado I went to check it. A house and big chunk of property with it, were fenced off and for sale, clearly within the cemetery perimeter (of course with gravestones long pilfered from that section, and buried people underneath undisturbed). My photos of all parts of the cemetery are here.

FARM FOR SALE

Posted in Cemeteries and Mass Graves, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory | Tagged Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe, Jewish cemeteries in Lithuania, Jewish heritage in Lithuania, Lithuanian Dept of Cultural Heritage, Radvileshik, Radvilishok, Radviliškis | Comments Off

Museum of The Lost Truth: A Lithuanian Drama

Posted on 5 October 2018 by Defending History

OPINION | MUSEUMS | SHEDUVA | POLITICS OF MEMORY | SHTETL COMMEMORATIONS | HUMOR (OF SORTS)

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

Evaldas Balčiūnas informed the English speaking world of a series of state honors for alleged Holocaust collaborators, starting with Jonas Noreika back in 2012. He paid a hefty personal price for it (scroll down his DH section to 2014).

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PREAMBLE

The Lost Shtetl is a massive, holistic project to reclaim the Lithuanian Jewish heritage of Šeduva (Shádeve, older Shádev). Plans include a multimillion euro state-of-the-art museum complex scheduled to open in 2020 that is slated to become an international tourist attraction. Now is an excellent time for public comment and observers’ contemplation.

“The Lost Shtetl” will not be a generic community of faceless Litvaks. It will make tangible the lives of real individuals. But will we learn about the real individuals from the town and its region who destroyed them? Their names and faces? Or will we simply tuck them away into the phrase: “The Nazis and their local collaborators murdered 664 Šeduva Jews in Liaudiškiai forest”?

Posted in Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Šeduva (Sheduva, Shádeve, Shádov) and its "Museum of the Lost Shtetl", South Africa | Tagged Evaldas Balciunas, Holocaust in Lithuania, Lost Shtetl Museum, Museum of Jewish Sheduva, Seduva (Lithunia), Šeduva Museum of Jewish History, Sergejus Kanovicius | Comments Off

Sad Error of Naming 2018 for Someone who “Just” Led a Pro-Nazi “Partisan Squad” in Lithuania in June and July of 1941

Posted on 7 December 2017 by Defending History

OPINION | GLORIFICATION OF COLLABORATORS | POLITICS OF MEMORY

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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The national scandal unleashed by the Lithuanian Rūta Vanagaitė and the Jewish Efraim Zuroff via their statements about Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, is gradually losing momentum. The Seimas (parliament) went right ahead and declared the incoming year, 2018, to be The Year of Ramanauskas-Vanagas. That is sad. Three years ago, I wrote about this person’s activities in Druskininkai in 1941. Society back then was silent about it. It was only the desire of some politicians to glorify this personage that led to the aforementioned Lithuanian and Jewish commentators to talk about him. They spoke loudly and an antisemitic bubble burst. Vanagaitė’s statement had some inaccuracies. The very statement was taken as an insult by the mainstream. Public details about Zuroff’s statement were scarce. My 2014 article was among those details.

Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Debates on Adolfas Ramanauskas (Vanagas), Dr. Arūnas Bubnys and State Holocaust Revisionism in Lithuania, Evaldas Balčiūnas, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, New Britain, Connecticut: Plans to Glorify Alleged Nazi Collaborator?, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory | Tagged Adolfas Ramanauskas Vanagas, Efraim Zuroff, Evaldas Balciunas, Forest Brothers in Lithuania, Ruta Vanagaite | Comments Off

Instead of Removing Honors for Holocaust Collaborators, New Petition is Launched to Ask for Yet Another

Posted on 23 October 2017 by Defending History

OPINION | GLORIFICATION OF COLLABORATORS

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by Evaldas Balčiūnas

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In a 2012 article in Defending History, I asked why Holocaust perpetrator Jonas Noreika is made into a “national hero” here in Lithuania, one honored by street names and public plaques. Since then protests have come, among others, from a somewhat obscured petition by Lithuanian intellectuals, an appeal from journalist and Declaration of Independence signatory Rimvydas Valatka, Lithuania’s official Jewish community, Grant Gochin, a South African born author resident in the United States, and others. These appeals, all from 2015, were crowned by a rare protest by Jewish students at a Noreika shrine in central Vilnius (see Defending History’s guide for English readers to the links in the 2015 debate).

Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, State Glorification of Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika | Comments Off

Defending History Writer Evaldas Balčiūnas Is Found ‘Not Guilty’

Posted on 22 July 2016 by Defending History

22 July 2016 Defending History Eyewitness Report

VERDICT IN: EVALDAS BALČIŪNAS NOT GUILTY (AFTER 4 YEARS OF HARASSMENT AND A DOZEN 450 KM ROUND TRIPS FROM HOME — BUT COURT ALLOWS FAR RIGHT “PLAINTIFF” 20 DAYS TO APPEAL)

Posted in Evaldas Balčiūnas, Free Speech & Democracy, Human Rights, It Pays to Defend History: Success Over the Years..., Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Prosecutors & Police 'Investigate' DH Author Evaldas Balčiūnas, State Glorification of Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika | Tagged Evaldas Balciunas, Free speech in Lithuania | Comments Off

DH Writer Lugged into Court Again for Critique of State Honors for Holocaust Collaborators

Posted on 9 June 2016 by Defending History

FREE SPEECH | HUMAN RIGHTS | DOUBLE GENOCIDE | BOLD CITIZENS

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VILNIUS—The latest in a long line of court appearance demanded by summons of Defending History author Evaldas Balčiūnas, will be held this Monday, 13 June, at 1:30 PM (13:30) at Vilnius County Court at Laisves Prospektas 79A, courtroom 019.

COME SUPPORT EVALDAS BALČIŪNAS MONDAY 13 JUNE 2016, 1:30 PM (13:30), VILNIUS COUNTY COURT, LAISVĖS PROSPEKTAS 79A, ROOM 019

Posted in Bold Citizens Speak Out, Collaborators Glorified, Double Genocide, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Free Speech & Democracy, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Prosecutors & Police 'Investigate' DH Author Evaldas Balčiūnas, State Glorification of Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika | Tagged Abuse of Judiciary in the Baltics, Democracy in Eastern Europe, Evaldas Balciunas, Free Speech and Holocaust Discourse, Free speech in Lithuania, human rights in Lithuania | Comments Off