In a letter to the editor of today’s edition of the mainstream daily Vakaro žinios (Evening News), three organizations, including the mainstream Sąjūdis, write to complain that the state has not done enough in 2011 to commemorate the 1941 fascist collaborators (including the Lithuanian Activist Front or LAF ‘white-armbanders’), who unleashed the Lithuanian Holocaust, killing Jewish neighbors in dozens of locations before the Germans ever arrived. Many were then recruited for the Germans’ organized killing squads. The organizations signing the letter clearly regard them as national heroes and ‘insurgents’.
The letter to the editor is available online (English translation here).
A few friends asked me if I could attend a book presentation in Kaunas, since they couldn’t make it. The book is called Undigested Past: The Holocaust in Lithuania by Robert van Voren. It was published in English first as part of a series by the Rodopi publishing house on Eastern Europe. I’d never heard of van Voren, but people told me he was known for his books on psychiatric abuses in the Soviet Union. The poster for the event proclaimed boldly in Lithuanian that the conference’s official language would be English, which made me smirk, but an English-language version of the poster became available on the morning of the event.