Politics of Memory

Joseph Melamed, Head of Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors’ Association, Releases Letter to Director of Yad Vashem

Posted on 3 September 2012 by Defending History

TEL AVIV—The office of the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel today released the text of the Hebrew letter which the ALJ’s chairman, Tel Aviv attorney Joseph Melamed, sent today to Avner Shalev, the director of Yad Vashem. Images of the letter’s two pages follow (signed letter as PDF). English translation here.

See also the separate English statement which the ALJ released to the media earlier today, following the recent news about the Lithuanian government renewing a much enlarged red-brown commission with the ostensible participation of Yad Vashem.

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Holocaust Survivors, Based in Tel Aviv, Issue Statement on Renewal of the Red-Brown Commission

Posted on 3 September 2012 by Defending History

TEL AVIV—The following public statement was received at 2:15 PM Tel Aviv time from the offices of the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel at King David Boulevard 1. In addition, the ALJ today released the letter written by its chairman to the head of Yad Vashem (English translation here). Background.

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June 2009 Correspondence with Yad Vashem

Posted on 3 September 2012 by Defending History

D O C U M E N T S

After more than three years’ wait for a substantive reply to the points raised in a letter to Yad Vashem, and in light of the past week’s shocking revalations about political legitimization by Yad Vashem of the Lithuanian government’s “red-brown commission” that is the engine of Prague Declaration and Double Genocide politics in Europe, DefendingHistory is releasing the full text of the letter of 28 June 2009, and the initial reply received the following day.

In the original the images, numbered 1-7, were included as email attachments. Here they are inserted in the text. [Note: the author’s eleven-year Vilnius University affiliation ended in 2010.]

—-Original Message—–

From: Dovid Katz [mailto:dovidkatz@vilniusuniversity.net]
Sent: Sunday, June 28, 2009 1:17 PM
To: גביר יוסי
Cc: ‘Simon Wiesenthal Center-Israel Office’; ‘Dov Levin’; ‘Joseph Melamed’
Subject: from Dovid Katz (Vilnius University)

Greetings dear Yossi (at the moment from Tel Aviv),

Trust this finds you and all at Yad Vashem well and thriving. As you may recall, we corresponded for several months in Spring 2008. I had been (and frankly remain) disappointed that by continuing to allow Yad Vashem’s name to appear as a partner of the Lithuanian government sponsored “Red-Brown Commission” even as the falsification of history (replacement of the very notion of the Holocaust by a paradigm of two equal genocides) continues apace at the European Parliament. Parliamentarians are told: “Look, Yad Vashem is with us….” Of course Yad Vashem has no such intention, and we are in agreement that it’s important for Lithuanian teachers to be educated in Jerusalem but that should be facilitated through any of the various honest NGOs or educators, not the “Red-Brown Commission” whose major current project is passage of the “equal genocide” resolutions in the European Parliament. My two recent op-eds on the topic are in the Jewish Chronicle and Irish Times.

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Clemens Heni’s Facebook Reactions to the Red-Brown Commission’s Renewal

Posted on 31 August 2012 by Defending History

The following Facebook entry is reproduced here with permission of the author, Dr. Clemens Heni.

Clemens Heni shared a link.

31 August 2012

1) Dina Porat wrote a piece on the Lithuanian Holocaust years ago, https://defendinghistory.com/readinglist.

2) Her joining the Lithuanian commission makes the institutional / government betrayal coming from Jerusalem even worse: a top honest Holocaust scholar joins with distorters, obfuscationists in a commission that has a track record of throwing its honest Israeli members to the wolves (Arad!), and of using serious foreign scholars with an array of intrigue, complexity, and layered nuance that no foreigner could combat in the multimillion euro den of Holocaust Obfuscation’s European capital.

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Didier Bertin on Prague Declaration Europe

Posted on 30 August 2012 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Didier Bertin

An excerpt from Didier Bertin’s longer work dated 20 July 2012, Planetary Geopolitics and Economics Today, republished here with the author’s permission. The author heads the Society for the Promotion of a European Human Rights Model in France.

The Declarations of Prague of  3 June 2008 and of the European Parliament of 23 September 2008 and their consequences

The contents of the Declaration of Prague of 3 June 2008 and the European Parliament of 23 September 2008, whose target was to take stock of the suffering experienced by the peoples under communist regimes, finally took an ideological and partisan rightist turn.

The progressive parties could have reacted with their own statement rejecting the ideological and revisionist considerations, which focus both on an anti-communist hatred and contempt for Nazi victims and their liberators.

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Yad Vashem Shocks Holocaust Survivors by Rejoining Lithuanian Government’s “Red-Brown Commission”

Posted on 28 August 2012 by Defending History

Holocaust survivors from Lithuania, and their families and advocates, are reporting feelings of “shock and betrayal” at “unbelievable reports” that Yad Vashem might again be lending legitimacy to the Lithuanian government sponsored “red-brown commission.” These accounts derive from a BNS (Baltic News Service) report today that appeared in various Lithuanian media, including Alfa.lt (full translation below), reporting that the president herself signed the decree today for substantial new state investment in the commission.

The Vilnius and Jerusalem rumor mills are equally putting out the word that there had been pressure from the Israeli foreign ministry, itself pressured by the Lithuanian foreign ministry for Holocaust-revising gestures in line with the current Baltic state policy often referred to as “Double Genocide.”

UPDATES: 29 Aug 2012; 31 Aug; 31 Aug(b); 31 Aug(c); 3 Sept; 3 Sept(b) [Holocaust survivors’ statement]; 3 Sept(c) [Survivors’ letter to head of Yad Vashem]; 3 Sept(d) [in English translation].

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Wiesenthal Center Calls for Immediate Dismissal of Director of Croatian Episcopal Archives who Denies Holocaust Crimes at Jasenovac

Posted on 26 August 2012 by Defending History

JERUSALEM―The Simon Wiesenthal Center today called for the immediate dismissal of Dr. Stjepan Razum, director of the Episcopal Archives of the Croatian State Archives in the wake of his August 10 interview to www.hrsvijet.net in which he claimed that the figures of victims in the notorious Croatian concentration camp Jasenovac were exaggerated and a product of Serb propaganda.

In a statement issued here by its Israel director, Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Center noted that such attempts to rewrite the history of World War II in Croatia by whitewashing the horrific crimes committed by the Ustasha cannot be tolerated and are inexcusable when asserted by prominent Church officials.

According to Zuroff:

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When I Received a Response from the Genocide Center in Vilnius

Posted on 25 August 2012 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Evaldas Balčiūnas

 

When I wrote about three glorified Lithuanian Freedom Army colonels who had in fact been implicated in the Holocaust, I did not realize quite how deep-rooted the shameful worship of Nazi-era war criminals has become here in Lithuania. I used to think that a few mistakes had been made due to patriotic excesses. A year has passed since that article, and I no longer feel that this is just some irksome problem “still encountered now and then”…

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The Case that Broke the Heart of a Nazi-Hunter

Posted on 23 August 2012 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Efraim Zuroff

The following is a transcription of the text that appeared in today’s edition of The Australian.

 

At the end of next week, I will have spent 32 years as a “Nazi-hunter,” trying to facilitate the prosecution of those individuals who in the service of Nazi Germany or in alliance with its regime, engaged in the persecution and/or murder of innocent civilians categorized as “enemies” of the Third Reich. During that period, I have dealt with many dozens of cases of all sorts of criminals from many different nationalities and walks of life, from mass murderers to individuals who were charged with the murder of a single person.

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It’s Not Just About the New Tuskulėnai “Peace Park” in Vilnius

Posted on 20 August 2012 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Milan Chersonski

Milan Chersonski (Chersonskij), longtime editor (1999-2011) of Jerusalem of Lithuania, quadrilingual (English-Lithuanian-Russian-Yiddish) newspaper of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, was previously (1979-1999) director of the Yiddish Folk Theater of Lithuania, which in Soviet times was the USSR’s only Yiddish amateur theater company. The views he expresses in DefendingHistory are his own. This is an authorized translation from the Russian original.

Photo: Milan Chersonski at this desk at the Jewish Community of Lithuania (image © 2012 Jurgita Kunigiškytė). Milan Chersonski section.

Can you imagine a European Union / NATO government investing millions in setting up a “Peace Park” in its beautiful capital city, in memory of people buried at the site of the park, when hundreds of them were Nazi collaborators who eagerly supported the annihilation of the Jewish population of their country?

Earlier this month, VilNews.com prominently published an article by Vincas Karnila, presented as the Introduction to a series called “The Mass Graves in Tuskulėnai.” It is a panegyric to the employees of the Museum of Genocide in Vilnius and the Center for the Study of Genocide and Resistance for their tireless efforts to establish the Tuskulėnai Peace Park. Readers are informed that six articles will follow. [Update: Subsequent articles in Karnila’s series can be found in www.VilNews.com.]

Tuskulenai Peace Park

We know from official sources that Soviet KGB victims were buried at Tuskulėnai from 1944 to 1947.

Karnila tells us:

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Executive Director of “Red-Brown Commission” Doubts Lithuanian Jews were Killed “on a Racial Basis” Before Arrival of German Forces in 1941

Posted on 16 August 2012 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

A number of viewers of the new Australian documentary film Rewriting History, by Marc Radomsky and Danny Ben-Moshe, have submitted to Defending History near-identical transcripts of a statement on camera, made to the film’s producers, by the executive director of the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania.”

Known for short as the “red-brown commission,” the state-sponsored body has long been opposed by Holocaust survivors and educators. The commission is responsible for Holocaust education in Lithuania, but has also taken an active political role in promoting the 2008 Prague Declaration and various details of alleged “equality” of Nazi and Soviet crimes. The commission’s website features the Prague Declaration in both English and Lithuanian.

The commission’s executive director, Ronaldas Račinskas, is quoted as saying on camera that his commission does not support “Double Genocide” but that he does support the 2008 Prague Declaration (though he concedes there are passages to be “discussed”). The problem is that the Prague Declaration is the primary document of the Double Genocide movement in Europe.

See also: Mr. Račinskas’s 2011 speech in the Lithuanian parliament; Critiques of his commission; 2015 Update: His call for investigations of Holocaust survivors who joined up with the anti-Nazi partisans.

Mr. Račinskas goes on to say, according to the transcripts provided of his Rewriting History interview:

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Wiesenthal Center Protests Australia’s Failure to Extradite Suspected Nazi War Criminal

Posted on 15 August 2012 by Defending History

FROM THE SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER:

The Simon Wiesenthal Center harshly criticized this morning’s decision by the Australian High Court to block the extradition to Hungary for war crimes of suspected Nazi collaborator Charles (Karoly) Zentai.

“Today is a sad day for Australia, and for justice, but most of all for the Nazis’ victims, their families and those who empathize with their suffering. Our sympathies today are with the Balazs family, whose brother Peter was the victim of Zentai and his accomplices, and who tried to see justice achieved in this case, but were thwarted by the Australian authorities.”

— Efraim Zuroff

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Ernst Nolte’s Grandson

Posted on 8 August 2012 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Clemens Heni

This edited and condensed extract is from the author’s forthcoming book (in press) and appears here with Dr. Heni’s permission. Clemens Heni is founding director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA).

In June of 1986 the German historian Ernst Nolte (born 1923) started the so-called Historians’ Dispute (Historikerstreit) by publishing an article in the leading conservative daily of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.[i]

Nolte has to be seen as just one of the voices, though a leading one in point of fact, in the nationalist wing in the Federal Republic under Helmut Kohl, who had become chancellor in 1982, with “national identity” as a core element of his politics. The national wave had already begun in the 1970s with the infamous “Hitler wave” films, and with the emergence of the New Right and its German agitator Henning Eichberg and authors such as Martin Walser in 1979.

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Lithuanian Foreign Minister Includes “Historical Memory Policy” (= Double Genocide) Among Nation’s Prime Goals for 2013 EU Presidency

Posted on 2 August 2012 by Defending History

In a curious annual statement to his nation’s diplomats around the globe, Foreign Minister Audronius Ažubalis recently proclaimed publicly that “historical memory policy” would be one of the main goals of Lithuanian’s foreign policy, particularly as it looks forward to its rotating presidency of the EU next year.

EARLIER REPORT

The insistence on the Eastern European right wing’s history appears alongside energy and transport infrastructure, economic development, consular services for citizens resident abroad, military security, international alliances and more. The speech also mentions the need for more  coordination of Lithuania’s “body and mind” implying the need for more rather than less diplomatic work in the field of history revisionism internationally.

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Efraim Zuroff Responds to Tablet Magazine Essay on Timothy Snyder

Posted on 27 July 2012 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Efraim Zuroff

  • The following comment first appeared in the discussion following David Mikics’s Tablet magazine article on Timothy Snyder (“The Diplomat of Shoah History. Does Yale historian Timothy Snyder absolve Eastern Europe of special complicity in the Holocaust?”). It is reproduced here with Dr. Zuroff’s permission. For further background, see the links below.

Unfortunately, this excellent article by David Mikics focuses almost exclusively on Poland, which for historical reasons is not the place where Snyder’s Bloodlands totally fails to present a historical account of the reality of the Holocaust. A far better place would be the Baltics in general, and Lithuania in particular. In these countries, three important phenomena took place:

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Amherst’s NYBC Caught Up in Lithuanian Government’s Jew-less, Yiddish-less PR Library

Posted on 23 July 2012 by Defending History

Last March 11th, Lithuanian Independence Day, when over a thousand neo-Nazi marchers passed the sign for the government’s Jewish Public Library on the capital’s main boulevard, no member of the library’s staff turned up to oppose the neo-fascists, with even a modest, polite sign of disapproval. The march proceeded with official permits and the participation of several members of parliament identified with the ruling coalition. The Lithuanian Embassy in Washington DC failed to respond to a DC based petition that attracted 2,156 signatories, many from Lithuanian citizens.

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Why was a Lithuanian Holocaust Perpetrator who also Murdered Belarusians Given State Honors? Open Letter to the Lithuanian Ambassador to Belarus

Posted on 18 July 2012 by Defending History

 

O P I N I O N

by  Evaldas Balčiūnas

 

I was surprised to learn that Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė appointed you ambassador to Belarus. She said Belarus is an important partner for Lithuania with many ties between our countries, and that cooperation should be on an equal footing, constructive and mutually beneficial. I invite you to think about whether you really are able to do this job, or whether you won’t make international relations worse because of certain matters of the past.

Let me remind you of one such thing. On 31 October 2002, you and then-president Valdas Adamkus signed presidential decree no. 1965 posthumously promoting Juozas Krikštaponis (Krištaponis) to the rank of colonel. The decree mistakenly gave his first name as Jonas, a mistake corrected in presidential decree 1K-849 issued by President Adamkus on 5 January 2007.

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Lithuanian Foreign Ministry Planning to (Ab)use EU Presidency to Push Red-Brown Politics

Posted on 17 July 2012 by Defending History

In spite of the repeated visible damage to Lithuania’s standing emanating from previous attempts, the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has now announced that red-brown politics in the service of Double Genocide would be one of the goals of its upcoming stint in the rotating presidency of the European Union.

There was diplomatic blood on the floor following the foreign ministry’s failed attempt to insinuate Double Genocide into the Stockholm Program in 2010 (reports here, here, and here).

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Landsbergis. Then and Now.

Posted on 16 July 2012 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

 

Vytautas Landsbergis is one of the giants of the late twentieth century. Along with Poland’s Lech Wałęsa and then-Czechoslovakia’s Václav Havel, Landsbergis led his people from foreign domination to freedom and democracy. Nothing these gentlemen might later on have said or done to their own legacies, particularly in the subsequent century, can detract from their singular achievements in contributing to the downfall of the Soviet Union and the freedom of the subjugated nations on its western periphery.

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Trilingual Memorial Plaque Unveiled on Zhager Town Square

Posted on 13 July 2012 by Defending History

O N – S I T E  R E P O R T / O P I N I O N

by Dovid Katz

ZHAGER, northern Lithuania. Over a hundred people gathered here today on the historic town square to unveil a trilingual plaque memorializing the erstwhile Jewish population of thousands in the town, today Žagarė. The event was incorporated into the annual Cherry Festival and suitably entitled “You can’t fudge the history.”

SEE ALSO THE REPORTS BY ROD FREEDMAN AND SARA MANOBLA

THE QUESTION: IS IT THE ONLY TOWN-CENTER IN ALL THE LAND WITH CLEAR AND TRUE WORDS ON THE TRUE FATE OF THE JEWISH POPULATION?

The text — in English, Lithuanian and Yiddish — summarizes the unvarnished history, with prominent reference to local Lithuanian collaboration (though historians will quibble with the use of “some” in place of “many” among other points). It is placed right in the center of town, rather than at a mass grave site deep in the forest; that might well be a first in modern Lithuanian history.

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