DefendingHistory.com has been able to confirm the following exchange on the floor of the Seimas (Lithuanian parliament) on 17 May 2012. MP Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis, the Social Democrats’ senior spokesperson for foreign affairs asked a question of the prime minister, Andrius Kubilius, and the foreign minister, Audronius Ažubalis, both from the ruling Conservative / Christian Democrats’ faction. It was answered by the foreign minister.
The following is a translation of the exchange.
It seemed to many Vilnius observers this week that Yale historian Professor Timothy Snyder and Yivo director Mr. Jonathan Brent were both “brought” to Lithuania for various events that would, without their foreknowledge, coincide with the week of the Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis glorification ceremonies financed by the Lithuanian government. These ceremonies have now attracted considerable international criticism (see page one).
It was hoped by some in high places, it is alleged, that their presece would deflect international attention from the honoring of the Nazi puppet prime minister (it didn’t), and that their own fabled reluctance to criticize the Lithuanian government unambiguously would in its own way add legitimacy to the controversial events (it won’t).
Background:
Though neither of the two Foreign Ministry Chosen, both painfully controversial among Holocaust survivors and their families, would issue during their stay in Vilnius a public statement on the series of state-sponsored events to honor a Nazi collaborator, Professor Snyder did answer a question about the reburial in a public interview carried by 15min.lt. The question and answer are as follows:
— There is a controversy in Lithuania surrounding the reburial of Juozas Brazaitis, leader of the provisional government, with the support of the government. Do you think it’s a right thing to do?
“I am going to choose my words very carefully here. I think before you rebury anyone, you should think very very hard and probably wait a very very long time because once you rebury somebody once, you can’t rebury them again.”
The following is a translation of the statement submitted to the Lithuanian parliament (the Seimas) on 17 May 2012 by MPs Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis and Algirdas Sysas. The original is available here.
MPs Andriukaitis and Sysas in the Seimas (foreground). Photo courtesy Image Archive of the Seimas.
Several days ago we received an invitation to a ceremony for the reburial of the remains of Juozas Brazaitis Ambrazevičius (1903–1974) in the churchyard of the Kaunas Church of the Resurrection of Christ. A booklet was included with the invitation recounting the life and deeds of Juozas Brazaitis Ambrazevičius. It included his academic and pedagogical activity and his participation in the anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet resistance. It also presented an excerpt from a letter by Joshua Eilberg, chairman of the Immigration, Citizenship and International Law Sub-Committee of the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives, saying that an investigation into the Juozas Brazaitis Ambrazevičius’s collaboration with the Nazis during World War II had been stopped.
Members of Lithuania’s small and fragile remnant Jewish community were left in shock as word was spreading that quite secretively, the country’s prime minister and culture minister personally signed off this past March on the 30,000 litas allotment for the expenses of reburying and honoring the wartime fascist leader, Juozas Ambrazevičius (later Brazaitis). Ambrazevičius, as the Nazi puppet “prime minister” during the first weeks of the war in 1941, signed the orders confirming “all means” against Jews (though calling for public executions to halt), for a concentration camp for Lithuania’s Jews, and for the herding of all of Kaunas’s Jews into a ghetto within four weeks (English translation here).
The Lithuanian Jewish Community, in partnership with the Vilna Gaon Jewish museum, has issued a statement of protest against government sponsorship of the events.
According to the right-wing Lithuanian website “Dešinioji Mintis,” you have until May 18th to register for free transportation, courtesy of the Chancellery of the Parliament in Vilnius, to the events in Kaunas scheduled for May 19th and 20th to honor the memory of the head of Nazi puppet “provisional government” (“PG”) of 1941. Specifically, you can attend the memorial conference on the 19th, and/or the re-interment ceremony on the 20th. There is specific reference to the offer being for the good of young people who are not “apathetic.” Contact information at the Lithuanian parliament (Seimas) is also provided.
Is this really how the nation’s parliament wants to educate the country’s youth?
MEP Leonidas Donskis’s letter, in reply to Krystyna Anna Steiger, author of the international petition against the VMU event, was released today by the MEP for immediate publication in DefendingHistory.com (more background here).
The full text is as follows:
On May 19 and 20 of this year rites to re-inter Juozas Brazaitis (Ambarazevčius), the head of the Provisional Government of Lithuania, and commemorations and events in connection with this will take place in Kaunas.
Every person has the right to leave this world maintaining their inherited traditions and religious convictions. The Lithuanian Jewish Community and the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum do not protest and are not expressing dissatisfaction over the return of the mortal remains of Juozas Brazaitis (Ambarazevčius) to Lithuania.
Nonetheless, we are deeply hurt because of the ceremonies and events surrounding the reburial ceremony of this controversial political figure. This figure is connected with the actions of the puppet Provisional Government of Lithuania and with the calls by the Lithuanian Activist Front for inciting the mass murder of Jews which led to the execution of barbaric “justice” by the mob.
Many usually admiring readers of Bernardinai.lt were shocked today by an article by Archbishop S. Tamkevičius which contains the following paragraph (here in translation), and which was not followed by any editor’s comment.
“This month Juozas Brazaitis-Ambrazevičius, the former prime minister of the Provisional Government of Lithuania who worked for the anti-Nazi underground during the German occupation and after the war actively made the case for Lithuanian independence in the world, returns from America to Lithuania. His contributions to Lithuania are enourmous. But he didn’t just love Lithuania, he also loved God. Having chosen for himself in his youth friends who were sincerely faithful young people, and taking active part in the activities of the Futurists, he matured into a profoundly faithful man and for his entire life was consistently faithful to the principles of Christianity and nationalism. Professor Juozas Brazaitis is a living example of how much faith gives to a person who adheres to it consistently.”
The “return to Lithuania” refers to the flying over and reburying with full honors, at the culmination of four days of commemorative festivities, of the “prime minister” of the 1941 Nazi puppet “Provisional Government” in Kaunas which oversaw the onset of the Lithuanian Holocaust at the hands of its associated LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front), and then during the first weeks of Nazi genocide between late June and early August 1941. There was no public statement of regret from Juozas Ambrazevičius (Brazaitis) during his subsequent decades in the United States, where he died in 1974.
On 2 May 2012, the Lithuanian mass media reported that the mayor of Kaunas, Andrius Kupčinskas, in his capacity as chief of a special working group, announced that the remains of Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, chairman of the Lithuanian Provisional Government in 1941, who was buried in Connecticut in 1974, will be transported to Lithuania for a reburial with full honors.
MORE COVERAGE HERE
Kupčinskas said that the remains of Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis will be brought to Vilnius Airport on 17 May 2012, honored in the capital, and then solemnly escorted to the Church of the Resurrection of Christ in Kaunas and placed into a columbarium in the church yard. Lithuanian Government officials have confirmed the announcement.
It was not however reported precisely who took the decision or precisely why the decision to rebury Ambrazevičius’s remains was taken. These are not the remains of an ordinary citizen. He was the leader of Lithuania’s 1941 Provisional Government (PG). Transporting his remains to the motherland is a state act, which carries with it the implication of immortalizing the memory of a historical figure in the solemn chronicles of the nation.
I will begin with a recent document I found while collecting information about the Lithuanian Freedom Army (LFA), an organization formed during World War II which present-day historians are attempting to portray as an organizer of the anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet resistance in Lithuania.
On 31 October 2002, President Valdas Adamkus issued decree no. 1965 titled “On Promoting Volunteer Soldiers to the Rank of Colonel” which gave the rank of colonel to three “members of the armed resistance: volunteer soldiers and soldiers of Lithuania’s pre-war military,” namely, Tauras military district chief Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas (posthumously); Vytautas military district chief Vincas Kaulinis-Miškinis (posthumously); and Vytis military district chief Jonas Krištaponis (also posthumously). Five years later the president noticed he had made a mistake regarding one surname and on 5 January 2007, issued decree no. 1K-849 to correct the mistake, replacing Jonas Krištaponis with Juozas Krikštaponis (aka Krištaponis).
Regarding the anti-Soviet resistance, there really isn’t any argument: most of the LFA fighters heroically fought against the occupiers and died in that struggle.
Regarding the anti-Nazi resistance, however, many doubts are raised. These doubts arise because of the LFA’s position on the mass murder of Jews.
On 21 September 2010, that year’s annual commemorative event was held in the forest of Ponár (Paneriai) at the monument to the seventy thousand Jews who were murdered there and whose remains were then burned at the site. Shortly before the ceremony’s conclusion it was announced that the Seimas (Lithuanian parliament) had decided to declare the year 2011 the “Year of Commemorating Lithuanian Residents who Became Victims of Holocaust.” The parliament’s move came as a complete surprise to the Lithuanian Jewish Community (LJC). The country’s Jewish community had appealed neither to the president of Lithuania nor to the parliament with any such request.
Can history be bought up by even a small state’s nationalist government that has talked itself into the idea that revision of history and wide acceptance of that revision is somehow a national cause? It becomes a serious issue when that state is willing to invest heavily in the enterprise, at a time when the targeted influential foreigners are far from the issues at hand and easily manipulated.
Note: The following letter to the editor appeared in today’s Baltimore Sun. It is republished here by permission of the author. [Update of 2 May 2012: The editor of VilNews, in a 29 April article, said of the letter’s author: “In this case, she goes too far.” This in turn elicited a response from the editor of DefendingHistory on 1 May.]
In response to Ellen Cassedy’s “We are here” (April 18), I offer a second opinion.
Can there be hope for a country that claimed the highest percentage of Jewish deaths in all of Europe? More than 95 percent of Lithuania’s Jews were annihilated — most of them murdered by Lithuanian collaborators who began the frenzied executions of their Jewish neighbors even before the Germans had marched into Lithuania. Yes, there can be hope — if lessons are learned from their past and if the truth is faced by this nation which is now an EU/NATO democracy.
See also the COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED section
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SPRING-SUMMER 2012 UPDATE:
Vilnius: In an EU capital, in 2011, state-sponsored adulation of the local collaborators and participants in the Holocaust; key event is addressed by a former head of state, on the 70th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion10 April 2012
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was characterized by diversity of religious belief and religious tolerance. Neither is it any accident that Lithuania was called the Northern Jerusalem for centuries. Cultural tolerance was the pride and strength of our country. Why is it that we have to speak of this in the past tense? Who edited our genetic code?
MORE IMAGES
A FIRST-TIME PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN LEYVIK HOUSE YIDDISH CULTURE CENTER, THE SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER ISRAEL OFFICE AND THE ASSOCIATION OF LITHUANIAN JEWS IN ISRAEL
Holocaust survivors Shlomo Cheskov (left, from Shavl/Šiauliai), and Joseph Melamed (from Kovno/Kaunas) at the Tel Aviv demonstration. Mr. Cheskov’s sign says (in Yiddish) “With our partisan heroes, against neo-Nazism. We are here!” Mr. Melamed’s (in Hebrew) addressed to the South African businessmen diners at the gala dinner: “Dear Diners! Where is your conscience? Your solidarity with Holocaust survivors and resistance fighters and partisans?” Photo: Bella Bryks-Klein.
O P I N I O N
Who was Jonas Noreika?
Jonas Noreika (1910-1947), also known by his nom de guerre, General Vėtra, has been named by the current Lithuanian government as “an important member of the resistance” and an object of every sort of heroic commemoration.
In 1997 he was posthumously awarded the Order of the Cross of Vytis, First Degree. The same year a memorial plaque was placed on the facade of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences Library in Vilnius.
Library of the Academy of Sciences in Vilnius. The red arrow marks the Noreika plaque.
Noreika plaque in central Vilnius
Honorable Mr. Andriukaitis,
Your courage needs to be saluted.
I have followed with admiration your successive actions in favor of a proper appreciation of the unique crimes of the Nazi regime in Lithuania and beyond. From signing the Seventy Years Declaration to your letter to your parliamentary colleague the foreign minister, you have a shown a courage and a decency that, unfortunately, are rare in the Lithuanian political class.
You have defended the truth and the respect for the victims.