Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry announced on 14 December 2010 that it was the initiator of a new demand from six East European countries ― Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania — to Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, that Double Genocide sentiments, and support for effective criminalization of the view that the Holocaust was a unique genocide, be incorporated in the new Stockholm Programme before the end of 2010. Less than a week earlier, Lithuania’s president took the same demand with her to a meeting in Brussels.
Lithuania
Does the Road from Prague to Stockholm Go Through Vilnius?
Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, EU, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, News & Views, Politics of Memory, The Czech Republic
Tagged Double Genocide, Holocaust Politics in the EU, Matthew Newman (EU), Montero Report, Stockholm Programme
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On 1941, the Jews, and Us
O P I N I O N
by Nida Vasiliauskaitė
I read Kęstutis Girnius’s and Leonidas Donskis’s essays on this more than once and can’t get rid of some strange impressions. Even if I pretended that I knew nothing about the Provisional Government, the LAF and that historical period in general, and my only source of information were these two texts addressed to each other, they would suffice to start to make clear some things not just about the past, but also about its intimate connection with the present. How this is being talked about here and now is not less important than that (and the things connected with that) which actually happened.
Posted in Bold Citizens Speak Out, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, History, Legacy of 23 June 1941, Leonidas Donskis, Lithuania, Nida Vasiliauskaitė, Opinion, Politics of Memory
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US Embassy’s ‘Secret’ Holocaust Conference is ‘Fiasco’
The Survivor community and its supporters, Holocaust studies and commemoration circles, and numerous members of the Lithuanian Jewish community felt betrayed by the largely secret Holocaust education conference organized by the US embassy in Vilnius from 29 November to 3 December 2010, in close cooperation with local state-sponsored ‘Double Genocide’ proponents. The event included excellent individual scholars and educators, both from Lithuania and abroad, alongside notoriously obfuscationist local institutions, including the ‘Red-Brown Commission’ and the Genocide Research Center.
The American embassy’s conference in Vilnius was the subject of comment in The Tablet (US), and in the London Guardian (by Efraim Zuroff and Dovid Katz).
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Double Games, Lithuania, News & Views, United States, US State Dept Manipulated?
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Interior Ministry ‘Specialist’, writing in a Mainstream Publication, calls the Murder of Six Million Jews ‘a legend’
The mainstream Lithuanian magazine Veidas (Veidas.lt), a glossy publication available at every news stand in the country, published on its website on 14 November an article under the rubric of ‘History’ titled ‘The Nurnberg Military Court Tribunal: The Biggest Legal Farce in History’. Original here. Full English translation here.
Posted in Lithuania, Media Watch, News & Views, Politics of Memory
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Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors ask U.S. Embassy in Vilnius to Clarify 64,000 Euro Holocaust Education Grant
Joseph A. Melamed
The Tel-Aviv based Association of Lithuanian Jews, the world’s most active association of Holocaust Survivors from Lithuania and their progeny, today released to the media the letter which its chairman, Joseph A. Melamed, sent on 16 September 2010 to Anne E. Derse, America’s ambassador to Lithuania. Mr Melamed, a Tel Aviv attorney and former Israeli diplomat, told DefendingHistory.com that his office hopes to receive a reply “in the nearest future”. The full text of Mr Melamed’s 16 September letter:
Posted in Joseph Melamed, Lithuania, News & Views, United States, US State Dept Manipulated?
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Revolving Posters at Ponar?
Ponár (Polish Ponary, Lithuanian Paneriai) is the mass murder site outside Vilnius where around a hundred thousand civilians were murdered by the Nazi regime. Some 70,000 of them were the Jews of Vilna and its region.
Before the war the site was known as a bucolic holiday and picnic spot set in the forest. During the year-long Soviet rule in 1940-1941, large pits were dug for an oil storage facility. After the Nazi invasion the site was converted to a mass murder operation with the ready-dug pits serving as mass graves.
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Double Games, Exotic Jewish Tourism, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai)
Tagged Memorialization of the victims of Ponar (Paneriai), Ponar (Paneriai, Ponary)
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Revolving Posters at Ponár
Ponár (Polish Ponary, Lithuanian Paneriai) is the mass murder site outside Vilnius where around a hundred thousand civilians were murdered by the Nazi regime. Some 70,000 of them were the Jews of Vilna and its region.
Before the war the site was known as a bucolic holiday and picnic spot set in the forest. During the year-long Soviet rule in 1940-1941, large pits were dug for an oil storage facility. After the Nazi invasion the site was converted to a mass murder operation with the ready-dug pits serving as mass graves.
The vast majority of the murderers were local nationalist volunteers organized by the Nazis for the purpose of annihilating the country’s Jewish population. The eyewitness account of Christian Polish journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz was brought out in an academic English edition by Yale University Press in 2005 (Ponary Diary).
The small museum at the site has generally won acclaim for providing authentic information in a very small space and modest means. The primary address in Lithuania for visitors and locals wishing to learn more about the site is the Green House in central Vilnius.
Posted in Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai)
Tagged Holocaust in Lithuania, Paneriai, Ponar, Ponary), Revolving poster at Ponar/Ponary/Paneriai
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First Reading of Jewish Communal Property Restitution Bill passes the Lithuanian Parliament
The first reading of the long-delayed restitution bill dealing with Jewish communal property in Lithuania passed the Seimas (Lithuanian parliament) today. It will next be considered by the Committee on Legal Affairs on 21 December. There are diverse opinions regarding various aspects of the text of the law and accompanying documents.
Most seriously, experts say that the document contains no clear mention of the actual legal recipient, leading to fears (despite verbal assurances) that the project could in the future be diverted to the ‘Disneyland Vilna Ghetto Theme Park’ as per the wish of powerful forces in the government. That project is anathema to the Jewish community (see here and here).
When the bill was announced, the government’s official Jewish Affairs Advisor, Arkadijus Vinokuras, published a blistering attack on the Jewish Community of Lithuania’s presumed role as future recipient of restitution. Mr Vinokuras is a close ally of Conservative Party MP Emanuelis Zingeris. English translation here.
Reports on Alfa.lt; BNS; European Jewish Press; Ottawa Citizen; Reuters.
[updated 14 Nov 2010]
Posted in Lithuania, Lithuania: Textbook Case of East European Restitution (for Lost Jewish Assets) Abused to Dismantle a Vibrant Jewish Community, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views
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U.K. Ambassador Simon Butt Visits tbe Vilna Yiddish Reading Circle, Offers Moral Support
The British ambassador to Lithuania, HE Simon Butt, today visited Professor Dovid Katz’s Vilna Yiddish Reading Circle, an advanced Yiddish- in-Yiddish institution that Prof. Katz initiated in September 1999. As guest of honor, Ambassador Butt, who listened to participants reading from the works of Yiddish authors with interest, was invited to say a few words. He told the assembled hat he deeply understands their concerns over resurgent antisemitism, ultranationalism, Holocaust revisionism and the attempted defamation of Jewish partisan heroes. He made it clear that “he is on the case” and gave reasons for hope and optimism.
Front row, from left: Prof. Dovid Katz (standing); Dr. Shimon Alperovich, chairman of the Jewish Community of Lithuania,, Ambassador Simon Butt, and Prof. Izaraelis Lempertas (Israel Lempert). Standing at right at the back if Carole Lemee, a university lecturer from France visiting in Lithuania.
Posted in Ambassador Simon Butt, It Pays to Defend History: Success Over the Years..., Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, United Kingdom, Yiddish Affairs
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Green House Reopens in Vilnius; Kostanian is the Star
The Green House, as the Holocaust exhibit of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum of Lithuania is internationally known, was formally relaunched today in Vilnius after a closure of several months for renovations, technical upgrading of a number of exhibits and the addition of video screens and other facilities.
Rachel Kostanian (left) and Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky celebrate at the Green House’s Relaunch. Photo: Sebastian Pammer.
In a massive show of support for Rachel Kostanian, its beloved guardian and director since its inception over two decades ago, the diplomatic corps came out in force, including the ambassadors of Austria, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, UK and chargés d’affaires or consuls of Bulgaria, the Netherlands and the United States. There was a sense of relief that Ms Kostanian and her staff had succeeded to preserve not only the vast majority of images, texts and topics from the venerated old exhibit, but also its key message of straight-talking Holocaust studies that stays clear of the obfuscating discourse of ‘artificial balances, mitigations and excuses’ that runs rampant in this part of Europe.
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Events, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, It Pays to Defend History: Success Over the Years..., Lithuania, Museums, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Rachel Kostanian, The Green House
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Lithuanian Parliament’s ‘Dualism’ Strikes Again
Readers recall that the Lithuanian parliament’s 21 September proclamation of 2011 as the ‘Year of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania’ (text here) was mysteriously reincarnated one week later, on 28 September, as the ‘Year of Commemoration of the Defense of Freedom and of Great Losses’ (text here) with accompanying press explanations restricting the 1941 aspect to Soviet deportations to Siberia and no mention of the Holocaust among the ‘great losses’ (text here).
The text and press releases gave rise to fears that plans were still underway to sanitize, revise and glorify the memory of the 1941 LAF and Provisional Government collaborators of the Nazis. This painful subject was dealt with in a recent statement from the Jewish Community of Lithuania.
The ensuing History Apartheid, as this journal called it (2011 dedicated to one thing for foreigners and Jews and another for the country itself, in effect) led to a letter to the chair of the Seimas from the head of Lithuania’s tiny but proud Jewish community (text here).
A check today of the official website of Lithuanian parliament (the Seimas) added a further curious aspect to the parliamentarians’ thinking. The English version of the website explains that 2011 has been proclaimed as the ‘Year of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania’.
The corresponding sentence on the home page of the Lithuanian version of the official Seimas website indicates however that 2011 is the designated ‘Year of Commemoration of the Defense of Freedom and of Great Losses’.
One Western diplomat who requested anonymity commented to this journal: ‘You see, if you live long enough, you live to see everything’.
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Double Games, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, EU, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Humor (Of Sorts), Legacy of 23 June 1941, Lithuania, Media Watch, ministries, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
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Esther Goldberg Gilbert Continues to Honor Courage of Rachel Kostanian, Critiques Lithuania’s Policy of ‘Holocaust Downgrade’ and Ongoing ‘Investigations’ of Kostanian
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Esther Goldberg Gilbert, wife and partner to Sir Martin Gilbert and an accomplished Holocaust scholar in her own right, today published a second bold article in the Canadian Jewish News on Holocaust issues in Lithuania. The new piece, a follow-up to her first on the subject last month, became necessary, in the view of some observers, in light of a renewed campaign of harassment, degradation and attempted dismissals , against Ms. Kostanian, enabled and enacted out by the highest echelons of the parent museum’s government sponsored leadership, as well as the state’s “Double Genocide industry.” The new article is available as PDF, and herein:
2010Oct7EstherGoldberg (1)
Posted in Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Rachel Kostanian, The Green House
Tagged Esther Goldberg Gilbert, Green House (Vinius), Holocaust in Lithuania, Rachel Kostanian
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Jewish Community’s Alperovich Writes to Parliament, as Government’s ‘History Apartheid’ Becomes Official Policy
Dr Shimon Alperovich (Simonas Alperavičius), chairman of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, has written to the chairperson of the Lithuanian parliament, MP Irena Degutienė, concerning the most recent travesty of the government’s ‘Jewish merry-go-round’, as one Western ambassador put it, off the record, during yesterday’s German National day event at Vilnius’s Old Town Hall.
At the September 21st commemorative ceremony at Ponar (Paneriai), the mass murder site of 100,000 civilians (70,000 of them Jewish), mostly at the hands of the Nazis’ fascist collaborators here, the government’s MP Emanuelis Zingeris (now head of the parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee), boasted of a parliamentary resolution to declare 2011 the year of Holocaust Remembrance in Lithuania.Continue reading
Posted in Double Games, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Human Rights, Lithuania, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Shimon Alperovich (1928 – 2014), What Do Fake Litvak Games Look Like?
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Gathering in the Forest to Remember the 8000 Jews of the Svintsyan Region
Some eighty people gathered at midday today, in an eerie mix of wind and autumn sun, at the forest mass grave memorial site just outside the town once known in Yiddish as Svintsyánke (or Nay-Svintsyán; now Lithuania’s 
Švenčioneliai, interwar Poland’s Nowo-Święciany). Such is the custom every year on the first Sunday in October, to remember the eight thousand Jewish civilians murdered there after a gruesome ten days of imprisonment, deprivation of basic human needs, and torture, in makeshift barracks here at the site, in October 1941. The eight thousand Jews were marched (with the lame and the old transported on wagons) from their hometowns in the area to the site on September 27th. They were all shot over a two-day period on the 7th and 8th of October 1941.
Posted in Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Defense of Old Jewish Cemeteries and Mass Grave Sites, Events, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Poland, Svintsyán (Švenčionys)
Tagged Holocaust in Svencionys, Svintsyan, Svintsyánke
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‘Holocaust Year’ in Lithuania, 2011, is Converted 1 Week Later to ‘Year of Freedom Defense, Memory of Great Losses [minus the Holocaust]’
One week ago today, on 21 September 2010, this journal reported on a document released by various Lithuanian embassies on the ‘Resolution of the Republic of Lithuania on Declaring the Year 2011 as the Year of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania’ (read document here).
In addition to ‘condemning the genocide perpetrated against Jews by Nazis and their collaborators in Lithuania’ the resolution pledges itself to ‘honoring the residents of Lithuania who fought against Fascism’. [In its report, HITB naturally asked for immediate action to halt the kangaroo investigations of Holocaust Survivors who did just that; to dismantle antisemitic exhibits in state museums; and to halt the campaign for the ‘Double Genocide’ model of history in Europe.]
At the solemn September 21st ceremony at the mass murder site Ponar (Paneriai), member of parliament Emanuelis Zingeris informed the assembled diplomats, citizens and visitors that the Seimas had unanimously approved the resolution and that 2011 would be dedicated to Holocaust commemoration, a most appropriate gesture, on the 70th anniversary of 1941, when nearly all of Lithuanian Jewry was annihilated by the Nazis, with the massive participation of local nationalist forces who are on occasion glorified in modern Lithuania as ‘anti-Soviet partisan heroes’ (see e.g. the Genocide Museum’s narrative).
Many of the assembled at Ponar went away believing that the Seimas had turned a new page in the country’s perception of its Holocaust history.
But today, one week later, September 28th, the Seimas announced the following ‘slightly revised’ version of its plan for the focus of 2011: ‘Parliament announces 2011 as year of freedom defense, memory of great losses in Lithuania’ (as per the text of BNS’s report in English here). The parliament’s own official statement is here; full English translation here, with the corrected English title: ‘Year of Commemoration of the Defense of Freedom and Great Losses’.
Frankly, there is unease in the Jewish community as to whether this title and text leave open the possibility that the LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front) and PG (Provisional Government), both massively complicit in the early stages of the Lithuanian Holocaust, are going to be celebrated as ‘defenders of freedom’ (or anti-Soviet patriots) during the 2011 seventieth anniversary of events unleashed by Hitler’s invasion of 22 June 1941.Continue reading
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Collaborators Glorified, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Double Games, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Legacy of 23 June 1941, Lithuania, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages
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Esther Goldberg Gilbert on Life’s Work of Rachel Kostanian, Intrepid Director of Vilnius’s ‘Green House’ Holocaust Museum
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VILNIUS—Esther Goldberg Gilbert, wife and partner to Sir Martin Gilbert and an accomplished Holocaust scholar in her own right, published a profile today of Rachel Kostanian, the widely admired director of Vilnius’s Green House, which many consider to be the only honest Holocaust exhibit or museum in the entire country. The PDF is available here, and a facsimile follows. Please use handles in the upper left hand corner to turn pages.
20108SeptGGoldergOnKostanian
Posted in Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Rachel Kostanian, The Green House
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Sir Martin Gilbert Releases August 2008 Letter on his Resignation from the Lithuanian Government’s “Red-Brown Commission”
Sir Martin Gilbert has today authorized publication of his 24 August 2008 letter to this journal’s (future) editor. The facsimile follows. The letter had confirmed his April 2008 resignation from the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania” (known informally and for brevity as the “Red-Brown Commission”), citing the Yitzhak Arad affair.
In view of the subsequent developments, the 24 August letter also cites the need for the Commission to condemn the defamation of additional Holocaust survivors Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, Professor Sara Ginaite, and Dr. Rachel Margolis. Professor Gilbert’s authorization for publication came after the Commission’s website failed to remove his name from the list of members in spite of his resignation on principle.
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Dr. Rokhl (Rachel) Margolis (1921-2015), Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, United Kingdom, Yitzhak Arad
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When Will the Truth Finally Set Us Free?
O P I N I O N
by Leonidas Donskis
I will admit that when I read political analyst Kęstutis Girnius’s comments on the Lithuanian Provisional Government and the Lithuanian Activist Front, and about the supposedly low level of academic research and documentation of these phenomena, I found myself in a state of disbelief that a person whom I consider one of the most sober-minded and most insightful of our political commentators could write this. Without citing his earlier statements on radio and in publications on this topic, here is the link to Kęstutis Girnius’s latest commentary [English translation]:
Posted in Bold Citizens Speak Out, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Legacy of 23 June 1941, Leonidas Donskis, Lithuania, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Yitzhak Arad
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The Last Jewish Fort in the Forests of Lithuania: Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky Calls for its Preservation
FANIA YOCHELES BRANTSOVSKY | THE JEWISH FORT IN THE FOREST | BLAMING THE VICTIMS
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by Dovid Katz
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Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, born in 1922, who lost her entire family in the Holocaust, escaped the Vilna Ghetto several moments before it was encircled by police preparing for its final liquidation on 23 September 1943. Together with Dobke Develtov [update: who passed away in 2012 in Los Angeles], she made it to this underground anti-Nazi partisan fort that was home to fighters aligned with the Soviet partisans. The precise number of inhabitants varied with newcomers and deaths in battle. Fania remembers at one time 99 of 101 were Jewish Vilna Ghetto escapees, at another 101 of 107. An underground bunker like this was home until the fall of Nazi rule in July 1944.
Along with other Holocaust Survivors who resisted — including Yitzhak Arad and Rachel Margolis — Ms Brantsovsky, librarian of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, has in recent years been the object of a campaign of defamation and harassment in Lithuania.
The antisemitic press has targeted her (January 2008). Armed police came to search for her (May 2008). Prosecutors told the press she could not be found (May 2008). The editor of Lithuania’s main news portal called for her to be tried (May 2009). The mainstream media, citing ruling-party members of Lithuania’s parliament, branded her a war criminal (Oct 2009). And one of the country’s leading associations for human rights (!) demanded that she and other Jewish partisan veterans be ‘sentenced’ for committing ‘a massive slaughter’ (Dec. 2010).
All in the absence of any charge or iota of evidence.
“I dream that good people from all over the world will not forget the Holocaust in Lithuania or our struggle to stay alive and to fight the Nazis and their collaborators, that for generations to come they will make their way here to look and see where we, a hundred Vilna Ghetto survivors who lost our entire families, lived, loved, fought, and dreamt of a better tomorrow.” — Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Remnants of Europe's Last Jewish Anti-Nazi Partisan Fort
Tagged Fania Brancovkaja, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, Jewish partisan fort in Lithuania
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Swastika Sanitization
In May 2010 a Lithuanian court legalized public displays of swastikas, with nearly no reaction from foreign embassies or human rights groups. Reports here and here. Jewish community’s reaction here. See also the page on Antisemitism. On the term swasticals, see our report for 8 May 2010.
REPRESENTATIVE SELECTION
11 March 2008
Gedimino Boulevard, Vilnius. This is the ‘Lithuanian swastika’ with the added lines meant to evoke the ‘Columns of Gediminas‘. Details and video of the parade here.
16 February 2010
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Celebrations of Fascism, Christian-Jewish Issues, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Swastikas in Lithuania, Symbology
Tagged swastica sanitization, swastikas in Eastern Europe, swastikas in Lithuania
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