MEMOIRS | GLORIFICATION OF COLLABORATORS | HUMAN RIGHTS | PERSON OF THE YEAR | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS
by Evaldas Balčiūnas
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Evaldas Balčiūnas is Defending History’s Person of the Year 2023
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Evaldas Balčiūnas is Defending History’s Person of the Year 2023
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Editor’s memoir
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.”