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OPINION

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VILNIUS—Appreciation is due to the Lithuanian NGO “Maceva” and the German Army’s new Panzer Brigade (Panzerbrigade 45, Litautenbrigade) for their new joint effort to clean and maintain old Jewish gravestones in Lithuania, as reported, inter alia, on Facebook. This is a noble endeavor.

It is a laudable activity for both “Maceva” and for the German soldiers. Cleaning pre-Holocaust gravestones of a people of whom none exist anymore in those places is in itself a valuable indirect lesson in the meaning of “genocide” on the ground rather than just in the realm of academic and political debate of the day.

But there is a catch.

And it touches on an essential point of direct commemoration of the Holocaust in Lithuania. The new German army training grounds in the Rūdninkai forest south of Vilnius (a little over a half-hour’s drive from the capital) is right next door to the remnants of the last relic of Jewish partisan resistance against the Nazis in Lithuania, the Jewish Fort where virtually 100% of the fighters were Jewish escapees from the Vilna Ghetto, where the language of life and struggle was Yiddish, and which is described in great detail in Holocaust memoirs emanating from the Vilna area.

For some three decades, the fort’s last survivor, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (1922-2024) took thousands of visitors from around the world to see these relics of the indomitable human will to survive against all odds. A sample video. These were people whose entire families were murdered, who were going to be murdered themselves because of the ethnicity they were born with, and who fled the ghetto to join the anti-Nazi partisan resistance, during a period in history where the Soviet war effort, including its partisan movement, were in close alliance with the United States, Great Britain and the Allies. Indeed, nobody else was seriously fighting the Nazis anywhere in Lithuania or the surrounding countries. That has nothing to do with justified abhorrence of (and education about) Stalinist crimes and condemnation of Soviet evils.

So what is the catch? That the cleaning of prewar gravestones coordinated by Maceva has come to be the decoy for deflecting questions about the partisan fort with which it has nothing to do, beyond bother issues being “Jewish”. Meanwhile, the partisan fort is deteriorating rapidly. No official historic markings. No fencing. Areas of nearby forest cleared for the Panzerbrigade ruining the unique forest ambience. Leftovers from partying at the fort by building workers constructing the new barracks for the Panzerbrigade.

In fact, the whole story is told rather succinctly on the Bundestag’s own website. German policy is to honor and preserve the Jewish partisan fort and that is confirmed in writing. The uninitiated reader would not know that the rest of the text, about “cleaning gravestones” thanks to “Maceva” has nothing to do with the fort and serves to mask the fact that the Panzerbridge has publicly done zero to preserve the fort. German military personnel in Lithuania repeatedly report that they have never heard of the place! What kind of game is going on?

In recent months, the fort has become a wider issue thanks to articles in Der Spiegel by Solveig Grothe and Berliner Zeitung by Maritta Tkalec.

We respectfully call upon the Bundestag to follow up on its own commitment, and not allow military or political authorities to pretend to be honoring the last remnant of Jewish anti-Nazi resistance in Lithuania by once again  reporting on the cleaning of old cemeteries while failing to even mention the partisan fort.

This is especially important in light of the repeated efforts of certain powerful far-right ultranationalist power bases in Lithuania to defame and prosecute survivors of the Holocaust who survived by joining the anti-Nazi partisans and are heroes of the history of the free world.

As for “Maceva” the question is whether they even mention the Jewish partisan fort during their work with the German soldiers. Or are they just cooperating with those in Lithuania who want the fort destroyed as soon as possible, and have found in “Maceva” a swell means of diverting the issue from partisan resistance to Hitler to the need to maintain old Jewish gravestones. Are the supporters and admirers of “Maceva” aware of all this? Would the souls of the buried want their moss-covered time-aged gravestones to be scrubbed in conjunction with an effort to erase from the land the last relic of the tiny number of their descendants who survived?

Will “Maceva” now issue a public statement calling for preservation of the Jewish partisan fort? Or will this NGO go down in Holocaust commemoration history as a doer of good works for the honor of the prewar dead that also cooperated in efforts to obfuscate the proud history of Jewish partisan resistance and particularly the efforts to erase from Lithuania the last remnant of that resistance? Time will tell.