OPINION | MEDIA WATCH | LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EUROPE | HISTORY | BLAMING THE VICTIMS | GERMANY | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS | HUMAN RIGHTS

VILNIUS—The following is an adapted version of Dovid Katz’s comment on Facebook today on Shira Li Bartov’s article, “In a forest where Jews fought the Nazis, a German military base and Lithuanian politics encroach on memory” that appeared in JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency) yesterday, and is being reposted in other Jewish news media that use JTA feeds.

◊

BRAVO to Shira Li Bartov on her balanced and much-researched JTA article on the Jewish partisan fort remnants in the Lithuanian forest. These precious relics are now in danger of imminent disappearance due to the construction next door of the massive barracks and shooting grounds for Germany’s new 45th Panzerbrigade (the saga in DH’s section on the fort).

*
The comments Ms. Bartov elicited from German and Lithuanian authorities enhance our understanding of rapidly changing current government positions. Moreover, her photographs strikingly show the state of things in August 2026, a marked deterioration from April when Solveig Grothe photographed the site for her splendid piece in Der Spiegel last June. Now there are even signs and police-style Do-not-enter barrier tape chasing visitors away (!) from all the very recent man-made obstacles there.

*
What is 2026 Germany’s will here? The most important statement remains the Bundestag’s own, of 29 December 2025. We find there the phrase “the German Armed Forces will advocate for the protection and preservation of this historical site” as well as the words confirming that Germany “supports the preservation of the former Jewish partisan camp in the Rūdninkai Forest in Lithuania as a site of learning and remembrance.” But shockingly, the next paragraph hints that this may be accomplishe” by helping a certain Lithuanian NGO dedicated to cleaning and preserving old cemeteries elsewhere to scrub down gravestones, in other words a ruse that has zero to do with preserving the partisan fort. A diversion. The evidence: not a single member of German military personnel encountered we have encountered in Vilnius has ever even heard of the Jewish fort next door to their own training ground. Their “Jewish education in Lithuania” has been transmigrated to cleaning prewar cemeteries. Please see our response to that one in Defending History.

*
Shira Li Bartov is the first to break the sad and curious taboo that has frightened off Jewish media outlets for years now. A single attempt by London’s Jewish Chronicle in 2022 did not quite muster the courage to mention the words “defending history” where readers may find more views and material on the subject, although we had provided the paper with all the materials it requested. Even more painful, there has been a blanket of public silence from those who honor history’s only Yiddish speaking partisans, including the Bund (Melbourne, Paris, NY etc.), “Following Fania” here on FB, YIVO, Nusach Vilna, NYBC, the Workers Circle, Yiddishkayt LA’s Helix, and others who have so delighted in singing with gusto the Jewish Partisan Hymn as part of Yiddish and Holocaust Remembrance programs and historical journeys to Eastern Europe. Hopefully now, with a mainstream Jewish media hekhsher, they will feel more able to speak up and find the gumption to contact German and Lithuanian embassies abroad asking for rapid action to recognize, honor and protect the Jewish partisan fort, making sure, to pick up a point made by Ms. Bartov, that in the future those who wish to honor the Jewish partisans will be able to visit with dignity, and not be threatened by “Danger” signs. Where the Workers Circle stands out is that as long as the Vilna partisans’ last surviving veteran Fania Brantsovsky was alive and able, the biennial WC historical heritage tour to Lithuania always featured the trip to the fort with pride. The last time this happened was in 2019, when Fania meticulously answered every detailed question posed to her. (Some other Jewish history trips and their appointed scholar-guides stick only to what makes Lithuanian government “history agencies” happy).
*
Defending History started to champion this cause in 2010 in partnership with that last Jewish partisan, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (1922-2024) who showed it in great detail to thousands of visitors over three decades. Video of Fania showing us the fort (in her Vilna Yiddish of course), in 2007. Many more linked on our Fania page.
*
No one media report can do justice to all the components. So we hope the next one will focus on what lies right behind the current events: Not only “Double Genocide” Holocaust revisionism, but its corollary: the state-sponsored campaign of defamation and criminalization of the Vilna partisans, and other anti-Nazi Jewish partisans in Lithuania. This caused huge pain and damage to all Holocaust survivors for whom the partisan fort was so sacred, the last tangible trace of the Jewish resistance fighters who remain heroes of the free world in the history of the Allies’ joint effort to bring down Hitler. For a chronology of the campaign against the Jewish partisans, see DH’s Blaming the Victims page. That phrase, in this connection, was coined by Edward Lucas, then at the Economist, whose famous piece on the subject was called “Prosecution and persecution: Lithuania must stop blaming the victims” that appeared on the Economist website and in the print edition). Incidentally, Ms. Grothe actually referenced directly the state-institution campaign of defamation against Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (and by extension, the entirety of the Jewish partisan movement), that continued after Fania’s death in 2024.

*

Indeed, some have forgotten (or wanted to forget) that in 2008, armed police came looking for Fania and for Rachel Margolis as part of a kangaroo “war crimes investigation” whose only purpose was to smear the Jewish partisans and divert from state glorification of Holocaust perpetrators as part of the rewrite campaign dictated by “double genocide” historical revisionism. At the time, the Lithuanian Jewish Community was led by the inspirational Dr. Shimon Alperovich, of blessed memory. Please look at his responses. They are the responses of a tiny but intellectually honest, radiant, robust and fearless Jewish community.
*
Every article by a Western journalist who actually talks to all sides brings out surprises even for the locals. Not many people in town know that there is actually a “Jewish editor” listed on books published by the far-right, ultranationalist, history-revisionist “Genocide Center” that has for decades been behind both the campaign against the Jewish partisans and the campaign to glorify as heroes Lithuanian Holocaust collaborators. Just go have a look at the  incongruous small-type “editor” credits on the title-page verso of some of those books. A Jew-for-hire makes “kosher” the Genocide Center’s “fixed Holocaust history”  (including works by Dr. Bubnys himself). He has now been entrusted by his employers, it seems, to “tell the world” that the fort is fake, and even to falsify, in a Facebook post what a certain Holocaust survivor explained (it rapidly attracted a “like” from Dr. Bubnys himself, the same Dr. Bubnys who so proudly addresses public gatherings flanked by posters glorifying Holocaust collaborators J. Noreika and K. Škirpa; more photos) . When this came to Facebook we rapidly responded and produced the video of that survivor, Fania herself, showing us in detail every corner of the forest refuge from the Nazis. The for-hire fixer’s late father, a close friend of Defending History, was an honest, delightful gentle scholar, a resolute patriot of modern democratic Lithuania and proud to don his army medals from the war against Hitler every May 9th. For him, the last Jewish fort was a sacred site and he would be turning in his grave at the turn of events. (So don’t tell him.)

The simple truth was explained by Fania, and all the other Holocaust survivors we were privileged to know who were saved thanks to the fort (they include Rachel Margolis, Avrom Zeleznikow, Chasia Shpanerflig). Yes, the Soviets did indeed maintain the fort by concrete buttressing of collapsing wood structures in the forest. They turned it into a weird picnic site with added typical Soviet-propaganda signage lauding the overall Soviet “Great Patriotic War” effort that did not even mention that these partisans were Jews or that as Jews they were escaping certain death-for-being-born-Jewish. In other words, during the Soviet period, the Jewish partisan fort was preserved and repaired, open to Soviet citizens only, and presented with a falsified Soviet-propaganda history. But that didn’t make the surviving zimlyánkes where they spent winter 1943-44 any less sacred for the Holocaust visitors who regularly visited, now followed by their progeny, as Lithuania’s most inspirationally fearless guide, Aušra Mikulskienė, makes clear in the quotes cited by Ms. Bartov in JTA (and earlier, by Ms. Grothe in Der Spiegel).

It is thanks to the fall of the dictatorial Soviet empire, and the rise of modern, democratic Lithuania that  thousands have been able to see this one last relic of Jewish resistance without hindrance. The recent setbacks must be put right before further deterioration or disappearance occurs, which would be a stain of shame on both Germany and Lithuania. Think about it: All that German shooting practice in that very corner of the Jewish partisans’ forest with the remnants of their fort wiped away thanks to the arrival of Germany’s Panzerbrigade 45 (have a look at its Facebook page with its 20 thousand followers, to fathom the scope of the PR efforts in play here).
*
There is now every possibility for world Jewish organizations to take an active part, first in rescuing from destruction this extraordinary heritage site, and then in its preservation for future generations. That was the hope and dream of these Holocaust survivors who survived because they joined the anti-Nazi resistance and whose first order of business when visitors came was to take them to the one site of Jewish anti-Nazi resistance in Lithuania that survives.
*

Note: We are putting online ever more videos of our in-situ interviews, all in Yiddish, with Holocaust survivors from Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and adjacent areas of Ukraine and Poland during the thirty-year period of 1990 to 2020. They are at LYVA (Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive).