OPINION | LEGACY OF 23 JUNE 1941 | 2011 ATTEMPTS TO SANITIZE THE LAF | LAF’S INTENTIONS IN WRITING | ŠKIRPA’S PLANS | COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED | LITHUANIAN JEWISH AFFAIRS | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS
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OPINION
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The eminent Harvard and Univ. of Chicago educated American-Lithuanian professor and public affairs analyst, Kęstutis Girnius, tried a decade and a half ago to mobilize support for a far-right inspired dry-clean of the “Lithuanian Activist Front” (LAF, Lietuvių aktyvistų frontas, “white armbanders”) which was the 1941 organization that did not shoot a rabbit when the Soviets were in power (1940-1941) but began to murder thousands of innocent Jewish neighbors the moment the Soviet army started its panicked flight eastward, and there was no authority to stop them. Hitler’s local henchmen declared an “independence” that included the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, the commitment to rid Lithuania of all its Jews, and the unleashing of barbaric murder before the Germans even arrived or set up their control. Any true friend of Lithuania will understand that this is the kind of pro-fascist revisionism that beautiful, modern, tolerant, democratic Lithuania needs like a hole in the head.
Girnius’s gushing public announcement of the new initiative to whitewash the LAF was announced in an article in Delfi.lt this week, heralding the formation of a group of Conservative (Homeland Union party) members of parliament who are forming a “collegium” for this task. If that’s correct, it would, in one fell swoop, undermine the magnificent contributions of so many great truth-telling Lithuanian ethicists of the past three and a half decades, including Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis, Evaldas Balčiūnas, Saulius Beržinis, Aleksandras Bosas, Valentinas Brandišauskas, Algirdas Brazauskas, Leonidas Donskis, Silvia Foti, Andrius Kulikauskas, Liudas Truska, Rūta Vanagaitė, Nida Vasiliauskaitė, Tomas Venclova, Linas Vildžiūnas, and numerous others.
“On 11 March [2025], a group of Conservative Party members set up the June Uprising Collegium with the aim to ‘properly assess and legitimize the uprising as a significant historical event’ which had decisive influence on the subsequent struggle for Lithuanian independence.” — K. Girnius in Delfi.lt. See also the press release on the official website of the Seimas.
Leonidas Donskis answers from the grave with his essay aptly titled: ‘When will the truth finally set us free’? See also his other essays in Defending History. Milan Chersonski, longtime editor of the Lithuanian Jewish community’s newspaper, also answers from the grave…
Girnius’s new “revisionism launch” takes out of context quotes from two of them, Donskis and Venclova, in a lame effort to recruit them to this pathetic cause. But the tragically prematurely departed Leonidas Donskis (1962-2016) answers him today from the grave. It seems the original Delfi.lt link to Donskis’s 2010 essay was taken down (but a version was published by Bernardinai in 2019). Back in 2010, the prescient and brilliant Lithuanian thinker asked Defending History to arrange and publish an English translation of his essay, which he personally edited and approved. Before that year was out, Defending History also published an essay in the debate by philosopher Nida Vasiliauskaitė.
But in modern Litvak collective memory, there is perhaps one incident, that took place one day before, that will be remembered even more. The Lithuanian delegation was met by a picket line of Holocaust survivors near Yad Vashem. One elderly survivor, Y. Brosh, whose entire family was murdered at Ponar, made his feelings known robustly. Like the other survivors who protested, he was wearing a yellow star on his jacket. President Brazauskas went over to to the man, hugged him and kissed him.
