This op-ed was first published in Jerusalem Report in August 2013.
I remember my first visit to Yad Vashem as a 16-year-old visitor to Jerusalem. It had a profound, and indeed formative, effect on me. I left there with a badge clipped to my lapel inscribed with the motto, zakhor, the Hebrew word for remember.
On the 15 July 2013 centenary of the birth of the illustrious Yiddish poet of Vilna, Abraham Sutzkever (1913–2010), the last active association of Holocaust survivors from Lithuania released the statement below (also available as PDF). It urges organizers, participants, judges and prize winners to avoid being instrumentalized as cover-up props for Holocaust obfuscation. It proposes that they simply issue public statements calling for written public apologies from the Lithuanian government to the defamed Jewish partisans who knew Sutzkever well from the forests of Lithuania and dozens of years of contact in survivor circles. See the related debate on this year’s Sutzkever Prize.
See also:
Page on the commission
Critiques of the commission and its associated Prague Declaration
DH section on the commission.
Resignations to date from Commission-related bodies include Dr. Yitzhak Arad, Sir Martin Gilbert (London), Prof. Gershon Greenberg (Washington DC), Prof. Konrad Kwiet (Sydney) and Prof. Dov Levin (Jerusalem).
The run-up to next week’s controversial Lithuanian-government sponsored conference on Lithuanian Jewish issues in London, which is sowing enough confusion as it is, was put into further disarray as it emerged that an email received by hundreds of people (from various forwarders) is apparently part of a curious hoax. The only discernible purpose seemed to be bring discord into the fragile ranks of the surviving Litvak camp by spreading a set of “symmetrical” false rumors.
Some of the emails were identified as originally coming from an official of an NGO, “Maceva” that is dedicated to the laudable cause of maintaining Lithuanian Jewish graveyards, but it is increasingly thought that this shocking attribution could well be part of the hoaxter’s agenda, and that an unambiguous denial — or apology —will be forthcoming from Maceva’s board of directors at the earliest possible opportunity.
The major two — actually three — pieces of disinformation being disseminated are:
C O N T E N T S:
Introduction
Lithuanian Nationalism and Antisemitism Prior to the Holocaust
The First Soviet Occupation of Lithuania, 15 June 1940 – 22 June 1941
The Lithuanian Activist Front: Antisemitic Incitement
The German Invasion and the Organization of an “Independent” Lithuanian Government
The Period of Pogroms: Late June to Mid July 1941
The Lithuanian Press at the Time of the Pogroms: A Source of Incitement
The Lithuanian Provisional Government: Anti-Jewish Legislation
Systematic Mass Murder: German Design and Command, Lithuanian Perpetration (late July–November 1941)
Lithuanian Police Battalions and Their Role in the Murder of the Jews
The Lithuanian Catholic Church and the Holocaust
The Rewriting of Holocaust History and the Double Genocide Thesis — “The Jewish Holocaust and the Lithuanian Holocaust”
Anti-Soviet Guerilla Warfare in Lithuania
The Prague Declaration of June 2008 and the European Parliament Resolution of April 2009
Conclusion
Notes
In Lithuania, as in other places in Europe conquered by Nazi Germany, a thorough and comprehensive inquiry into the tragic events that occurred compels consideration of three factors:
Israel’s Ambassador Chen Ivri Apter presenting Dr. Rachel Margolis with a certificate of merit at Leivick House in Tel Aviv. Dr. Margolis is seen wearing the medals won for her bravery fighting against the Nazis in the forests of Lithuania during the Holocaust. Her entire family perished.
Leivick House, one of Israel’s (and the world’s) last Yiddish-in-Yiddish cultural institutions, has released a video clip of the June 2009 visit to its Dov Hoz Street headquarters in central Tel Aviv by Israel’s then ambassador to Latvia and Lithuania, the late Chen Ivri Apter, at an event to honor Dr. Rachel Margolis. It is posted on YouTube (partial English translation here). The event itself was reported in DefendingHistory and the Leivick House website, among other venues.
Dr. Margolis, due to celebrate her 91st birthday next week, is a Vilna Ghetto survivor and anti-Nazi resistance hero who has been targeted by Lithuanian prosecutors, in effect according to some for “the crime of surviving.” Tributes to Dr. Margolis have come from around the world, including former UK prime minister Gordon Brown in 2011.
Ambassador Ivri Apter died last month at the age of 54 after a long battle with cancer that friends always said he never allowed to cloud his love of life and the day ahead.
His short speech at Leivick House is thought likely to go down in history for its courage and forthrightness at a time when his nation’s foreign policy was noticeably starting to tilt in a contrary direction. The Tel Aviv event was organized jointly by DefendingHistory.com and Leivick House.
Holocaust survivors from Lithuania, and their families and advocates, are reporting feelings of “shock and betrayal” at “unbelievable reports” that Yad Vashem might again be lending legitimacy to the Lithuanian government sponsored “red-brown commission.” These accounts derive from a BNS (Baltic News Service) report today that appeared in various Lithuanian media, including Alfa.lt (full translation below), reporting that the president herself signed the decree today for substantial new state investment in the commission.
The Vilnius and Jerusalem rumor mills are equally putting out the word that there had been pressure from the Israeli foreign ministry, itself pressured by the Lithuanian foreign ministry for Holocaust-revising gestures in line with the current Baltic state policy often referred to as “Double Genocide.”
UPDATES: 29 Aug 2012; 31 Aug; 31 Aug(b); 31 Aug(c); 3 Sept; 3 Sept(b) [Holocaust survivors’ statement]; 3 Sept(c) [Survivors’ letter to head of Yad Vashem]; 3 Sept(d) [in English translation].
UPDATE 1: On 27 June 2011 at 3:31 PM (Vilnius time), the Israeli Embassy in Riga (responsible for Lithuania as well as Latvia) emailed DefendingHistory.com to say that Yad Vashem’s participation in the event has been cancelled. This was confirmed in a further email from Yad Vashem at 3:56 PM. In Vilnius, however, the name of Yad Vashem and its designated representative continue to appear on programs and brochures, giving the impression that the event enjoys the formal participation of Yad Vashem. See our public query to Yad Vashem.
UPDATE 2: See Defending History’s eyewitness reports of Day 1 and Day 2 of the conference.
According to a conference program posted on the website of the Lithuanian Parliament, Yad Vashem is the only Jewish institution sending a representative to the latest conference mounted by the Lithuanian government in its campaign to downgrade the Holocaust and whitewash the Lithuanian Holocaust’s first murderers (the L.A.F. and other fascist groups), often by glorifying them as ‘freedom fighters’. The printed brochure for the conference, to be held on 29 and 30 June 2011, announces the event as a joint project of the Lithuanian Parliament (Seimas) and the deeply antisemitic Genocide Research Center. One of the Center’s top ‘specialists’ participated in the recent neo-Nazi parade and went on to launch a public antisemitic campaign. He was neither removed from his post nor publicly reprimanded, as the season’s conferences plow ahead full steam.
marked three years to the day since police in Vilnius came looking for Holocaust Survivors Dr Rachel Margolis (born 1921, at right of photo) and Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (born 1922) in a ‘war crimes investigation’ that has still not been publicly closed.
Both women were incarcerated in the Vilna Ghetto from 1941 to 1943. Both lost their entire families to the barbarity of the Nazis and their local collaborators. They both escaped, on different days in September 1943, to join up with the anti-Nazi partisans in the forests of Lithuania. The underground forest fort, a half-hour’s drive from Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, where Fania lived with another hundred or so Jewish escapees of the Vilna Ghetto, is being allowed to sink into the ground and disappear from history’s view.
SEE ALSO:
DH editor’s take
Video: Commission’s director about Fania Btantsovsky and other Jewish partisan heroes defamed by antisemitic prosecutors
Page on the Commission
Section on the Commission
Commission’s Own Website
2015 Appeal to conscience of members of the Commission
2015 Appeal by one of the last Vilnius Holocaust survivors
Holocaust Survivors expressed grave concerns about the Commission at its inception in 1998. As PDF. See also 1998 letter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
‘The fact that the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania” established by the President (chaired by E. Zingeris), did not publicly defend its own member Yitzhak Arad, or the other Jewish anti-Nazi partisans, is also surprising.’
—Jewish Community of Lithuania and Uni0n of Former Ghetto and Concentration Camp Prisoners (Vilnius 2008)
2011: Commission’s understanding of “Holocaust Studies” revealed at the Lithuanian parliament in the speech of its executive director / director general.
28 August 2012. DefendingHistory.com: ‘Yad Vashem shocks Holocaust survivors by rejoining Lithuanian government’s “red-brown commission”’.
31 August 2012. Lietuvos rytas: ‘Taking an interest in Nazi and Soviet crimes is a response to Russian propaganda’. English translation. DefendingHistory.com comments.
3 September 2012. DefendingHistory.com: ‘English text of Joseph Melamed’s letter to Yad Vashem’.
3 September 2012. DefendingHistory.com: ‘Joseph Melamed, head of Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors’ association, releases letter to director of Yad Vashem’.
3 September 2012. DefendingHistory.com: ‘Holocaust survivors, based in Tel aviv, issue statement on renewal of red-brown commission’.
21 November 2012. DefendingHistory.com: ‘When the politicians run the conferences on — history’ by Evaldas Balčiūnas.
21 November 2012. DefendingHistory.com: ‘Red-Brown circus in Lithuanian capital’.
26 December 2012. DefendingHistory.com: ‘Tell me I’m wrong’ by Geoff Vasil.
1 January 2013. DefendingHistory.com: ‘Instead of truth about the Holocaust — myths about saving Jews’ by Pinchos Fridberg.
15 January 2013. The Algemeiner: ‘Instead of truth about the Holocaust — Myths about saving Jews’ by Pinchos Fridberg.
17 January 2013. DefendingHistory.com: ‘Red-brown commission’s newest layer of obfuscation: Are names of members secret?
27 January 2013. US Researcher is Persuaded that the Problem in Lithuania is called “Zuroff and Katz” …
21 February 2013. Executive director of the red-brown commission calls prominent Vilnius Holocaust survivor a ‘liar’ on the commission’s website.
28 May 2013. Executive director of the commission uses paper at Riga conference to personally attack Defending History editor.
21 June 2013. One of the commission’s new members, the head of the research department art the Genocide Center, tries yet again, in a public interview, to whitewash th LAF murderers of June 1041. Geoff Vasil replies.
5 December 2013. Commission ‘does’ Toronto.
2 March 2014. Defending History’s English translation of the public correspondence between Vilnius Holocaust survivor Prof. Pinchos Fridberg and Yivo director Dr. Jonathan Brent concerning the commission. Original appeared on 1 March in Yiddish in New York’s Forward (Forverts).
8 March 2014. Olga Zabludoff comments on the misrepresentations by the commission’s representative on a panel discussion organized by Yivo in New York City in February 2014.
15 March 2014. Defending History’s appeal to the conscience of the members of the commission.
22 November 2016. ISGAP Flashpoint: ‘Antisemitism in the twenty-first century shtetl’ by Dovid Katz.
April 2022. Red-Brown Commission seems to abandon any distancing from the far-right state-sponsored Genocide Center, whose director has long been a regular participant in far-right antisemitic events that often glorify local Holocaust collaborators as supposed heroes. See Evaldas Balčiūnas’s review of a book by Genocide Center director A.Bubnys, published in Lithuanian only by the Commission, and its implications for the wider debate.
APOLOGIES
THIS PAGE HAS MOVED HERE:
SEVEN SOLUTIONS
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This essay first appeared in Transitions on Line on 10 October 2008, with the following editor’s note: “Lithuanian authorities in late September closed their two-year investigation into the wartime partisan activities of Yitzhak Arad, a Lithuanian-born Israeli historian and a former head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, reportedly on the urging of the European Union and the United States. Prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence to link Arad to possible war crimes committed by Soviet partisans during a 1944 fight with German forces that left many Lithuanian civilians dead. The authorities are still considering whether to put two Lithuanian Jewish women, Fania Brantsovskaya (Brantsovsky) and Rachel Margolis, on the witness stand in connection with the killings.”
It is republished here with Professor Donskis’s permission. For a history of the issue, see our page on the subject of Holocaust survivors defamed by prosecutors.
See more of Professor Donskis’s work in Defending History.
A disturbing tendency has recently appeared in Lithuania. In the words of the eminent scholar of Yiddish Dovid Katz, this tendency may best be described as the “Holocaust Obfuscation movement.” Its essence lies in subversion of the logic and evidence of the Holocaust, whitewashing or at least selectively reading the history of the Second World War and drastically shifting the roles of victims and evil-doers.
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Last week I was caught in a debate with myself: whether or not to appear, despite the feeling of nausea, in a discussion with Lithuanian historians, writers and poets at the International Book Fair in Jerusalem. The idea made me so sick that in the end I decided to stay away and I also convinced my friend, former partisan and former chairman of Yad Vashem Yitzhak Arad, to excuse himself from the discussions.
