HISTORY | LITHUANIA
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OPINION
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by Roland Binet (De Panne, Belgium)
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The Holocaust was a unique phenomenon. But its perception is double-faceted, to some degree, in the eyes of some Jews and non-Jews alike, hence my use of the term “split image” to describe the phenomenon.
In July 2010, I was in Paris with David Silberman, Latvian author of И Ты Это Видел, a book of testimony and accounts by Jews mainly from Latvia, originally written in Russian and which we together worked on getting published in French. We met Serge Klarsfeld, the well-known French historian and Holocaust authority in France, also a Nazi-hunter. He succeeded in bringing Klaus Barbie, among others, to trial.
I had noticed he held a copy of a book he had just purchased: The Black Book by Ehrenburg and Grossman. So, I surmised that he wanted to learn about the Holocaust in the Soviet republics. I understood quite well his dilemma because, although I had begun to learn about the Holocaust at the beginning of the 1970s, to me, until September 2009, my only iconic representation of the Holocaust was situated at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which I had already visited twice in 1982 and 2006, its symbols having been the gas chambers and the crematoria.
Genuine heroes of this saga—both written out of the film
There is, however, disturbingly, quite a stupendous missing link in this abridged history of Lithuania in the twentieth century. Where had the quarter million Jews (the figure on the eve of the Holocaust) of the country disappeared to “overnight” (as centuries go), during that fateful century? Had there ever been a Jewish minority in Lithuania at all? When I looked at the author’s pedigree, I understood why the Jews had not played any role of significance in his biased dialectical discourse. Joren Vermeersch is a historian (of sorts) and an accomplished author. He is also a representative (stand-in, as we call it) for the Belgian House of Representatives, for the “N-VA.” This is the nationalist Flemish party that has its historical roots in the collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. The party that has systematically fought for an amnesty for Nazi collaborators. The party in which the grandparents or parents of some of the present actual leaders had been condemned by the Belgian State for collaboration with the enemy. Nobody is guilty of sins of their ancestors, but when there is a pattern of such pedigree being considered a great plus for current leadership, and that pedigree is subtly glorified rather than disowned, we have a current moral problem that merits discussion in the public square.
