LITHUANIA | POLITICS OF MEMORY | BLAMING VICTIMS | GLORIFYING PERPETRATORS | LAST REMNANT OF JEWISH PARTISAN RESISTANCE IN THE FORESTS OF LITHUANIA | HISTORY
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OPINION
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by Roland Binet (De Panne, Belgium)
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- “Soviet rule has disappeared. The Jews are left behind as fair game.”
- Entry of July 7, 1941. From Surviving the Holocaust: Kovno Ghetto Diary, by Avraham Tory.
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In the late sixties while working in a small company in Brussels my Jewish boss who had been “geschmuggelt’’ out of the ghetto in Lvov (former Lemberg, now Lviv, Ukraine) in a truck, before it was liquidated in 1942, had repeatedly told me that after his escape he had repeatedly tried to join with partisan groups in the area, mostly Polish or Ukrainian. Had they known that he was Jewish, he would have been killed outright. His luck was that he could pass himself off as a Pole as he spoke the language well. He had been fifteen years old at the time. I remembered these words recently on the occasion of the scandal that has erupted these past months regarding the Jewish Partisan Fort in the Rūdninkai Forest (Yiddish; Rudnitsker vald) which is now in danger of being erased due to the presence in that zone of the new German NATO Panzer Brigade (Litauenbrigade).
EFFECTS OF THE LITHUANIAN GOVERNMENT’S ‘MAGIC WAND’? Left: Public monument to Holocaust collaborator Juozas Krikštaponis (photo: Seimas). Right: One of the collapsing bunkers at Lithuania’s only relic of the Jewish anti-Nazi resistance that sits next door to Germany’s new Panzer brigade and may soon disappear (photo: DefendingHistory.com).