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The modest but resolute Defending History community, in Vilnius and internationally, in unanimity today expressed heartfelt congratulations to Yad Vashem director Dani Dayan who broke dramatically, and publicly, with decades of what the last Lithuanian Holocaust survivors considered to be tragic betrayal and appeasement, often under presumed political pressure (see our report from earlier this week and Defending History’s section “Yad Vashem and Lithuania“).

Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan (photo courtesy Yad Vashem)
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Posted in Ins and Outs of the Central Vilnius Noreika Plaque Glorifying a Brutal Holocaust Collaborator, Israel, It Pays to Defend History: Success Over the Years..., Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Yad Vashem and Lithuania
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Tagged Chen Ivri Apter, Conn., Dani Dayan, Efraim Zuroff, Grant Arthur Gochin, Holocaust in Lithuania, Jonas Noreika, Juozas Krikštaponis, Kazys Škirpa, Ofer Aderet, Ramanauskas in New Britain, Silvia Foti, Yad Vashem + Lithuania, Yitzhak Arad
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UPDATES: This page dates from 2009. Since then, the Noreika plaque in Vilnius was replaced with a “bigger and better” one, the city’s Skirpa Street renamed but with a new plaque glorifying the Hitler collaborator mounted under the street name. Please use Search to find the news for each site over the years.
Lev Golinkin’s listing of public shrines to Holocaust collaborators (in Genocide Watch and the Forward),
DefendingHistory’s comment:
“Lithuania has her magnificent real heroes of 1941: the inspirational people who saved an innocent neighbor from the LAF and Provisional Government’s reign of genocide, starting with the war’s first week. They are that year’s heroes of history who should be honored. May their families live to see streets and squares named for them.”
(1) Lecture Hall at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas (in the spirit of a “Marshal Pétain Auditorium” at Vichy, Bordeaux or Paris):

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(2) Bas Relief at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas:

NOTE: In spring of 2012, the Lithuanian government repatriated the remains and glorified the memory of the 1941 Nazi puppet prime minister. A vice-rector at Vytautas Magnus University went on to praise the reburial as affirmation of the “drama of Lithuanian history” and to complain that people are afraid to speak on this subject because “the Jews will hit them over a head with a club.”
The Lithuanian Holocaust was initiated when dehumanization, taunting, humiliation, pillage and murder of Jews was initiated in dozens of locations by “freedom fighters” of the LAF and other nationalist groups before the arrival of German forces. Some six centuries of legendary coexistence were brought to an abrupt end on 23 June 1941 when the Jewish minority was subject to degradation, harm and murder. Readings. Eyewitness testimonies. [Historic note: the far right’s “explanation” that the murderers of Jewish neighbors were “heroic anti-Soviet rebels” is demonstrably nonsense. The Soviet occupiers were fleeing the German attack initiated on 22 June 1941.]
Street name in Vilnius:

Whitewash in the New “Holocaust Room” (!) at the Genocide Museum in Vilnius:

Hundreds of local Holocaust perpetrators and collaborators are among those the Soviets after the war tried, killed and then buried at Tuskulėnai. The participation in Nazi atrocities by many of those buried here remains unmentioned on the Genocide Center or Vilnius municipality websites which describe the site as a memorial for the victims of Soviet rule buried there. See Milan Chersonski in DefendingHistory.

Street in Kaunas:

Square in Ukmergė:

(1) Plaque on the Library of the National Academy of Sciences in central Vilnius:


(2) High on the wall of national heroes inscribed on the facade of the Genocide Museum on the main boulevard of Vilnius:

(3) Street name in Kaunas:

(4) On the Šiauliai Region government building in Šiauliai:


Street name in Kaunas:


and in central Vilnius:
