Lithuanian Anti-Fascist Group Mounts Protest in Kaunas Against Glorification of 1941 LAF Killers on Anniversary of the Day the Killing Started

Courageous Antifa Lietuva banner reads: “Real heroes rescued people instead of killing them. Remember the victims of the Holocaust”

Milan Chersonski was there. His report on the event. His take: “Let the world know that not everyone in Lithuania tolerates the distortion of history.” 

Milan Chersonski (second from right) is not the only one in town taking pictures of the banner and the handful of demonstrators. Police photographed anti-fascist participants and asked names and addresses (as last February).

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The group of courageous demonstrators at the Lietukis Garage memorial, in a city-center courtyard in Kaunas

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Milan Chersonski walks with the small group of Antifa Lietuva demonstrators who marched the same route though Kaunas old town that throngs of neo-Nazis take each year on February 16th. This year the neo-Nazis’ banner had honored the 1941 Nazi puppet prime minister on whose watch the  Lithuanian Holocaust began.

MORE IMAGES HERE

 Antifa Lietuva’s report on the event; on Facebook

MEANWHILE, GENOCIDE CENTER’S MEMBER OF GOV’S RENEWED “RED-BROWN COMMISSION” WAS BUSY SANITIZING THE LAF (AND DISMISSING THE  HISTORIC EVIDENCE OF “ISRAELI” SCHOLARS) IN NATIONAL MEDIA. Some of the sources.

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Could there really be a “June 23rd Street” in Vilnius?

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Background: Evaldas Balčiūnas; Milan Chersonski; Section on collaborators glorified. Honors for collaborators in public spaces.  Reburial of 2012.  Historical readings.  More on June 1941.

INTERNATIONAL PETITION

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Milan Chersonski (Vilnius):

Rehabilitation of the Past as a Tool in Modern Politics

Street name in Kaunas for the head of the “Lithuanian Activist Front” (in Berlin) whose hateful radio addresses incited mobs to mass murder.

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The lecture hall at Vytautas Magnus University named for the actual Nazi puppet prime minister Juozas Ambrazevičius (Brazaitis) who signed papers confirming German orders for sending the Jews of his city (KAUNAS) to a concentration camp, and for incarcerating all the rest in the ghetto. The 2012 reburial saga.

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Leena Hietanen (Tallinn) on the bestseller novel Purge:

Double Genocide: A Literary Jackpot?

Background: Sections on Double Genocide and Collaborators Glorified; Yitzhak Arad’s paper on the academic evolution of the revisionist paradigm; Efraim Zuroff’s “The Equivalency Canard”; articles by Danny Ben-Moshe and Dovid Katz.

SEE ALSO: Books

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Litvak Holocaust Survivors: Betrayed Again?

State-sponsored “red-brown commission” in Vilnius posts new list of members

Commission has caused concern among survivors themselves: Yitzhak Arad, Pinchos Fridberg, Dov Levin, Joseph Melamed, Basheva Ran. A decade and a half of issues.

Still no apology to commission’s former (& founding) member Yitzhak Arad after massive state-sponsored defamation

In 2013, Commission defames Vilnius survivor Pinchos Fridberg on its website, and uses conference in Riga to attack Defending History. Commission member from the Genocide Center uses 23 June 2013 in newest attempt to whitewash 1941 LAF collaborators and perpetrators, in defiance of the history. Accidental omission? His entry on Commission members’ list (with no hint of “completely separate subcommissions”) omits the “detail” that he is director of the “Genocide and Resistance Research Department” at the Genocide Center… 

MORE HERE

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 FILM

Screening tour of Rewriting History in the UK (London July 10th 2013), presented by Danny Ben-Moshe. RELATED: US tour.

Documentary films by Richard Bloom (USA) and Christian Carlsen (Germany), both scheduled for release on 23 Sept 2013. SEE ALSO: Film listings and Film & Theatre section.

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 The Clock is Ticking…

A Time for Loyalty to Litvak (and All) Holocaust Survivors

TO EVERY THING THERE IS A TIME UNDER THE SUN…

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A Need for De-Obfuscation?

Newest Word for Holocaust Revisionism in Eurospeak? “ISTME” (pronounced Is-it-me?) comes under “Science and Technology”!

Is the EU Again Being Bamboozled with “Double Genocide”? Are fine scholars again unwittingly instrumentalized for DG?

More red-equals-brown movement dissemination, now via “Science and Technology”? Orwellian concoctions to downgrade the Holocaust and stifle debate include: “Reconciliation of European Histories”, “Platform of European Memory”, “principle of non-discrimination of victimhood” and now, under “European cooperation in science and technology” (!) a brand new “Euro-classic”: In Search of Transcultural Memory in Europe (ISTME)…

Will it be a fair and balanced conference in Cracow on 16-18 Sept. 2013? Will there be critical papers on the Prague Declaration (and SYD), Double Genocide? state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators (in Croatia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine)? arbitrary redefinition of genocide? attempts to incriminate survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance? “red-brown” laws restricting free speech in Hungary and Lithuania?

RELATED: Was Montero instrumentalized in 2011? When the EU “just said No”  (2010) [background]; EU section.

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Shrines for Nazis, in the EU

International Petition Tops 750 Mark; Progress Seen, as Organizers of Kaunas “Religious Heritage” Conference Reported to Seek Alternative Venue; Vytautas Magnus University Continues to Honor City’s 1941 Nazi Puppet Prime Minister who Presided over Initiation of the Lithuanian Holocaust

He was honored by the central government too in a fiasco including Kaunas’s university. Its leading historian told the press that reburying the fascist underlines “the drama of Lithuanian history” and lamented that administrators were “afraid of getting hit over the head by the Jews with a club.” The city’s Jewish population, once over 30,000, is now several hundred, close to statistical zero.

Defending History urges people of conscience politely to refrain from entering the building until the shrines are removed.

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Related: Evaldas Balčiūnas on a military academy named for someone with Nazi-era biographical gaps…..

28-30 May 2013

Fireworks in Jerusalem

Times of Israel coverage by Raphael Ahren. Comment by: Abraham Foxman, Clemens Heni, Robert Wistrich, Efraim Zuroff. More debate.

27-28 May 2013

Fireworks in Riga

On the Watch, In Real Time

DEFENDING HISTORY MONITORS THE EAST EUROPEAN EXPORT OF REVISIONIST HOLOCAUST HISTORY, ATTEMPTS AT GLORIFICATION OF LOCAL COLLABORATORS, AND THE ACCOMPANYING RACISM, ANTISEMITISM AND HOMOPHOBIA

CHECKING ON THE INTERNATIONAL SCENE:

Australia, Canada, EU, Israel, South Africa, UK, USA

DEFENDING HISTORY SUPPORTS HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS, RESISTANCE HEROES AGAINST NAZISM, EAST EUROPEAN JEWISH COMMUNITIES, YIDDISH LANGUAGE AND CULTURE; WITH EMPHASIS ON THE LITVAK CULTURE, LEGACY, HISTORY AND FUTURE

MISSION    MEDIA    NEWS    LITVAK CULTURE & TOURISM

Rewriting History  ◊  More documentaries  ◊  SYD  ◊  Donate  ◊  Facebook  ◊  Neo-Nazis target DefendingHistory.com  ◊  But many courageous citizens stand up with courage

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22 May 2013

Admirers, in Vilnius, say ‘Happy Birthday’ on Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky’s 91st

Veteran of the Vilna Jewish partisans, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky answers questions from an international audience that came to celebrate her 91st birthday (at the Jewish Community of Lithuania, in the room dedicated to veterans of the Jewish resistance against the Nazis). She was one of the victims, in recent years, of local prosecutors’ kangaroo “war crimes investigations” against Lithuanian Jews who survived the Holocaust precisely because they joined the anti-Nazi resistance.

Brantsovsky set the tone for public resistance early on, in May 2008, in a Jerusalem Post interview, concurrent with the Wiesenthal Center’s letter to the then Lithuanian ambassador in Israel, and followed by the Jewish community’s own protest. The campaign of defamation has extended to some of the last Lithuanian Holocaust survivors, including Dr. Yitzhak Arad, Prof. Sara Ginaite, Dr. Rachel Margolis, and attorney Joseph Melamed, head of the world’s last active associations of Litvak survivors. There has been massive international reaction including the Australian made documentary film Rewriting History, and the American Defending Holocaust History (scheduled for 23 Sept 2013 release).

HELP SAVE THE FOREST FORT WHERE FANIA YOCHELES AND ANOTHER 100 JEWISH SURVIVORS OF THE VILNA GHETTO FOUGHT THE NAZIS

There is still time for Lithuania’s government to end the six hundred year pre-Holocaust sharing of space in the spirit of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on the happier note of reconciliation via public apologies to the defamed Jewish partisans (who continue to be defamed in new publications, e.g. “Intermarium” and on Wikipedia etc).

14-15 May 2013

Another EU Supported Lopsided “Double Genocide” Conference, This Time — in Warsaw, Courtesy of the Red-Brown “Platform”

Not one presentation on EU states’ glorification of local Holocaust perpetrators (including street names and reburials of Nazi collaborators; commemorations in Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania); criminalization of debate; Holocaust Obfuscation; Double Genocide; distortionist “genocide museums” and “genocide centers”; state accusations against survivors; failure to seriously prosecute Nazi war criminals and the need for study of underlying narrative-revising motives; red-brown commission’s campaign against a courageous Holocaust survivor in 2013; issues with the Prague Declaration; the Seventy Years Declaration.

Survivor circles express quiet regret that DC’s Holocaust Museum (USHMM) unwittingly supports revisionist agenda by legitimizing, via simple participation, another Double Genocide event in Europe. At earlier events, USHMM was one of an array of “useful Western legitimizers” but this time around it is the only one.

9 May 2013

Jewish Community of Lithuania Honors Veterans of the War Against Hitler