LITHUANIA | POLITICS OF MEMORY | BLAMING VICTIMS | GLORIFYING PERPETRATORS | 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).
In a recent article in Der Spiegel journalist Solveig Grothe writes that after having inquired on that subject with Lithuanian authorities, the director of the Center for the Research of Genocide wrote her that “The Soviet partisans in Lithuania were from 1941 to 1945 part of the Soviet armed forces fighting against Nazi Germany. Their activities are considered hostile towards the sovereign Lithuanian State.” We could easily disregard such a blatant distortion of the historical truth related to the Jews who had survived extermination in their country but I know from my personal visit at the Genocide Museum that Lithuanian officialdom are far more interested in counting and weeping for the postwar Forest Brothers than for their former Jewish countrymen. Solveig Grothe had also noticed that difference in treatment when she visited that museum, now renamed Museum of the Occupations and the Fight for Freedom, having seen “only a small cell in the basement is foreseen for the murder of the Jews.”