A distinguished Lithuanian historian, Professor Liudas Truska, has criticized ongoing Holocaust ignorance and whitewashing in his country, which seeks to glorify resistance to Communism while ignoring the Holocaust and complicity in the murder of its Jewish citizens.
Since breaking free from Soviet oppression after decades of suffering, Lithuania has been obsessed with documenting the evils of the Soviets and with glorifying the resistance to them. The USSR invaded Lithuania in 1940, withdrew when the Germans attacked it in 1941, and recaptured the country in 1944, ruling it as part of the Soviet Union until 1990.
Unfortunately, many of the anti-Soviet resistors were also Nazi supporters and mass murderers of Jews, and their commemoration as national heroes is accompanied by a downplaying of the Holocaust and of their role in it: With the abrupt departure of the hated Red Army in 1941, commemorated locally as the “June Insurrection”, the resistance movements brutally turned upon Lithuania’s Jews, and in the course of the war over 90% of the country’s Jews were exterminated, many by these fellow countrymen of theirs.
In addition to the need to avoid tarnishing the reputation of its heroes by acknowledging their foul deeds against the Jews, Lithuania also suffers from a deeply ingrained stereotype connecting the Jews with the Communists, and this to some degree legitimizes in many citizens’ eyes the attacks on the innocent Jewish community. Originating in the 1920s, this vicious stereotype was much used by Nazis and Fascists, and in Lithuania it seems to have survived to this day.
This year sees the 70th anniversary of the "June Insurrection", and public commemoration events have gone to great lengths to glorify Soviet crimes and the resistance to them, while downplaying or ignoring the Holocaust and Lithuanian complicity in the genocide perpetuated against the country’s Jews.
At a recent Academic conference hosted by the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences to mark the anniversary of the "June Insurrection", Professor Liudas Truska of the department of the history of Lithuania at the Vilnius Pedagogical University spoke out against this wide ranging policy.
Professor Truska criticized the fact that the national Museum of Genocide Victims in the capital Vilnius says almost nothing about the Holocaust. According to the professor much more attention is paid there to what is called as the "Soviet genocide". "But I do not see any Soviet genocide - as the world defines genocide as a deliberate, massive physical extermination of people due to their race, nationality or religion. In Lithuania, this was not [done] even under Stalin. Thus, this is not genocide. How can you speak about a Soviet genocide in Lithuania when the number of residents increased by one million?" asked the distinguished historian.
It should be emphasized that his opinion today in Lithuania is not only unpopular, but it can also lead him to jail. The law in Lithuania stipulates up to two years in prison for “disavowing the fact that Lithuania was occupied by the USSR and Nazi Germany, and for impairing or nullifying the crimes of these regimes."
Professor Truska is not merely an armchair academic. He is also the co-chairman of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, established in 1998 to conduct research into these periods of occupation. He is therefore an exceptionally well informed commentator both on what happened during the Holocaust, and on what is happening to memory of the Holocaust today.
His concern is epitomized by the country’s official Genocide Research Center of Lithuania, and the Lithuanian Museum of Genocide Victims which it runs. The Museum has often been criticized for displaying anti-Semitic materials without comment and for completely ignoring the Holocaust, while the Center’s spokesman has been noted spreading anti-Semitic propaganda and accusations and participating in neo-Nazi marches.
Further reading:
Yad Vashem: “The ‘Final Solution’ in Lithuania in Light of German Documentation”
Google Books: The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, By David Cesarani
The Slaughter at Lietukis Garage (Warning: graphic, extreme violence)
