Ruta Vanagaite, a bestselling Lithuanian author, recently co-wrote a book with the Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff on the role of Lithuanian collaborators in murdering, torturing, and robbing Jews during the Holocaust. The book, mostly comprising interviews with witnesses to the events, has provoked a tumult in Lithuania, as Cnaan Liphshiz writes:
The 304-page volume has prompted not just the official Jewish community of Lithuania but also local media outlets to demand the government publish its list of suspected war criminals. The government received the names in 2012 from its own Genocide and Resistance Research Center but failed to publish them or issue any indictments. The center’s director now has promised to publish the names by 2017.
Vanagaite’s book also has highlighted the fact that despite ample evidence and testimonies of widespread complicity, not a single person has been imprisoned in Lithuania for killing Jews during the Holocaust. . . .
In Lithuania, locals who fought with the Germans against the Red Army are widely revered as patriotic freedom fighters. . . .
Lithuania is the only country whose government officially branded Soviet occupation as a form of genocide. That “Soviet-sponsored genocide” is commemorated in Lithuania far more prominently than the Holocaust. And any mention of the Jewish genocide had been absent from Vilnius’s [state-run] Museum of Genocide Victims until 2011.
More about: History & Ideas, Holocaust, Lithuania, Soviet Union, World War II