In 1998, Lithuania established a commission to investigate local collaboration with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, who successively occupied the country during World War II. But rather than searching out the numerous Lithuanians who aided the SS in murdering Jews, the commission turned against one of its own participants—the eminent Israeli Holocaust historian Yitzhak Arad, who fought the Germans as part of a pro-Soviet partisan unit. Daniel Brook writes:
On April 22, 2006, Respublika, an openly anti-Semitic newspaper that is one of Lithuania’s highest-circulation dailies, published a story headlined, “The Expert with Blood on His Hands.” The article used passages of Arad’s memoir, The Partisan, published in English in 1979, to smear him. In the Respublika article, what Arad’s memoir terms a 1944 “mopping-up operation” against “armed Lithuanians” after the Nazi withdrawal becomes an “ethnic cleansing of Lithuanians” that was part of a larger “Soviet genocide.” Arad, who was a teenager during the Holocaust, is referred to as an “NKVD storm trooper.”
The anti-Communist convictions that are evident throughout Arad’s book—his recounting of how Stalin crushed the organized Jewish community of Lithuania during the annexation of 1940 [and] his description of his hometown’s market turned scraggly and abandoned in the fallout from disastrous Communist economic policies—go unmentioned. As for the defection of this supposedly rabid Communist from Soviet Lithuania, the article seems genuinely puzzled: “It is not evident why, but right after the war Y. Arad decided to run to the West.”
Read more on Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/07/lithuania_and_nazis_the_country_wants_to_forget_its_collaborationist_past.html