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110 FRIDAY, APRIL 13, 1990
Justice From
The Lithuanians
EFRAIM ZUROFF
Special to The Jewish News
W
hen the church bells
ring out in Vilnius
to mark Lithuanian
independence, I do not want
to be there. When the masses
celebrate their newfound
freedom in the streets of
Kaunas, my sympathies will
be elsewhere. When red,
green and yellow flags fly
alone in Siauliai, Penevezys,
Klaipeda and hundreds of
Lithuanian towns and
villages, I do not want even to
see them.
Although my roots go back
to that country, my thoughts
will be elsewhere, in the
places most Lithuanians
want to forget, the places
many nationalistic Lithua-
nians pretend do not exist or
are not their forefathers' crea-
tions. Places where tens of
thousands of Jews were mass-
murdered during the Holo-
caust by their Lithuanian
neighbors.
Those are the places I will
remember, because any dis-
cussion by Jews of Lithuanian
independence must be put in-
to that context. For it was the
Lithuanians' desire for in-
dependence that played such
a critical role in their mass
participation in the wanton
murder of hundreds of
thousands of Jews during the
Holocaust.
The sad, unalterable facts
are that the murder of Jews
began in many places in
Lithuania even before . the
Nazis took over, and that the
Germans found numerous
collaborators among the
Lithuanian people who im-
plemented the Final Solution
of Lithuanian Jewry with
perverse zeal and thorough-
ness.
The assistance provided by
these collaborators was
especially important in
Lithuania, where the
murders were carried out
locally, primarily by, the
native population. (Unlike
the majority of European
Jewry, who were deported to
death camps, the Jews in the
areas of the Soviet Union
were mostly killed on the spot
by the Einsatzgruppen, local
police forces and vigilante
squads.)
In fact, the Germans were
so impressed with the zeal
exhibited by the Lithuanian
collaborators that they estab-
The writer is director of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center in
Jerusalem.
lished special Lithuanian
murder squads and sent
many of these killers
elsewhere to carry out addi-
tional murders. The infamous
12th Lithuanian Auxiliary
Police Battalion was one such
unit which spread terror and
mass murder in its wake.
They went from town to town
in Byelorussia, annihilating
one Jewish community after
another, and on occasion also
carried out the execution of
Soviet prisoners of war.
True, there were exceptions.
Righteous Gentiles whose
brave deeds were a beacon of
humanity during that terri-
ble period. Unfortunately,
however, the Lithuanian
murderers far outnumbered
their noble compatriots, a sad
fact unquivocally corro-
borated by extensive research
in Israel and elsewhere.
The historical record is a
factor that must be taken in-
to account when we formulate
a Jewish-Israel response to re-
cent events in Lithuania. It
would be simply unthinkable
for Israel to rush headlong in-
to establishing diplomatic
relations with Lithuania
without extracting not only
an admission of guilt and an
unequivocal expression of
contrition, but several specific
related matters as well.
On a practical level, the
new Lithuanian regime could
indicate its goodwill towards
Israel and the Jewish people
by:
• Restoring Jewish com-
munal property to the Jewish
community.
• Ending the intentional
cover-up of the tragic fate of
Lithuanian Jewry during the
Holocaust by disclosing an ac-
curate record of the events at
the sites of mass murder
which are official national
memorials.
• Guaranteeing that all
documentation regarding the
Holocaust, and especially
material relating to the role
of local collaborators, will be
preserved and made available
to prosecution agencies and
researchers.
• Making an unequivocal
commitment to bar the
return of suspected Nazi war
criminals currently under in-
vestigation abroad.
How tragic it would be if,
after Western governments
have finally been persuaded
to take measures against the
perpetrators of the Final
Solution, these criminals
were able to escape justice by
returning to their beloved
homeland.
❑