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Call 354-6060 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. ❑