Vilnius: Capital Of Culture Or Injustice?

by Mark Weitzman
Special To The Jewish Week

On April 30, the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, honored Fania Brantsovsky, the 86-year-old librarian at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, for her heroic actions as an anti-Nazi partisan in Lithuania during World War II. The next week, a group of Lithuanian plainclothes policemen came searching for her, although her place of employment is public knowledge, and she has lived in Vilnius for decades. Prosecutors claimed that she was implicated in war crimes against Lithuanian civilians at the end of the war. Several weeks ago, on the eve of a visit to the U.S., Lithuanian Prime Minister Gedimins Kirkilas was able to locate the octogenarian librarian (who was giving a tour of the Vilna Ghetto to an employee of the U.S. Embassy) and invited her to

a reception at his office where he presented her with flowers and a gift while offering his support for Holocaust education. At the same time, a Lithuanian state prosecutor said that she was wanted for interrogation.

What lies behind this dizzying and apparently contradictory series of events is the tale of a country that appears to be more concerned with rewriting history than learning from it. Lithuania was once the center of a vibrant Jewish community, with Vilnius known as the “Jerusalem of Lita” (Lithuania), and a center of Jewish learning and culture. It was the home of the great rabbinic authority, Rabbi Elijah, known as the Vilna Gaon (sage), as well as of the Strashun library, which was one of the earliest and greatest Jewish bibliographic collections in Europe, and YIVO, the center for research and study of Eastern European Jewish life.

The Holocaust struck Lithuanian Jewry particularly hard, with 93 percent of the Jewish population murdered. This was one of the worst records in Nazi occupied lands, with one of the contributing factors being the brutality of native Lithuanian collaborators.
After the war Lithuania fell under Soviet domination and did not gain independence until 1991. Given the historical record, it was thought that the Lithuanians, like many other European countries, could now freely explore their own history under both Nazi and Communist control, and be able to draw lessons that would aid in the transition a Western democratic state.

Unfortunately, in regard to the Nazi past, the Lithuanians have continued to turn a blind eye. To date, despite the abundance of historical information and surviving eyewitness accounts available about the actions of the collaborators, no Lithuanian has ever spent one minute in jail for crimes committed as part of the Holocaust.

While three trials have been held, they all involved Lithuanians whom the U.S. government had discovered in America, and who had been sent back to Lithuania. One died while at trial, one was convicted but developed Alzheimer’s disease during the trial, and one was convicted and sentenced, but the sentence was never implemented. Not one case has ever been developed by the Lithuanians in the almost two decades of independence.

In a last-ditch attempt to find some measure of justice for the victims, and to strengthen the historical record, the Simon Wiesenthal Center began Operation Last Chance in Lithuania and other countries. This operation encourages witnesses with information about Nazi war crimes to come forward, and then puts pressure on the countries either sheltering the accused, or the countries where the crimes took place, to launch official investigations and proceedings. In a reversion to Stalinist justice, Lithuania appears to have reacted to this initiative by deciding that, instead of searching for and prosecuting the guilty, it would persecute the victims. Fania Brantsovsky was not the first, nor the only such case.

Earlier attempts included targeting two former Lithuanian Jews, then living in Israel, followed by a request that Israel cooperate in the investigation of Dr. Yitzhak Arad, a renowned historian and former chairman of Yad Vashem, the internationally recognized Holocaust Memorial Center in Jerusalem. Like Brantsovsky, Arad had also been a partisan, and his distinguished post-war career includes being honored in 1993 by Lithuania’s first president, and being named to the government’s international commission to investigate Nazi and Soviet crimes. Until recently he was facing charges that he was a war criminal himself; now, in an apparent attempt to save face, the Lithuanian government is saying that he is only being requested to testify as a witness.
Arad and Brantsovsky are only the two most prominent targets. Others include another two octogenarian women, one the founder of Vilnius’ Jewish Museum, the other a retired academic now living in Toronto, who was responsible for a Lithuanian Christian family’s being honored for their rescue of a Jewish girl.

The persecution of aged survivors is only one of the issues relating to Lithuania’s past during the Holocaust. Others include restitution of looted and confiscated Jewish assets, including property, and preservation of Jewish sites, including cemeteries. And last March, on Lithuania’s Independence Day, 200 skinheads marched in downtown Lithuania, where despite not having a permit they were protected by laughing police.
The recent visit of Prime Minister Kirkilas to the U.S. failed to resolve these issues. It is time that Lithuania lives up to its responsibilities as a member of the International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Research and Remembrance, and ceases to rewrite history and persecute the victims.

Last week, Reps. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), Paul Hodes (D-N.H.) and Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) sent a letter to the Lithuanians expressing their concern over this issue. We urge international bodies, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the European Union, to follow their lead and to pressure the Lithuanians to accord the survivors their basic human rights. Recently, the EU named Vilnius Europe’s cultural capital in 2009, but unless culture is construed as including a return to Stalinist justice, that designation needs to be put on hold. n

Mark Weitzman is director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Task Force Against Hate.

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