Israel is up against the spiritual heirs of Nazism

By Dr. Efraim Zuroff

It appears that the events of last week have finally convinced the Israeli government that hope of a solution for peace begins with the elimination of Hamas and replacing the leaders of the PA.

As a historian who has devoted many decades to studying the Holocaust and has spent more than 40 years trying to facilitate the prosecution of its perpetrators, I am very careful about comparing the Shoah (Holocaust) to other tragedies and causes. 

While I find the false comparisons by organizations such as PETA (animal rights) and opponents of abortion to be baseless and far more wishful thinking than historically factual, there are incidents which do deserve to be compared to antisemitic crimes committed by the Nazis.

One such tragedy took place on October 7, when Hamas, the Islamic terror organization which rules the Gaza Strip, invaded Israel and murdered more than 1,400, mostly Israeli civilians, and raped, tortured, and took hostage Israeli women whose fate was filmed and screened on YouTube. 

They also tortured and killed children, who were forced to witness the murder of their parents before being murdered themselves, or abducted to Gaza as hostages. 

They burned many of the victims’ bodies beyond recognition. This pogrom, which claimed more Israeli lives than any other attack on Jews since the Holocaust, was reminiscent of Nazi atrocities committed during the Shoah. And the fact that it was carried out on Israeli territory added to the shock and horror. 

After all, Israel was primarily established to be a safe haven for Jews, a secure home for a people who had suffered so terribly in the Diaspora.

Yet the large number of victims and the exceptional cruelty of the terrorists should not have come as a surprise.

Hamas: The spiritual successors to Hitler’s Arab allies

The history of Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, is one of staunch opposition to the existence of the State of Israel, and continued armed resistance to end the Israeli “occupation”. It was established in 1987, shortly after the outbreak of the First Intifada led by Hamas founder sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and from the start was connected to the Islamic fundamentalist and virulently antisemitic Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Thus Hamas has in principle – both religious and political – opposed any compromise which would recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel in its current territory. 

They are, in that respect, the spiritual heirs of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who hoped that the Nazis would implement the Final Solution in Palestine and spent most of World War II in Berlin, spreading Nazi propaganda in Arabic, and helping recruit Bosnian Moslems to join the Waffen-S.S.

Needless to say, they refused to accept the Oslo Accords, which were signed by their secular rival Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, which officially recognized Israel, and renounced “terrorism and other acts of violence.” Arafat never abided by this renunciation of terrorism.

In 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian legislative election, and a year later took control of the Gaza Strip from the Fatah. Even before gaining control of Gaza, Hamas carried out countless terrorist attacks against Israel, killing and wounding hundreds of Jews in suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, and car rammings, as well as shooting tens of thousands of rockets into Israel.

As Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh explained in a recent article on jwire.com.au, Hamas leaders have never, ever hid their goal of destroying Israel by jihad, or “holy war”. In fact, several days before their latest attack on Israel, Hamas urged all Muslims to “continue the legitimate struggle in all forms” until Israel is defeated and expelled from “our historical land.”

YET DESPITE the numerous acts of terror carried out against Israel by Hamas, Israel decided in 2005, to evacuate its army bases, 20 settlements, and 9,000 settlers in a move ostensibly designed to strengthen the peace process, and reduce the number of Palestinians under Israeli control. 

A year later, however, Hamas defeated Fatah in the Palestinian elections and took over control of the Gaza Strip.

But instead of treating Hamas like the religiously fundamentalist terror organization that it was, Israel preferred to foster good relations with Hamas at the expense of Arafat’s Fatah, ignoring Hamas’ charter and ideological support for jihad. 

Many of those supporting the two-state solution, indeed harbored optimistic predictions about the future of Gaza, and supported the government’s efforts to achieve practical agreements with Hamas, but in practice, Hamas never changed its ideology.

Instead of turning the Gaza Strip into a version of Singapore, Hamas diverted its resources into acquiring weapons, building tunnels to help invade Israel, and turned Gaza into a version of Afghanistan.

Twice during the past two decades, Israel was forced to invade Gaza, but in each case, we only gained a temporary respite, because we did not want to recapture Gaza, and assume full responsibility for its rapidly growing population (which is currently over two million inhabitants). In fact, apropos the Holocaust, I often had the feeling that we were primarily appeasing Hamas, rather than destroying them, for lack of a practical solution.

In that context, I was reminded of some advice Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal imparted to me several decades ago. He related that when he was a student in Prague in the latter half of the 1930s, he and his friends would often make fun of Hitler, an attitude which he later very much regretted. “When fundamentalist extremists threaten you, don’t laugh them off. Take them seriously, and be ready to fight against them.”

It appears that the events of last week have finally convinced the Israeli government that if there is to be any hope of a solution for peace with the Palestinians, it begins with the elimination of Hamas, and the replacement of the leaders of the Palestinian Authority. 

In the meantime, we can only hope that the IDF is successful in doing so as effectively and quickly as possible.

About the writer:

Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of its Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

The locals may never own what they did, but Yad Vashem’s chairman spoke truth to power, calling out their role in eliminating a vibrant Jewish world

By Dr. Efraim Zuroff

(First appeared in The Times of Israel)

During the past two decades, virtually every country in Europe, and many in the Western Hemisphere, have adopted a Holocaust memorial day, many inspired by the decision of the United Nations to do so in 2005. Quite a few have chosen to follow the example of the UN by commemorating the date of the liberation of Auschwitz death camp on January 27, 1945, but others chose dates that mark significant events in the history of the Shoah in their respective countries. In some cases, the choice is a reflection of the significance of specific Holocaust events for their societies, or the desire, or lack thereof, to emphasize the complicity of local Nazi collaborators.

Thus, for example, France chose July 16, the anniversary of the mass arrest in Paris in 1942 of 13,152 French Jews, who were deported to their deaths in Auschwitz by the local police. Similarly, Hungary chose April 16, the date of the initial orders for the ghettoization of Hungarian Jewry, the prelude to the deportation of 437,000 of them to Auschwitz in spring of 1944. Bulgaria, by contrast, chose March 10, the date on which the government revoked its original plan to deport the country’s entire Jewish population to Treblinka.

Other  countries’ choices of the memorial day are a reflection of their attempts to distance themselves from Holocaust crimes. Thus, Estonia, which to date has done little to deal with its Holocaust past, and the complicity of its locals with the Nazis, chose January 27, which has no connection to Estonian history, since none of the local Jewish community was deported to Auschwitz. A more striking example of a desire to deflect attention from the highly  significant and very extensive participation in the murder of their Jewish citizens by local collaborators is Lithuania’s choice of September 23, the date of the evacuation of the Vilna Ghetto, which was carried out by the Nazis. If the Lithuanians really wanted a date that expressed their self-reflection about their role in the Holocaust, they would choose October 28, when, in 1941, Lithuanians murdered approximately 10,000 Lithuanian Jews in the Ninth Fort in Kovno.

Those of us who are acquainted with the phenomenon of Holocaust distortion and are trying to combat it are well aware of the false Holocaust narrative created and promoted by successive Lithuanian governments. They have repeatedly attributed the mass murder of 212,000 Lithuanian Jews, as well as thousands of foreign Jews killed in Lithuania by local Nazi collaborators, almost exclusively to the German and Austrian Nazis. 

A major reason these lies have persisted for decades has been the refusal of Israel to protest these falsehoods, a policy crafted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to try to enlist the support of the new democracies of post-Communist Eastern Europe. Instead of objecting to the Lithuanians’ false narrative of the Holocaust, Netanyahu even praised their efforts to commemorate the Shoah during a state visit to Lithuania in 2018. No Israeli official has ever publicly criticized the Lithuanians’ refusal to admit the extensive participation of Lithuanians in the implementation of the Final Solution, not only in Lithuania, but even in neighboring Belarus, where a Lithuanian unit murdered at least 20,000 Belarussian Jews.

This policy apparently came to an abrupt and surprising end last week, when Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, addressed the Seimas, the Lithuanian Parliament, as part of the events of this year’s Holocaust memorial day on September 23. He began his highly emotional speech by mourning the destruction of the incredibly vibrant prewar Jewish life and culture that had earned Vilna the title of “Yerushalayim de-Lita,” –  the Jerusalem of Lithuania. 

He then continued by describing the scope and nature of the tragedy:

“Hundreds of thousands of Lithuanian Jews were murdered in this country by the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators. Almost the entire Jewish community became extinct. The totality of the destruction of such a…remarkably vibrant Jewish community, almost like none other, annihilated so cruelly, so systematically during the Holocaust – and to a significant extent, by the local population.

Insane, poisonous antisemitic hatred eradicated an entire civilization – my civilization – here in your homeland…

We are encouraged by gradual but substantial progress made over the years in Lithuania… but, unfortunately, I must say that not yet enough progress has been made… a great deal remains to be accomplished. Our task will not be completed until this understanding… trickles down to the very last member of the Lithuanian civil society.”

Dayan then broached one of the most sensitive issues in Lithuania regarding local Holocaust perpetrators, one that had never been broached by any Israeli official:

“An antisemite, especially a murderer of Jews, cannot be considered an ‘otherwise good person.’…For sure, he cannot be considered a hero. In addition to refraining from attributing public honor to such butchers, Lithuania must consistently acknowledge that many of the Lithuanian Jews massacred in the Holocaust died at the hands of their Lithuanian co-nationals, and that Lithuanians also took part in the extermination of Jews in neighboring countries.

Such recognition is obviously owed to the Jewish victims, but also, and probably even more, to the present and future generations of Lithuanians.”

Dayan then mentioned three specific cases of Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrators who have been glorified, and elevated to the status of national heroes, despite their role in the murder of Jews. “Such names as Noreika, Skirpa, and Krikstaponis do not add to the honor of your nation.”

He concluded his historic speech with the “El Malei Rachimim” prayer for the souls of the deceased, and received a loud ovation.

The question now remains whether Dayan’s bold and extremely moving speech will lead to a serious change in the government’s policy regarding the official historical narrative of the Shoah in Lithuania. It took France 50 years to accept responsibility for the crimes of the Vichy regime. Hopefully, Lithuania will not take that long. Without Israeli pressure, however, I am afraid nothing will change. That said, who knows? Perhaps one day Lithuania will commemorate the Shoah on October 28, instead of September 23.

About the writer:

Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the director of the Center’s Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

Whitewashing a nefarious past, Lithuania is the master.

By Grant Gochin

A feature of Putin’s war against Ukraine is the relentless and pervasive rewriting of Russian history, and elevation of Russian murderers into national heroes. Russia has even rewritten their school textbooks to teach their youth a fabricated history. If the West is to defend Ukraine from Russia, we must ensure Russia’s behavior is not replicated in NATO countries. NATO cannot be seen to be defending conduct we find abhorrent.

In a strange and ironic twist of fate, Russia is now seeming to be copying Lithuania’s disgusting Holocaust mis-education. Lithuania has rewritten history, elevated Holocaust perpetrators into their national heroes, and are teaching schoolchildren lies. Sounds familiar? While Russia is only trying to miseducate their own youth, Lithuania is trying to export their historical frauds into western education.

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a friend as “a person who has a strong liking for and trust in another”. This definition does not apply to the relationship between Lithuania and Russia. They are not “friends”. They do not like each other and there is no trust. Russia’s conduct is generally repugnant, there is no basis for anybody to trust Russia. After all, a proven compulsive liar will lie about anything, always. Russia lies so much, so often, that everything they communicate must be assumed to be false unless proven otherwise. Lithuania is walking a fine line when they disparage dastardly acts by their enemy. They joyously identify missteps by Russia and demand the West intervene. Lithuania continually tells the West what NATO “MUST” do. Lithuania does not have the humanity, integrity, credibility or power to tell anybody what they “must” do.

Russian Bear, Lithuanian Fox. A Lithuanian appeal for support against potential Russian aggression.

The West should take cognizance of Lithuania’s concerns, they are sometimes valid. However the finger pointing “MUST” demands are an absurdity, especially given that the Lithuanian Government showed the US Congress their middle finger when Congress asked Lithuania to stop using Congressional documents for Holocaust revisionism.

Many of the issues Lithuania identifies about Russia – are practices widely originated and replicated by Lithuania itself. Historical fraud, the honoring of murderers, inverting facts, and so many more. It seems the difference between Lithuania and Russia is negligible (the nut does not fall far from the tree).

Russia’s honoring of Stalin is repugnant. It is a repudiation of humanity, an assault on decency; it is utterly dishonest, and an insult to Stalin’s victims, and to victims everywhere. Honoring genocidal murderers is an anathema to civilization. Elevating genocidal murderers to national hero status enables future genocides. Putin is abominable, just as is every entity who considers mass murderers as their national heroes is repulsive.

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word “hypocrite” as “a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings”. Lithuania does exactly the same as Russia, but objects only when their own enemy mimics their own behaviors. It is the equivalent of a tiny temper tantrum that Russia can and does ignore. Lithuania does not have the power to do so. NATO cannot allow this repugnant behavior within our own member governments. It is contrary to NATO’s standard operating procedure.

Just as Russia rehabilitates Stalin and rewrites history, Lithuania has rehabilitated many Holocaust perpetrators and rewritten their history. The most widely known case is Jonas Noreika. Noreika was a Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrator who was responsible for the murder of approximately 14,500 Jews.

Lithuanian Bishop Emeritus of Panevėžys, Jonas Kauneckas, hung a grotesque monument to evil on a Heritage Listed, State building. There were mass joyous celebrations by Lithuanians. The monument hung on this State building until American officials refused to attend the 2023 NATO Summit in Vilnius, unless the Lithuania government removed this abomination. Lithuania capitulated and removed the monument for “cleaning”. They did not remove it out of any sense of decency or humanity or integrity.

The difference for Lithuania between the two monuments is that Stalin murdered Lithuanians, while Lithuanian murderers “only” murdered Jews. A distinction which cannot be missed or forgotten.

The Lithuanian Government maintains a legal standard which says that Jonas Noreika was never placed on trial during his lifetime, so he “must” have a Constitutional presumption of “complete innocence”, no matter what facts are apparent. However, neither Stalin nor Hitler were prosecuted nor convicted during their lifetime, so does Lithuania consider them the same as they do Noreika? No! Lithuanian legal standards apply by ethnicity – Lithuanian murderers of Jews are good, Russian murderers of Lithuanians are bad. There are three reasons:

• To Lithuanians, Jews are not really human, and are not deserving of truth or justice.
• Antisemitism
• Truth is not generally a component of Lithuanian society.

Just as Putin re-writes history for his propaganda war, so does Lithuania. Lithuania looks in the mirror and sees Russia in their reflection but do not see the irony in their two-faced, hypocritical outrage. The dictionary definition of hypocrite fits Lithuania exactly. So do the words deceiver, immoral, unethical, degenerate, dishonest, heinous, brutal and many more.

Stalin was responsible for the murder of millions. The only reason Noreika murdered fewer than Stalin is that there were fewer Jews for him to murder, and he didn’t have the same geographical reach.

As Stalin said – “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic”. For Lithuania, the slaughter of Jews by Lithuanians is of no consequence, but the murder of Lithuanians by Russians is an unforgivable offense. The term for this continual philosophy by Lithuania is “morally reprehensible”, or, as Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it: “Evil”.

The dictionary definition of friendship “a person who has a strong liking for and trust in another” means this definition cannot be applied to the past, present, or future relationship between Lithuania and Jews. The relationship is simply transactional. Lithuania has shown its true face too many times to be accorded credibility again. Perhaps, in a few generations from now, Jews might re-visit this issue.

NATO and the EU should ask themselves which values they are defending when offering Lithuania protection from its own mirror image.

With thanks to Dr. Melody Ziff

About the writer:

Grant Arthur Gochin currently serves as the Honorary Consul for the Republic of Togo. He is the Emeritus Special Envoy for Diaspora Affairs for the African Union, which represents the fifty-five African nations, and Emeritus Vice Dean of the Los Angeles Consular Corps, the second largest Consular Corps in the world. Gochin is actively involved in Jewish affairs, focusing on historical justice. He has spent the past twenty five years documenting and restoring signs of Jewish life in Lithuania. He has served as the Chair of the Maceva Project in Lithuania, which mapped / inventoried / documented / restored over fifty abandoned and neglected Jewish cemeteries. Gochin is the author of “Malice, Murder and Manipulation”, published in 2013. His book documents his family history of oppression in Lithuania. He is presently working on a project to expose the current Holocaust revisionism within the Lithuanian government. Professionally, Gochin is a Certified Financial Planner and practices as a Wealth Advisor in California, where he lives with his family. Personal site: https://www.grantgochin.com/

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

Enticing invitations often result in whitewashing local complicity in Holocaust crimes

By Dr. Efraim Zuroff

An ostensibly innocuous article with a very upbeat title (“Riga: A Baltic gem with more than a dash of Jewish history”), which took up almost an entire page of the August 13th issue of The Jerusalem Post, aroused my attention, and raised a serious question about journalistic ethics. Written by David Zev Harris and Mark Gordon, the hosts of the Travel Edition of The Jerusalem Post Podcast, the article was a very  positive portrayal of contemporary Latvia, and especially its capital Riga, as an interesting and pleasant tourist destination.

Alongside their article was a sidebar with an interview with Linda Ozola, the Deputy Chairman of the Riga City Council, under the heading “A proud people with nothing to hide.” The “nothing” in this case, is of course the Holocaust. “It is absolutely okay to talk about [the Holocaust],” she says.

“We’ve never wanted to tear out any pages of our history. We have to accept the history as it is. And we have to learn from history. We really regretfully admit that during the Second World War we lost so many Jewish people who were part of our society, who were co-creators of what Latvia was at that time.”

How interesting! Of course, these proud people have nothing to hide, because they simply created a false narrative of the Shoah in Latvia, which omitted the massive participation of Latvians in the mass murder of Jews, and not only local Jews, but also 96% of the 30,000 Jews deported to Riga from Germany, Austria and the Protektorat (today the Czech Republic), and many thousands of Jews in Belarus. So if the Latvians had no role in the mass murders, it’s no problem for the locals to speak about the Holocaust. How convenient.

In fact, while the text of  Harris and Gordon’s article does mention the Holocaust several times, there is no mention whatsoever of the highly significant role played by Latvians in the implementation of the Final Solution, not only in Latvia, but also in Belarus. (Half of the notorious Latvian murder squad, the Arajs Kommando was sent to Minsk to help liquidate the local ghetto.)

Interestingly, Harris and Gordon visited the local Holocaust museum established by Rabbi Barkan, which does not dwell (at least when I visited it several years ago) on Latvian participation in Holocaust crimes, but did not see fit to go to the local Museum of the Occupation. That site is a model of Holocaust distortion, which promotes the canard of equivalence between Nazi and Communist crimes, and overlooks the very numerous Latvian
killers, while focusing on the few local Righteous Among the Nations.

In Latvia, the real heroes are not the Righteous, but those who served in the Latvian Legion, which was part of the Waffen-S.S., which fought against the Red Army for a victory of the Third Reich, the most murderous regime in human history. Every March 16, a march is held in the center of Riga to honor Legion’s veterans, among them many who served in the Latvian
Sicherheitsdienst, which played a major role in the annihilation of Latvian Jewry. The locals justify their adulation for these misguided “patriots” by claiming that they paved the way for Latvian independence, but the Nazis had no intention to ever grant Latvia its independence.

Ultimately, I found the explanation for the seriously distorted narrative of the Holocaust in the article. The authors were the guests of the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia, Radisson Blu Ridzene, and the local airline AirBaltic. And that’s what happens when journalists get free junkets to interesting destinations. The question is, given the lies promoted by the
host government, can a journalist with principles, accept what ultimately becomes a bribe?

About the writer:

Dr. Efraim Zuroff. Director, Simon Wiesenthal Center – Israel office and Eastern European Affairs. Coordinator, SWC Nazi war crimes research worldwide
1 Mendele Street
Jerusalem, Israel 92147
Tel: 972.2.563.1273/4/5
Fax: 972.2.563.1276
www.swcjerusalem.org <http://www.swcjerusalem.org> 

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

Rescued from oblivion, the testimonies of Jews from the small shtetlach who miraculously survived

By Dr. Efraim Zuroff

(*First published in The Jerusalem Report June 26 2023)

On April 4, 1945, Leyb Koniuchowsky sat down in Kovno with Lithuanian Holocaust survivor Dina Zisa Flaum and carefully recorded by hand her testimony in Yiddish regarding her harrowing experiences during the Holocaust. Flaum was one of the very few survivors of the community of Rasein (in Yiddish), or Raseiniai (in Lithuanian), a pre-war community of some 6,000 Jews, and Koniuchowsky was a man on a mission, a sacred mission.

Originally from Alytus, Lithuania, Koniuchowsky survived the Kovno Ghetto and decided to record the testimonies of all the (few) Jews who had miraculously survived in the small shtetlach (villages with Jewish communities) in the provinces. Of the 220,000 Jews who lived under the Nazi occupation in Lithuania, only about 8,000 survived. The overwhelming majority of them, however, were from Lithuania’s large urban Jewish communities in Vilna (Vilnius), Kovno (Kaunas), and Shavli (Siauliai), where the Nazis had established ghettos and kept alive several thousands of Jewish forced laborers. The decimation in the small communities was almost total. Flaum’s testimony was particularly important because she had seen at least one of the mass murders in Rasein (not all the Jews were murdered at the same time) and could identify several of the killers. This is her description of one of the most horrific crimes she witnessed:

“While lying in the hay [close to the murder site], I clearly saw two women standing near the pit [which the victims fell into after being shot] smashing the skulls of small children with a large rock or killing the children by smashing their heads together. One of the women was the student Klimaite.”

Koniuchowsky started his project in Lithuania immediately after the end of World War II, and later continued in the displaced persons camps in Germany for several years. By the time he finished in 1948, he had collected testimonies that covered over 100 communities, and he sought a publisher to publish his collection in its entirety. And that’s where the story of this book hit a very unfortunate snag. Having by this time, immigrated to the United States, he could not find a single publisher willing to print his entire book as recorded by its author. And believe it not, that was still the situation 32 years later when I first met Koniuchowsky in 1980 in Israel while I was working as a researcher for the Office of Special Investigations of the US Justice Department, established to prosecute Nazis who had entered the United States illegally by hiding their service with the Nazis. I tried to convince Koniuchowsky to let me see the material, but he adamantly refused. He kept on saying that he collected the testimonies for the kedoshim [martyrs], to which I replied in utter desperation, that those who had turned them into kedoshim were walking around free, and that there is every chance that they will die in peace and tranquility if we cannot have access to his material – all to no avail. Only nine years later was the problem solved, after Prof. Dov Levin, a survivor of Kovno and the world’s leading expert on the fate of Baltic Jewry in the Holocaust, finally convinced Koniuchowsky to donate his collection to Yad Vashem, even though they did not commit to publishing his magnum opus. According to press reports, Koniuchowsky was getting old, and he wanted to make sure that he kept his promise to the victims. “They yelled, ‘Brothers and sisters, Yidden, please remember us! Take revenge for our poor blood! And I didn’t forget for a minute of my life.”

What Yad Vashem did do was publish a book titled Expulsion and Extermination; Holocaust Testimonials from Provincial Lithuania. It gives an in-depth treatment of the various stages of the persecution and murder of the Jews, using excerpts from the testimonies to illustrate the trials and tribulations suffered by the Jewish inhabitants of the more than 200 Lithuanian towns and villages that had Jewish communities. The unique historical significance of Koniuchowsky’s project becomes clearly apparent because the witness statements provide critical dimensions and details of the tragic fate of approximately half of Lithuanian Jewry, the most important of which are the major role played by local volunteers from all strata of Lithuanian society in the mass murders, and the incredible cruelty of the perpetrators. In view of the persistent efforts of successive Lithuanian governments since independence to hide and/or minimize the role of locals in the murders, The Lithuanian Slaughter of Its Jews is an invaluable addition to the historical record of the annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry, and it makes available vital information for the English-speaking public. This is not an easy or comfortable read, and the format is not reader-friendly, but its 569 pages present a message that must be heard and learned.

I cannot conclude this review without two additional points. The first relates to the potential importance of the testimonies in the efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice. Koniuchowsky’s collection consisted of 1,684 pages of testimony in Yiddish, and listed the names of 1,284 participants, only 121 of whom we had information about from other sources. Given our ability to trace the immigration destinations of thousands of Holocaust perpetrators, especially from the Baltics, to the Anglo-Saxon democracies, the decades-long delay in obtaining access to the testimonies was a veritable tragedy, which allowed many killers to escape punishment. The fact that it was a survivor, well aware of the horrors of the Holocaust, who refused to cooperate, makes it much more painful.

One final note. This volume has 121 testimonies from the Koniuchowsky collection, but for some reason additional witness statements were not included, including the testimony of Dina Flaum cited above. Their omission is not explained.

The Lithuanian Slaughter of Its Jews: The Testimonies from 121 Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust in Lithuania, recorded by Leyb Koniuchowsky, translated by Dr. Jonathan Boyarin with a forward by David Solly Sandler. 2022; 569 pages. Available on line.

About the Writer:

Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of the Center’s Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs. His latest book (with Rūta Vanagaitė) is Our People; Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust, published by Rowman & Littlefield

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

A number of acclaimed films have shone a spotlight on the Holocaust in the Baltics. But Latvia and Lithuania have responded with Holocaust distortion

By Dr. Efraim Zuroff

(*First appeared in The Jerusalem Post)

During the past half year, three new documentary films devoted to the Holocaust in the Baltics, and especially in Lithuania, have been screened in numerous venues all over the world, except in Lithuania and Latvia, which are the subjects of these films.

One, titled How the Holocaust Began, was produced by the BBC and focuses on the use of new forensic archeological technology to discover unknown mass graves of Holocaust victims in western Lithuania, where indeed the systematic mass murder of European Jewry began following the Nazi invasion of Lithuania, on June 22, 1941.

A second film, J’Accuse, focuses on the mass murder of the Jews of northwest Lithuania and the highly-significant role played by Lithuanian Nazi collaborators, and especially national hero Jonas Noreika, who, during the Holocaust, was the liaison between the Nazis and the Lithuanians, and was responsible for the annihilation of many thousands of Jews. After World War II, he was a leader of the local opposition to the Soviets.

The heroes of this movie, created independently by former BBC journalist Michael Kretzmer, are Noreika’s granddaughter, Silvia Foti, and American Litvak Grant Gochin, dozens of whose relatives were murdered in that part of Lithuania and who has unsuccessfully tried to sue the Lithuanian government numerous times to cancel the honors awarded to Noreika.

Silvia Foti’s biography of her grandfather, which began as an attempt to glorify him, ultimately exposed his role in Holocaust crimes, shocking Lithuanian society.

The third film, which is called Baltic Truths, deals with the Holocaust in Latvia and Lithuania, and emphasizes the failure of both Baltic republics to admit the highly-significant role played by local Nazi collaborators in the mass murder of their Jewish communities.

Produced by Eugene Levin, a Soviet-Jewish emigrant from Latvia living in Boston, whose grandfather was the sole survivor of the Latvian shtetl of Akniste, it tells a similar story about his country of birth, as well as about Lithuania.

So far, these films, especially J’Accuse, have won many awards at film festivals all over the world, but have not been widely shown in the countries to whom the messages of the films are directed. Nor has there been any official government response to the harsh accusations. Instead, these countries have launched charm offensives, which are directed at potential Israeli tourists.

LITHUANIA,LATVIA FIGHT HOLOCAUST HISTORY WITH CHARM OFFENSIVE AGAINST ISRAELIS

Thus two weeks ago, a lengthy article was published in the Dyokan weekend magazine of the staunchly-right wing Israeli weekly Makor Rishon by senior correspondent Ariel Shnebel, about his visit to Lithuania and Latvia at the expense of the Lithuanian and Latvian governments.

He was invited to promote the two countries as wonderful destinations for Orthodox tourists (who are the overwhelming majority of the readers of Makor Rishon), due to the numerous sites connected to the lives of leading renowned Orthodox rabbis, such as the Vilna Gaon, Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzenski and Rav Kook, as well as sites of famous yeshivas, such as Slobodka, Panevitch and Telz.

But what about the elephant in the room? Shnebel mentioned to his host, Vilna Deputy Mayor Tomas Gablinas, that Israelis think that the Lithuanians occasionally collaborated too closely with the Nazis, as if this was just an opinion of some and not an established fact.

Gablinas totally ignored it and proceeded, according to Shnebel, to tell his guest about the contemporary efforts of the government to combat antisemitism and their success in changing the name of a street previously named for a Lithuanian political leader who supported Hitler. Ever the polite guest, Shnebel dropped the subject and missed an opportunity to deliver an important message.

More recently, this past Friday, The Jerusalem Post devoted two pages of its Magazine to an interview with Latvian deputy chairman of the Riga City Council, Linda Ozola, who had come to Israel to attend the 17th International Conference on Innovation Crisis Management hosted by the Tel Aviv Municipality.

From the interview, we learned important facts about Latvia, all of which were patently false. First of all, the number of Latvian Jews murdered in the Holocaust was not 25,000, but 67,000, out of the 70,000 who lived in Latvia under the Nazis occupation, among the highest percentages of victims.

And that does not include the more than 30,000 Jews deported to Riga from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, only 4% of whom survived, and the thousands of Jews murdered in Minsk by the notorious Latvian Arajs Kommando murder squad.

According to the article, Latvia did not fight during World War II, a mistake that Ozola claimed would not be repeated in the future. That was not the reality, however, as there were two divisions of Latvian Waffen-SS created in 1943, which fought alongside the Nazis for a victory of the Third Reich, among whose men were former Latvian police who had actively participated in the mass murders of Latvian Jews.

A few months ago, in fact, Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks claimed that those Latvians “are the pride of the Latvian people and the state,” and books praising the Legionnaires are on sale in Riga International Airport. Unfortunately, Ozola was not challenged on any of these facts, or on her assertion that there is no antisemitism in Latvia, or about the rampant Holocaust distortion in Latvia.

Hopefully, the film J’Accuse, which was screened in Israel this past Holocaust Remembrance Day, as well as the other two films, will be shown here again and given wide publicity, to help educate the Israeli public, regarding the truth about what happened in the Holocaust in Lithuania and Latvia.

About the writer:

The writer, Dr. Efraim Zuroff a Holocaust historian, is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the director of its Israel office. His most recent book (with Rūta  Vanagaite) is Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust, published by Rowman & Littlefield.

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