An Outrage! Professor David Golan

The proverb “Time is a healer of wounds,” certainly makes sense and is certainly true in some respects. This is not the case, however, where we are concerned.

More than sixty years have passed since the dark days of the horrendous slaughter of Lithuanian Jews by their longstanding neighbors – the Lithuanians. Ninety four out of every hundred Lithuanian Jews – men, women and children, young and old – were brutally murdered by their own neighbors on Lithuanian soil, with their naked bodies (they were all forced to strip before being killed) dumped in hundreds of pits and fields throughout the country. Within less than three months of continuous intensive mass murder, only 20% of the Jewish community remained, most of whom were exploited as slave labor before they were finally murdered.

The attainment of Lithuanian independence in 1991 aroused hope among us for a measure of justice on the part of the newly established state authorities. All of those who murdered, raped, tortured and robbed were of Lithuanian stock. They also looted the property and assets, both communal and private, of their victims after they murdered them.

Men and institutions in search of the murderers identified many thousands of killers and appealed to the Lithuanian authorities to prosecute them. No such action was ever taken. In fact, the authorities have gone to great lengths to falsify the evidence. To facilitate this whitewash and exonerate their own compatriots, they have reinvented “historical circumstances” to suit their own convenience. Moreover, one of the first laws enacted by the independent Lithuanian parliament in 1991 was the “Rehabilitation Law,” which granted an official pardon to 55,000 individuals originally tried and convicted by Soviet courts. Thousands of these individuals participated in the mass murder of Jews.

The Lithuanian authorities tenaciously prefer to pay lip service to the Western world, rather than face the truth, which would have required them to bring criminal charges against their own errant compatriots and restore unequivocally citizenship to Holocaust survivors. They also enacted the “Citizenship Law,” which restricted eligibility for Lithuanian citizenship to individuals of ethnic Lithuanian origin (i.e. non Jews). This represented an attempt to legally disenfranchise the remnants of Lithuanian Jewry who would be unable to lay title of any of the property looted during the Holocaust, due to the passing into law of the “Restitution of Property” Law, which limited the right to reclaim property to Lithuanian citizens only!

With Lithuania now a fully fledged member of NATO and other European community institutions, this would be an appropriate moment for men of conscience to condemn such corrupt policies and call the Lithuanians to order.