Skip to content

Lithuanian Jews: Difficult questions for University College, simple answers from history.

By EFRAIM ZUROFF [The Jewish Chronicle] – A financially-strapped small Eastern European country is spending tens of thousands of pounds to sponsor an extraordinarily large number of political and cultural events – lectures, concerts, exhibitions and films – in London next week. Why? That is the obvious question for the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, several Lithuanian cultural institutions, and local UK partners.

Under the heading, No Simple Stories; Jewish-Lithuanian relationships: facing difficult questions, the events are projected as an honest attempt to address the ostensibly complex history of Lithuania’s once very large Jewish community, which was irreparably decimated during the Holocaust – 96.4 per cent of the 220,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania under the Nazi occupation were slaughtered, with the help of a large number of local collaborators.

A closer look at the themes of the events and the identity of the participants in the international colloquium slated for University College this weekend, raises serious doubts as to the real intentions of the Lithuanian sponsors.

According to the accompanying literature, the organisers seek to present a more nuanced version of the history of the Shoah in Lithuania, which they claim has been misrepresented by the false narratives created by Jewish survivors on the one hand and Soviet historiography on the other. Thus, while the latter hid the identity of the Nazis’ Jewish victims, the former overemphasised the significance of the role played by local Lithuanian collaborators.

The truth is, however, that the history of the Shoah in Lithuania is depressingly simple. While the guilt of the German and Austrian Nazis in launching the Final Solution all over Europe and creating the circumstances in which it was carried out in the Baltics is absolutely unequivocal, it was the extensive and zealous involvement of all strata of Lithuanian society in the mass murders that spawned the near-totality of the destruction.

Continued at The Jewish Chronicle | More Chronicle & Notices.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

2 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
David Schonberg
David Schonberg
13 years ago

The attempts of the Lithuanian authorities to rewrite history & hide the terrible complicity of Lithuanian police and civilians in large scale murders of Jews throughout Lithuania in the holocaust period is SCANDALOUS.

We have to be on our guard at these attempts to rewrite history & oppose them.

Dovid Katz
13 years ago

As a proud and loyal alumnus of UCL, I have been deeply pained by these events, but have done my best to treat them with the same brush as all other outreaches of the recent Baltic campaign to ‘change’ WWII history that we report on, on my website, http://www.DefendingHistory.com, which I cordially invite your readers to come and visit. Thank you.

2
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x