This was pointed out 3 years ago. See the article in the Jerusalem Post.
https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Will-Lithuania-continue-to-honor-Nazi-coll...
It is a shame that it was all ignored and only elicited interest when Mr. Noreika's granddaughter wrote about it.
He was a Nazi collaborator
“Every nation has to have its heroes. I understand Lithuanians on this. But how can we have heroes like Noreika?” said Pinchos Fridberg, 80, a retired professor and the only Jew left in Vilnius who was born in the city before the Nazis invaded in 1941."
The Lithuanians seem to have other considerations.
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This story pales in comparison with that of Mongolia. They consider Genghis Khan to be a national hero, a person to be highly admired. Statues of him are all over Mongolia. A guy who butchered an estimated 20 million Chinese during the later part of the 12th and early 13th century is admired as a hero by today's Mongo populations says enough about the insanity of human beings. Those 20 million were Chinese, countless more millions were slaughtered by him and his offspring, stretching to Europe. By today's standards it would be about 100 million killed.
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I wonder if there is a way to recognize both - it is history, like it or not - with more information on any memorial. If we do not want to repeat history we must remember it.
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My mother was born in Vilnius and always told my brothers and I how wonderful her life was. Her father had a bookstore and the Jewish people had good lives there. My Mother left Vilnius when she was about 18 years old, well before the Nazis destroyed Jewish life there. She had two older sisters who were already in America. Her mother had died when she was younger and she became the woman of the house. Her sisters were able to have their father come to America legally but my Mother had to go to Canada and from there she came to America illegally. She eventually married my father and had a wonderful life but she was not a legal American until she was much older when the courts gave this woman American citizenship.
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Ms Foti's courage in confronting her own ancestor's anti-Semitism is commendable. Seven of my grandmother's sisters and brothers, and their families, were murdered by Lithuanian Nazi collaborators in Vilna, where my family had lived for 200 years. Lithuania has an ongoing problem mourning its victimization by Russia while confronting its own collaboration with Nazis. One of my grandmother's brothers and one of her nieces escaped being murdered with the rest of the family by going to Russia to work. Lithuania paints Jews as Russian collaborators and uses this as justification for their murder by Lithuanian "patriots". In my family's case they're right, but working with the Russians was the only way to escape murder by one's Lithuanian neighbors.
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I attended a Lithuanian speaking elementary school for my first eight grades, two of them during WW2. Heard nothing about the Nazi occupation, but incessant criticism of the Soviets. Why my family sent my sister and I there is a mystery that was accepted and one we never thought to solve.
Aside from developing a facility with language, I don't think it helped either of us and if anything tended to isolate us from other kids to the extent we both were to a large degree lost throughout our high school years. Although never forgotten, odd to have the memories stirred.
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Good the two countries are reconciling
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"What shocked her, however, was not Ms. Foti’s discovery that her grandfather was complicit in the Holocaust — that was not really news to locals — but that a member of a patriotic émigré family had gone public and turned a private family matter into a public national shame."
When your daughter gets pregnant out of wedlock, that's a "private family matter." Working with an invading nation to exterminate all the Jews in your country is NOT a "private family matter."
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Former President Obama challenged the world the other day by asking: How hard can it be to say that Nazis are bad
What’s troubling is that people use moral relativism to justify aggrieved slights With cosmic certainty, Nazism is always bad.
So, the question is: why haven’t people denounced Steven Miller’s anti asylum seeker policy in the Southern US bodrder that has racialized asylum seekers, separated children from their parents, caged the children, and placed adults in concentration camps? And, even if people are trying to enter the country for economic reasons, the question remains why the acquiescence and silence to Steven Miller’s perverse policy. Human abuse and the suffering it causes is not relative.
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@Sam People HAVE denounced Steven Miller's abhorrent anti-immigration stance. Just as one example, read "Stephen Miller is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I'm His Uncle," written by Dr. David S. Glosser, published by Politico on August 13, 2018.
However, while the adults you mention have been subject to despicable policies, not the least of which is separation from their children, they are not in concentration camp. Just ask the descendants of those who lived in what is now Namibia, under German colonial occupation in the early 1900s:
"In terms of mortality statistics, the Namibian camps were horrific. An official report on the camps in 1908 described the mortality rate as 45,2% of all prisoners held in the five camps. ....
Rations were minimal, consisting of a daily allowance of a handful of uncooked rice, some salt and water. Rice was an unfamiliar foodstuff to most, and the uncommon diet was the cause of many deaths.
Disease was uncontrolled. An almost total lack of medical attention, unhygienic living quarters, insufficient clothing and a high concentration of people meant that diseases such as typhoid spread rapidly.
Beatings and maltreatment were also part of life in the camps - the sjambok was often swung over the backs of prisoners who were forced to work."
(Quoting from Raceandhistory.com, November 16, 2001)
When someone uses loaded words like "concentration camp" hyperbolically, it diminishes the persuasiveness of their argument.
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About ten years ago, I taught a summer course at a university in Kaunas, Lithuania. During my off time, I wanted to go visit the “Ninth Fort,” which was used by the Nazis as a concentration camp.
I hired a guide, but she wasn’t thrilled about going to the Fort. It turned out to be at least in part a turf thing – the fort has its own guides and the town guides aren’t supposed to work out there. But I also suspected from several conversations that Lithuanians were ambivalent about the fort and what it represents.
The ambivalence might have been attributable to some or all of the following: (1) they were still in a Soviet mindset where they thought they could control foreigners’ images of Lithuania by showing outsiders only the good things about their country, or (2) they were ashamed of what happened there right in the midst of their city, or (3) they wanted to move on and focus on other things or, sadly, and inescapably, (4) they thought that what happened there wasn’t an entirely terrible thing.
Antisemitism is a very resilient form of hatred. Even, perhaps especially, in a country with a rich Jewish heritage.
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Today is the second day of Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year). Why did the NY Times choose this date to publish this story? I don't think it is a coincidence.
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Compare Silvia Foti to Vitas Gerulaitis. His anti-Semitic remarks are googlable and his grandfather was a Lithuanian Nazi too. I wasn't exactly sad when he died.
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Any discussion of the tragedy of the Holocaust in Lithuania cannot be separated from the tensions between various ethnic and religious communities shaped by the Soviet occupation, and especially, the brutal deportation campaign perpetrated by Soviet NKVD in June 1941. There is no secret that Jews were broadly accused of collaborating with the Soviet occupiers, which supposed to justify the “reprisal” by the local population resulting in mass murder of their Jewish neighbors. However, what is continually ignored by the advocates of the “soviet genocide” being the primary historical record of the WWII in Lithuania, is that a disproportionally large part of the arrested and deported Lithuanians right before Nazi invasion were Jewish. According to the studies by Dove Levin, former professor in the Jerusalem University, almost 30% of Lithuanians deported from the Kaunas region on June 15, 1941, were Jewish. This fact is also ignored by the defenders of the Holocaust legacy in Lithuania, arguing that any comparison between Nazism and Communism is equal to the Holocaust denial. But. to me, and likewise to thousands of Litvaks (as Jews of Lithuania prefer to be called), the beginning of extermination of Lithuanian Jews, was started by the Soviet NKVD, right before Nazis' occupation. My grandfather was arrested separately from the rest of his family and was sent to die in one of the GULAG’s camp in northern Russia.
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@Gershon The usual Soviet take-over plan involved deporting or executing the professional, military officer and intelligentsia classes of a country. Witness the execution of hundreds of Polish Army officers at Katyn. One has to wonder what the countries occupied by the Soviets would be like today if that occupation had not happened. Music, art, science, law, politics, medicine, etc., set back decades if not centuries. The same cost is being paid in those countries where the Holocaust took place.
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This is a paradox in such countries. Many anti-communist resistors were/are Nazis. This is true throughout eastern Europe. As countries like Hungary and Poland return to fascism, it will be more and more acceptable to cerebrate the contributions of past fascists to the nation. History can be a female dog sometimes.
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Check the Hungarian movie “1945”
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"the tens of thousands who took to the forests at the end of World War II in a doomed fight against rule from Moscow."
Does this not raise the obvious question: why were they not already in the forests to fight the Nazis? Soviet propaganda attempted to identify the anti-Communism of the nationalist resistance movements with fascism, and this was not entirely without basis. Even more clearly, however, the nationalist ideology in these countries often defined the nation in religious-ethnic terms, and identified Communism, and thus the Soviets, with Jews.
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“We have all heard things about what Noreika did during the war,” Ms. Tamosiuniene said. “He obviously took the wrong path. But his granddaughter should have kept quiet. Every family has its ugly things, but they don’t talk about them. It is better to stay silent.” Really??? that ANYONE thinks it's better to cover up and NOT DISCUSS outright MURDER is pathetic! Ms. Tamosiuniene: YOU should be ASHAMED!
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The similarity of this situation to the one in the U.S. over confederate monuments is striking. The good work being done by Bryan Stevenson and others to mark the sites of every known lynching in this country is exemplary, and should be followed throughout eastern Europe with the numbers and if possible names of the victims at each site. Liberation from the Russians in eastern Europe by the nazis during World War II was often followed by extermination of local Jews, in fulfillment of generations of simmering anti-semitism. The Germans provided cover for the most massive pogroms ever in the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, and Byelorussia, etc. Followed of course by widespread theft of Jewish-owned homes and businesses, long coveted but previously unattainable. And some of the Jews who returned to their ancestral communities after the war were promptly murdered.
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Silvia Foti, thank you so much!
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Central Europe has always been a stew-pot of fascism and anti-semitism. Except for a brief hiatus, they can now march back to their true roots of hatred.
Witness Hungary, Poland, the list expands on a daily basis.
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@george eliot I believe that exceptions exist, e.g., the Serbs and the Czechs. I may be mistaken. All my Serbian friends, despite being quite nationalistic, were explicitly pro-Semitic.
@PaulN No...the exception exists with the Albanians; none of its Jewish population was killed during the Holocaust. The Nazi capital in eastern Europe was in Prague. You should read Jiri Weil's novel, "Mendelssohn Is On the Roof." When the Germans march in and take over the city, workers are told to take down the statue of among three (or bust..I don't recall) that of Felix Mendelssohn from the roof of the Concertebrauw. The workers didn't know who was whom, so they picked the one with the biggest nose: Richard Wagner. As for anyone in Central/Eastern Europe being "pro-Semitic," I'd more than likely limit them to Jews and Muslims.
Alan, just a geographical observation: Albania is not in Central Europe.
It appears that the anti Russian sentiments in the Baltics is on par with that here in the US. Read the NYT for further clarification
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There is a difference. We, Americans, probably have never seen a live Russian (except for maybe Barishnikov) whereas the Baltic nations are not only familiar with them but, in fact, much of their population is ethnic Russian.
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History tells us that the Lithuanians were the most rabid of anti-semites and were delighted to help the Nazis exterminate their Jews....and did so most effectively.
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Why am I reading so many stories about the shock of the Lithuanian Nazi collaborator, Germans rioting against immigrants, the rise of the Polish right and the world not understanding that anti-semitism in this part of the world never died? As it is here with guys carrying tiki torches, chanting "Jews will not replace us" and a president assuring us that there were "good people" in that march, fascism is on the rise in Europe and especially in it's most comfortable homes, Germany and its neighbors to the east.
Captain Renault would not be shocked.
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My birth mother was Lithuanian by marriage. I was adopted by Americans when she was in Austria as a displaced widow of a Lithuanian who was killed fighting the Russians. Being adopted is complicated, and until a younger half-sister located me, and I put the timeline together (along with a photo of the grave of my mother's husband with a swastika on it), I had forgotten that the Russians were our allies at the time. We all carry some of the guilt of past travesties in our genes. Through ancestry, I have found that my great grandmother was Jewish, which makes it even sadder. Until we look into the details of our histories, it is very likely that we have learned nothing, and that leaves the future open to repeating history. I see it in our country, Sweden and yes, even Germany, with the rise of "White Nationalists" -- a mere euphemism for NAZI. I congratulate every person who can recognize and embrace the failings of our forefathers and hope that we learn that we don't want to fall back into that mindset.
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My great-grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, just next door to Lithuania. The killers were locals, encouraged in their antisemitism by the Nazis and enticed by the loot they could get after killing their neighbors.
I think the monuments to Jonas Noreika should stay where they are. However, they should be complemented by a memorial to the Holocaust victims and an exhibit acknowledging local collaboration with the Nazis in the murders, including prominently that of Mr. Noreika.
One cannot do simple math here where heroic deeds are cancelled out by crimes, and the other way around. History is full of contradictions and complexities. Both good and bad need to be acknowledged in order to move forward.
I have met the current residents living in my great-grandparents' family home. The house is run-down, but still has many artifacts from before WWII. We did not discuss what our ancestors did or didn't do. We did not need to. The people were kind to let me in and contemplate silently, and I am thankful for that.
I salute and thank Ms. Foti for her work and contribution to the maturity of the Lithuanian nation.
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Thank you for covering this complex story. Too few people are aware of the terrible history of occupation and mass murder in the Baltic region.
As a Latvian-American (my great-grandmother was one of the hundreds of thousands send by the KGB to the Gulag in Siberia). I do however take some issue with the stance of the author especially in regard to the assertion that one was a "far greater crime" than another. At the end of the day hundreds of thousands of people died both at the hands of Stalin and Hitler. Do we really need to say one is less bad?
The author's assessment is based on sketchy (and unsourced) statistics. History is messy and wartime accounting is unreliable. In the case of Latvia, the Soviets did no research on the number of Jews killed during the holocaust, and the Soviet propaganda machine is notorious for shaping history in ways that play in their favor. All this is to say that I question some of the numbers provided in the article. There is substantial difference from those documented by the Museum of the Occupation in Latvia which can be found here: (http://www.mfa.gov.lv/en/policy/information-on-the-history-of-latvia/bri...
Fair enough to state that Noreika is no hero, he certainly is not, and his continued celebration by the Lithuanians is problematic, but must you diminish the crimes of the Kremlin and the suffering of the Baltic people to make your point?
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@kkrisjanis
"Do we really need to say one is less bad?"
History judges genocide as a more serious crime than mass murder.
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@kkrisjanis Comparing Stalin and Hitler with sheer numbers is not fair. Although tens of millions died because of both of them, Hitler (and Germany) beat Stalin (and the Russians) by millions when it comes to death by direct murder (as opposed to death by starvation or slave labor camp conditions, and such).
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Nazis identifying one group of people for extermination as their Final Solution, pouring extravagant sadistic means and methods to savor in this accomplishment, with the eager salivating locals greedily and personally grabbing up Jews, beating them to death, shooting and killing an entire population, including those who survived these ghastly massacres, only to return to more individual murder, so perpetrators can enjoy their looted and stolen properties, than the Soviets punishing Nazi collaborators who were trying to help the Nazis take over Russia. One group is aiding in the systematic extermination of a people, the Soviet’s were rounding up anti communists and Nazi collaborators out to destroy them. As the article states, what this and other Ukrainians did was much further wrong. One can not deny or use national pride to hide past inhumane egregious sins!
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Some similarity to the confederate monuments in the U.S. There is something to be said about understanding a way of life (plantations here and anti-communism there) but the extreme immoral/criminal behavior cannot be ignored. History, rather than politics, should govern our understanding.
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I applaud the granddaughter for her courage to research & write the history of her grandfather. Keeping the secrets of the past does nothing to help the present generation from learning how to not repeat these horrific crimes.
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