In Valkininkai, the Jews were robbed before they were murdered, and the theft was carried out on official paper.

I was born in Riga. I grew up under Soviet rule. I left in 1989. For five years I researched and filmed the Baltic Holocaust for my documentary Baltic Truth. I have stood in the killing fields of Latvia and Lithuania. I have read survivor testimony in four languages. And because I was raised inside a state that moved property by decree, that authorized a seizure with a stamp and called it law, I recognize the document at the center of the Valkininkai record on sight. It is a certificate. It permits a man to take his neighbor’s cow. It was issued by the town administration while the cow’s owner was still alive.

The witness is Leyzer Goldman. He was a blacksmith, born in Valkininkai in 1895, resident there his whole life before the war. In December 1947, in the Bad Reichenhall displaced-persons camp, he gave his account to Leyb Koniuchowsky, who was recording the testimony of the few Lithuanian Jews who had survived to speak. Goldman reviewed it, approved it, and signed it. Copies were preserved through YIVO and Yad Vashem.[1] I make the provenance explicit because Lithuania’s defenders reach for the same reflex every time a Jew names a Lithuanian killer: Soviet propaganda. I know what Soviet propaganda is. I grew up reading it. A confession extracted in a Soviet courtroom and a testimony signed by a free man in a displaced-persons camp in the American zone are not the same kind of document, and no one who has handled both can pretend otherwise. Goldman’s account is a record. It was not manufactured. It was preserved.

Goldman makes the sequence impossible to sanitize. After the Lithuanian administration took over civilian authority in the town, Jews were forced to labor, beaten, humiliated, and robbed. A Jewish committee was made responsible for meeting the administration’s demands. One month after the Germans arrived, Jews had to surrender their cattle to the town administration. They also had to give up bicycles and radios. The same happened in the Jewish farming villages. Jewish farmers were left without cows and without horses.[2]

Then came the part the modern Lithuanian state cannot fold into “tragedy.” Near Selo, also called Degsnės, a village had burned during the German advance. Its peasants moved in among the Jewish farmers of Selo. They did not arrive empty-handed. They arrived with certificates from the town administration permitting them to take cows from the Jews. Goldman’s words belong in the indictment of Lithuania’s memory: they inherited everything while the Jews were still alive.[3]

Read the verb again. You inherit from the dead. To inherit from a living man is impossible — unless the paperwork has already counted him among the dead. Goldman’s........

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