I Have Seen This Before (Part 1)

The Soviet Union brutally occupied Latvia. I was born under Soviet rule and learned early what that meant: a kleptocratic dictatorship that controlled speech, corrupted truth, and punished dissent. The state decided what could be said about the past and penalized anyone who said otherwise. Thanks to my parents, I left that system in 1989, and I spent the next thirty-five years believing I would never have to watch a European government revert to Soviet methods.

In January 2015, Birutė Burauskaitė, then the Director General of Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, appeared on Lithuanian national television to discuss Antanas Baltušis-Žvejys. He had served as Chief of Police in Pilviškės in 1941, when Lithuanian neighbors murdered the town’s Jews. He was subsequently promoted to command the 3rd Company of the 252nd Lithuanian Police Battalion. His unit commanded the external guard at Majdanek.

Majdanek was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that between 80,000 and 110,000 human beings were murdered there. Approximately 59,000 were Jews. The camp contained gas chambers. It contained a crematorium. It contained mass shooting operations and slave labor units. The stench of burning human remains was so pervasive that civilians in Lublin complained about it openly.

When Burauskaitė was asked on national television about Baltušis-Žvejys’s service at this camp, her response—broadcast to the Lithuanian public in her official capacity as head of the state’s Holocaust research institution—was: “Visą kas yra pasakos ir pritempimas.”

“It is all simply tales and stretching the facts.”

I need every reader to stop and absorb what that means. The Director General of Lithuania’s state historical institution—nominated by the Prime Minister, confirmed by the Seimas, holding a statutory mandate to produce the official historical conclusions of the Republic of Lithuania—went on national television and told the country that a death camp where Jews were gassed, shot, starved, and burned was “tales.”

She was not speaking as a private citizen sharing an opinion over coffee. She was the legal voice of the Lithuanian state on Holocaust history. Her conclusions carried the authority of law. When the Genocide Centre produces a historical finding, that finding can be cited in criminal proceedings. Citizens can be prosecuted for contradicting it. That is not academic interpretation. That is........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)