On a public Facebook thread, a Lithuanian citizen named Saulius Gudas wrote: “O will be for him, and so will A. Fridman—to the LT court. I don’t think it will be possible to hide it like Nachman Dušansky…”

Gudas was not making a prediction. He was drawing a line of continuity—and he drew it approvingly. He did not compare Fridman to any non-Jewish defendant. He compared him to the last Jew Lithuania selected for prosecution. He said the quiet part out loud.

I recognized the logic immediately. I spent sixteen years inside the Soviet system. When a state chooses one person from a category of comparable actors and makes an example of that person, we did not call it justice in Riga. We called it messaging.

Lithuania has done this before. After independence, it investigated Soviet-era repressions. Among those involved in comparable structures and conduct, it selected one man for special symbolic attention: Nachman Dushansky. As Dr. Efraim Zuroff documented, twenty-five Lithuanian officers of equal or higher rank who served with Dushansky were not even investigated. The distinguishing variable was not rank, not uniqueness of alleged conduct, and not evidentiary clarity. It was Jewishness.

Consider the biography Lithuania chose to prosecute. Dushansky’s father was murdered by Lithuanian police during the Holocaust. His mother was murdered at Majdanek, a camp guarded by Lithuanians. His siblings—Rochel, Peisach, and Yitzhak—were murdered. The Lithuanian state exterminated his family and then, decades later, chose him alone from among his non-Jewish peers for prosecution.

Israel took the extraordinary step of refusing Lithuania’s request for judicial assistance because it suspected the charges were motivated by antisemitism. Zuroff described the request as........

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