There is a word that closes files in Lithuania.

Attach it to a document and the document is contaminated. Attach it to a witness and the witness becomes an agent. Attach it to a book and the book becomes propaganda. The allegation does not have to be answered, because the origin of the evidence has answered it.

This is not source criticism. It is a conversion mechanism, and it belongs to the same machinery I have described before, in which evidence enters Lithuanian institutions as documentation and exits as exoneration.

I was born in Riga. I know what Soviet institutional architecture looks like from the inside, and I know what its successor looks like when it keeps the furniture.

Concede the Politicization

Begin by conceding everything the Lithuanian state wants conceded. Soviet historiography was politicized, and the politicization is not hidden. It sits in the front matter of the books. I am not defending these books. I am auditing them.

Kauno getas ir jo kovotojai, published in Vilnius in 1969, opens by attributing the Kaunas ghetto underground to the leadership of the Lithuanian Communist Party, presents the resistance as an expression of proletarian internationalism, and denounces books published in the West as falsifications written from bourgeois nationalist positions.

The document collection Masinės žudynės Lietuvoje 1941–1944 repeatedly subsumes murdered Jews into peaceful Soviet citizens and Soviet activists. Mordechai Kurganovas opens his Ninth Fort memoir by crediting his survival to the will of the Soviet people under Party leadership.

Be precise about what those books do, because precision is the whole argument. They subsume Jewish victims into a Soviet category. They do not conceal that the perpetrators were Lithuanian: Kauno getas ir jo kovotojai names lietuviškieji buržuaziniai nacionalistai, Lithuanian bourgeois nationalists, and describes the white-armband formations directly. What it does is recategorize them, dissolving Lithuanians into a class enemy acting under German direction. Two operations, then. Subsume the victim. Recategorize the perpetrator. Both will return.

The survivors said so first. Dimitri Gelpern, a Kaunas ghetto prisoner and a leader of its underground, told an international conference in Vilnius in 1993 that what had been published under Soviet rule had necessarily undergone political distortion. Alex Faitelson, a Ninth Fort prisoner who escaped in December 1943 from the detail forced to burn the corpses, reduced the demand of socialist realism to a formula: ten percent of truth and ninety percent as it must be.

Note what neither man concluded. Neither said the books were worthless. Both said the books required work.

What Those Same Books Contain

Meir Yellin, who published in Lithuanian as Mejeris Eglinis-Elinas, explained where his material came from. Behind the wire of the Kaunas ghetto he kept notes on what he and others experienced, sometimes in coded allusions for reasons of conspiracy, recording real incidents and real names. Part of the notes burned when the Germans torched the ghetto. From what survived he built the book.

He also distinguished. He records that the poet Kazys Binkis, his wife Sofija and their daughters turned their home into a refuge, sheltering Jews, sharing food, finding medicine and hiding places, and that as the terror continued more Lithuanians helped. A source that calls one Lithuanian a rescuer and another a killer is not producing ethnic denunciation. It is describing conduct, and conduct can be checked.

Check one. In 1963 Yellin names a murdered man who left an inscription in his own blood: Akiva Puchertas, a locksmith at the Drobė factory. The 1969 history names him again and adds that his family was murdered in front of him. The 1970 book gives Yellin’s first-person account of seeing the marks. Faitelson later criticized the embellishment that grew around the famous photograph,........

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