Leyzer Goldman tells us who governed Valkininkai while its Jews were regulated, robbed, assembled, and marched away.

In my previous article, Carts, Sacks, and Certificates, I followed a piece of paper. The administration in Valkininkai issued certificates permitting Lithuanian peasants to take cows from Jewish farmers while those farmers were still alive. The document joined public authority to private gain. It told the recipient that the seizure was permitted and the Jewish owner that the protection of law had ended.

The same testimony forces another question. Who was the public authority behind the certificate? Who governed the town while Jews were forced into labor, marked, robbed, confined, assembled, and taken away?

For five years, while researching and filming Baltic Truth, I learned to ask that question at every site. “Nazi occupation” tells us who conquered the country and created the genocidal system. It does not, by itself, tell us who stood in the municipal office, who delivered the order, who guarded the market square, who entered the Jewish home, or who marched the column. History becomes evasive when command and execution are collapsed into one convenient phrase.

The witness here is Leyzer Goldman. He was born in Valkininkai in 1895, worked as a blacksmith, and lived in the town throughout his life before the war. In December 1947, in the Bad Reichenhall displaced-persons camp in the American occupation zone, he gave his account to Leyb Koniuchowsky. Koniuchowsky recorded it in Yiddish. Goldman reviewed the account, approved it, and signed it.[1]

I insist on the provenance because the accusation of “Soviet propaganda” has become Lithuania’s automatic answer whenever Jewish testimony becomes inconvenient. Goldman was not testifying in a Soviet courtroom. He was not in Lithuanian custody. He was a survivor speaking in a displaced-persons camp, little more than two years after the war. Copies of the testimony were preserved through YIVO and Yad Vashem, and Jonathan Boyarin later translated it into English.[2]

The document is not a polemic. Goldman does not offer a theory of collective guilt. He describes the government he encountered.

After German forces entered Valkininkai, he says, civilian administration passed to Lithuanians from the town and from the Lithuanian interior. Jews were sent to daily labor and beaten there. Their possessions were taken. Jewish workers were expelled from the Jewish-owned paper factory. Jews were required to wear identifying marks. A Jewish committee was created to receive the demands of the........

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