Lithuania wants the Holocaust to be remembered as something done to Jews by a small number of criminals under German direction. The witness record says something much worse. It says the crime was not only committed. It was watched. It was watched in public, enjoyed in public, and converted into material gain in public as Jewish property was plundered while its owners were being degraded and destroyed.

That is not only what Jewish survivors said. It is also what Father Patrick Desbois found across the eastern killing fields: the Holocaust was carried out in public, with villages watching. The Lithuanian testimonies fit that pattern with brutal precision. They do not describe secrecy. They describe spectators, beneficiaries, and onlookers who treated the degradation of Jews as entertainment, opportunity, social instruction, and communal life.

As I have documented in 121 Witnesses Lithuania Cannot Prosecute, the foreword to The Lithuanian Slaughter of its Jews states plainly that the slaughter was widely known. Townsfolk saw Jews being confined, tortured, abused, and taken away. Peasants with wagons helped transport Jews and their property. Many local people appropriated or “inherited” Jewish homes, clothing, money, and goods after their owners had been marked for destruction. The witnesses do not describe an isolated conspiracy hidden from society. They describe a social field in which humiliation, robbery, and murder were encouraged, visible, and intelligible to the surrounding population.

Take Malke Gilis in Telzh. She testified that when Jews were driven through the streets, local Lithuanians stood on the sidewalks “enjoying themselves immensely,” throwing stones, barbed wire, and wood at them. Then came the Demon’s Dance. Jewish men were forced into a circle while Lithuanians with spiked sticks and whips beat them without exception. The men had to run, fall, rise, and run again under blows until some of the elderly collapsed and died. Malke Gilis says women and men from the city came to watch the velniu šokis, the “Demon’s Dance,” and that Lithuanians from town came running to enjoy themselves and applauded.

That is not passive presence. It is spectatorship as endorsement, agreement, celebration, and promotion. Women and men did not stumble upon the Demon’s Dance by accident. They came running. They applauded. And when a society’s civilian population — not its soldiers, not its officials, not its occupation administrators, but its ordinary townspeople — runs toward the public torture of its neighbors and applauds, the word “bystander” becomes a lie. There were no bystanders. There were participants at varying distances from the killing. The woman who applauded endorsed the beating. The man who “inherited” the house financed the next one. The teenager who demanded a Jewish child’s baby carriage at gunpoint was already fully socialized into the project. Lithuania’s post-independence narrative asks the world to believe that a nation of secret rescuers was somehow forced, against its nature and its will, into participation by a foreign occupier. The testimony record does not describe a nation of reluctant participants. It describes a civilian society in which the degradation of Jews was public entertainment, the theft of Jewish property was a community benefit, and the murder of Jewish neighbors was so normalized that peasants traveled from surrounding villages specifically to watch and enjoy it. That is not occupation. That is culture.

The pattern was not limited to Telzh. In Marcinkonis, armed Lithuanians calling themselves partisans — as documented in The Partisans Lithuania Celebrates — forced four Orthodox Jews to drive a pig through the streets while townspeople applauded “as at a circus.” The next day, the partisans dipped portraits in toilets, smeared them with filth, and forced Jewish youths to gouge out the eyes and lick the dirt from them. For several weeks, peasants from surrounding villages came into town specifically to “enjoy” themselves watching the humiliation of the Jews. This was not a crime hidden from society. It was public theater.

The same social degradation appears in Biržai. My aunt, Sheyne Beder, testified that Jews at forced labor were beaten with sticks and whips and “sadistically tormented and harassed.” She described six Jewish girls forced to clean toilets with their bare hands; when they asked for rags, they were made to remove their underwear and use those instead. Sheyne recorded that Miriam Zelkovitz, sixteen years old, had her head dipped into a toilet bowl and flushed while the Lithuanian murderers “doubled over with laughter.”

This is not only murder. It is a culture of humiliation in which cruelty becomes amusement — and that culture was not confined to the men holding the weapons. It was present in the women who came to watch, the men who applauded, the teenagers who demanded baby carriages at gunpoint, the peasants who traveled to enjoy the spectacle, and the neighbors who moved into empty houses before the bodies were cold. Cruelty of this kind — public, celebrated, multigenerational, and profitable — is not a feature of foreign occupation. It is a feature of a society that had already decided, before the first shot was fired, what its Jewish neighbors were worth.

Then came the “inheritance.” The transfer of Jewish property to Lithuanian hands is documented across the testimony record, as I have detailed in Lithuania’s Evasion Script. In Biržai, Sheyne Beder testified that when she returned, a Lithuanian peasant had moved into her family’s house and had “also inherited everything” belonging to her parents.

This is where the biblical question becomes unavoidable: “Have you murdered, and also taken possession?” Lithuania was, and remains, a deeply Catholic society. How did so many reconcile churchgoing, piety, sacraments, and Marian devotion with the murder of Jewish neighbors and the cheerful transfer of their homes, furniture, clothing, savings, and businesses into Lithuanian hands? What catechism allowed murder followed by inheritance? What confession absolved theft sealed by blood?

Lithuania’s institutional response to this record is to talk about rescuers. As Eugene Levin has documented, Lithuania’s January 2026 “Action Plan” assigns operational authority over Holocaust memory to the very institution that has spent decades laundering perpetrator histories — and its entire program directs attention toward rescuers as its centerpiece. The arithmetic exposes the strategy. Only 0.04% of Lithuanians are documented as having rescued Jews, which leaves 99.96% either as perpetrators, enthusiastic bystanders, or individuals with no substantiated claim to rescue. Lithuania wants the world to look at the 0.04% and draw conclusions about the nation. The testimony record describes the 99.96%. The entire institutional machinery of post-independence Lithuania — the ceremonies, the action plans, the rescuer commemorations, the criminal prosecutions of Jews who raise inconvenient questions — exists to ensure that the 99.96% is never the subject of the conversation.

It is reprehensible to deny or minimize Soviet crimes, Nazi crimes, or Lithuanian crimes — I reject all three. This is why the Fridman case is so revealing. Lithuania has chosen to criminally pursue one Jewish citizen over a Facebook post. Yet the witness record describes not only killers, but spectators, laughers, inheritors, transporters, and neighbors who understood perfectly well that Jews were being degraded, dispossessed, and destroyed. One Jew is prosecuted now for words. The people who watched the torture, applauded the humiliation, and moved into the empty homes were never placed under comparable moral scrutiny.

May 9, 1945 is the date Nazi Germany was defeated. For the Jews of Lithuania — 96.4% of whom did not survive to see it — that date marks the termination of the machinery that was murdering them. Every person on earth who opposed the murder of Jews should be able to say, without reservation, that May 9, 1945 was a day worth celebrating. A society that watched Jews being marched to killing pits, applauded their humiliation, and moved into their homes while their bodies were still warm has no standing to treat that date with ambivalence. Ambivalence about the defeat of Nazism, in a country where 96.4% of Jews were murdered with local participation, is not a political position. It is a disclosure. It discloses where sympathy resided then, and where it resides now.

And that makes the presumed innocence of Ramanauskas a theoretical absurdity. He lived and acted in a field saturated with persecution, murder, and their normalization. As I argued in Lithuania’s Jedwabne parallel, in such a setting silence is not neutrality, lack of protest is not innocence, and non-resistance to genocide is itself disqualifying. This is where Silvia Foti’s account in Storm in the Land of Rain: A Mother’s Dying Wish Becomes Her Daughter’s Nightmare becomes so important. When she writes that Noreika attended a celebration shortly after half of Plungė had been murdered, she is describing the environment Lithuania later converted into patriotic memory.

Those 924 recognized rescuers were not saving Jews from Nazis alone. In many cases they were saving Jews from other Lithuanians — from partisans, guards, neighbors, robbers, spectators, beneficiaries, and collaborators who saw no moral impediment in murdering and “inheriting.” A nation of secret rescuers does not produce the Demon’s Dance. It does not fill its town squares with applauding crowds. The rescuers were exceptional precisely because the surrounding society was so often hostile, predatory, or complicit. The record makes that undeniable.

The testimonies describe a society in which Jews were humiliated, abused, watched, robbed, and replaced in public. They make any claim of broad national innocence impossible. If Lithuania commemorates rescuers but will not speak honestly about the spectators, it is not informing — it is curating. If it prosecutes a Jew for speech while refusing to confront the society that laughed, watched, inherited, and benefited, it is not remembering — it is managing. That is the management of exposure. And it has been designed, from the beginning, not to inform — but to deceive.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)