The Gochin-Foti model, and the Lithuanian state that chose fraud

Jews do not believe in inherited guilt. A grandchild does not carry the crimes of a grandfather. Each person answers for what he himself does, and for nothing his blood did before him. No Lithuanian alive today murdered my family, and I have never asked one to atone as if he had. Responsibility belongs to the one who acted.

Reconciliation is a different matter. It does not rest on the absence of guilt. It rests on truth, and it is built for the generations not yet born. What a nation teaches its children about its past decides whether the next generation inherits an honest relationship or a lie dressed as one.

Watch how relations actually run between Jews and the Lithuanian state. Jews who know what happened on Lithuanian soil, and know what the state has done with that history since, keep their distance. Jews who do not know the facts, or do not care to learn them, or do not care about truth at all, get along with official Lithuania without friction. The rupture comes in between. A Jew who did not know, and then discovers how completely the state has lied, watches the goodwill collapse. A relationship built on a false account cannot survive the record. It falls apart like sand in the hand.

That is the exposure the Lithuanian state has chosen to carry. Every honest history, every opened archive, every descendant who finally reads the documents threatens a friendship the state secured by concealment.

There was always another way. One woman has already walked it.

Silvia Foti told the truth.

Silvia is the granddaughter of Jonas Noreika. I descend from Jews murdered in the district he governed. That sentence should have closed the door for good and left only inherited hatred and silence. It did not, because Silvia broke the lie before it could harden into another generation of enmity.

I had written in The Times of Israel about my young cousin Liam, about his family and mine, and about his Aliyah to the Torah in Zurich. Silvia answered with an open letter to Liam. She wrote as the granddaughter of the man whose orders helped empty our family’s world of Jews. She named Jonas Noreika. She named Šiauliai and Papilė. She named Tsile Gochin, the murdered sister of Liam’s great-grandmother Sarah. She accepted that her grandfather bore responsibility for our dead.

That is where reconciliation begins. Not in ceremony, not in embassy language, not in another wreath laid while the state keeps honoring the men who made the wreath necessary. It begins in truth.

Silvia came from the perpetrator’s family and told the truth to the victim’s family. She asked us to excuse nothing and forget nothing. She did not ask a Jewish child to carry Lithuania’s shame in place of the state that earned it. She blessed him instead.

There is no capacity for anger at Silvia. The relationship between us could have been cold, or nonexistent, or warm. She bears no guilt for what her grandfather did. What she has done is remarkable in the history of the perpetrator class. She reached out, told the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)