A society morally reckons with atrocity when it does more than condemn a single act of violence — when it asks what prejudices, benefits, silences, and evasions made that violence possible and why they persisted after the war.

Lithuania has never done that.

It has condemned Nazism in the abstract. It has commemorated Jewish death in ritualized form. It has used the approved vocabulary of remembrance. But it has not asked what made the annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry possible in the first place. It has not asked who benefited. It has not asked why the erasure continued after the Germans were gone. And it has not asked why, after independence, the state chose not reckoning but management.

The first evasion is chronological. Lithuania’s preferred story begins with German occupation, as if anti-Jewish destruction arrived fully formed from Berlin. But anti-Jewish hostility existed before the Nazi invasion, intensified in the transition, and in place after place, local actors moved against Jews before German control was consolidated. The Koniuchowsky testimony collection — 569 pages, 121 signed survivor accounts — documents this across dozens of towns: Lithuanian neighbors turned on Jewish neighbors, seized property, denounced families, and participated in killings that preceded formal German orders. A society that is only coerced does not require local initiative. Lithuania had local initiative.

The second evasion is moral. Lithuania prefers to isolate the Holocaust as a foreign crime rather than a catastrophe in which Lithuanian participation was extensive, visible, and in........

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