This article begins with one name: Samuel Gochin.

Lithuania knew that name. It knew him as a Jewish child from Papilė. It knew him as a survivor of deportation. It knew him as a young man taken by armies that did not ask his permission. It knew him as a conscript in the Lithuanian army, as a patient in a Lithuanian military hospital, and as the holder of a Lithuanian internal passport.

Then, when his grandson asked Lithuania to record that same man as Lithuanian again, the state resisted.

That resistance is why citizenship became Kaddish.

My grandfather asked me to remember. In the South African Jewish Report, I later wrote to him as Zayde: you asked me to visit the family cemetery in the old country and recite Kaddish. I did. But when I arrived, I found not memory, but organized forgetting. There was almost nothing Jewish remaining.

So I made Lithuania say his name.

In 1913, the Gochin family of Papilė, in the Šiauliai District, sat for a family photograph. My grandfather Samuel was a boy in that photograph. Lithuanian records show that the Gochin family had lived in Papilė since at least the late 1700s. The photograph survives. The people in that world do not.

That is the first document in this case: not a law, not a judgment, not an archive stamp, but a family photograph.

A photograph can become evidence. It proves presence. It proves belonging. It shows that before Lithuania learned to speak of its Jews as absence, Jewish families were part of the ordinary life of Lithuanian towns. The later crime was not that Jews disappeared. The crime was that Jews were murdered, and then the state learned how to speak as if their absence required no accounting.

Sam was born in February 1902. His bar mitzvah would have been in February 1915. Three months later, on 4 May 1915, the Jews of Papilė were deported during the Russian expulsions of Jews from the war zone. The pretext was the old antisemitic accusation of Jewish disloyalty: Jews were treated as spies, traitors, or a fifth column. In town after town, the accusation was not proved. It was useful.

This is how the dual-loyalty canard works. A state first says the Jew cannot be trusted. Then it demands that the Jew prove loyalty with his body. European armies did this repeatedly. Jews served in the........

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