In Samuel Gochin Existed, I set down the documentary spine of my paternal grandfather’s life in Lithuania. Birth in Papilė on 15 February 1902. Conscription in 1924. The 5th Grand Duke Kęstutis Infantry Regiment. The Jonas Basanavičius War Hospital. Internal passports stamped Žydas. Lithuania knew Samuel when it could use him. In 2008, when his grandson asked the same Lithuania to honor those records, the state suddenly found uncertainty.

This piece is the first crack in a larger record now published in long form. The Lithuanian state used the same evidentiary method against my family in 1922 that it used against me in 2008. The first time, eight of my direct relatives died. The second time, I had relatives in South Africa, an archive of survivors’ records, and the patience for litigation, and the method failed. Lithuania did not reform. The family had survived enough to fight back.

On 26 December 1921, my great-great-grandfather Faive Gochin filed an application with the Lithuanian authorities asking that his son Avram, Avram’s wife Chaie, and their children be permitted to return to Papilė from Russian Imperial deportation in Melitopol. The application is preserved in the Lithuanian Central State Archive at Fund 412, Inventory 13, File 6, Page 857. The Council of Papilė, on 28 February 1922, confirmed there were no reasons to bar the family’s return. The Jewish community of Papilė testified.

On 28 March 1922, the Lithuanian Department of Citizen’s Security overturned the District. The family, the Department wrote, “lacked the documents to prove they were Lithuanian.”

Lithuania’s own Migration Department now describes the implementing rules of the 9 January 1919 Provisional Law on Citizenship as “very liberal,” with statements of two witnesses sufficient to prove a person came from Lithuania. That standard accommodated displaced Jews. The 28 March 1922 denial did not.

Avram died of starvation in March 1922. Three of his and Chaie’s children, Leya, Tsipa, and Edel, died in 1922. Tsipa’s husband died. One of Tsipa’s children died. Both of Leya’s two children died. At least eight family members died during the application period, the denial period, and its immediate aftermath. They died while Lithuania delayed and then denied the family’s re-entry on documentary grounds.

On 27 September 1922, six months after the denial that killed Avram, Chaie Gochin walked her surviving children and........

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