Lithuania is prosecuting Artur Fridman for what he said about partisans. That is the simplest way to state the issue, and it is already damning.

I oppose the exculpation of Soviet crimes. I oppose the exculpation of Nazi crimes. I oppose the exculpation of Lithuanian crimes. The question here is not whether every harsh word ever used about partisans was elegant. The question is whether a democratic state may criminalize harsh speech about a category of men whom Jewish witnesses repeatedly described as robbers, tormentors, rapists, extortionists, hunters of escapees, guards, and killers.

Lithuania wants the public to hear the word partisan and think hero. The evidentiary record left by the victims repeatedly says otherwise.

The first fact Lithuania cannot evade is that the witnesses are not imposing the word partisan from outside. They are recording what the armed Lithuanians called themselves. The foreword to The Lithuanian Slaughter of its Jews says that self-described “partisans” took control of towns as the Soviets left, terrorized and abused Jews even before German power had stabilized, looted Jewish homes, carried out jailings, torture, and summary executions, and claimed Jewish property for themselves and their families. It also says Jewish women were raped and often murdered afterward, and that at times children were smashed against trees or broken on knees before being thrown into pits.

That is not my vocabulary. That is the book’s own summary of what partisans meant in practice.

These witnesses testified in displaced persons’ camps between 1946 and 1948—still uprooted, still stateless, still without institutional protection, and often only months removed from the events they described—while Lithuania later had decades, state resources, museums, commissions, prosecutors, and official institutions with which to build its counter-narrative.

Post-1990 Lithuania did not inherit the word partisan passively. It selected it, institutionalized it, and wrapped it in national honor. The state is not defending a neutral historical category from slander. It is defending its own chosen branding of men whose victims had already described them very differently.

Take Malke Gilis. In her testimony from Telzh, armed Lithuanian bands were already calling themselves “partisans” and openly ruling the town. Jews were driven into the streets while local Lithuanians stood on the sidewalks “enjoying themselves........

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