On June 27, 2026, the eighty-fifth anniversary of the Lietūkis Garage massacre will be marked in Kaunas and by Lithuanian diplomats in Israel and USA.

Expect the wreaths. Expect the candles, the bowed heads, the violin music, the brief and dignified statement. Expect a Lithuanian official, perhaps a diplomat, to speak of the Jews who “perished,” who were “lost,” whose world “vanished.” I have set out elsewhere, in What Lithuania Means When It Says “Vanished,” “Lost,” or “Perished”, what that vocabulary is built to hide.[1] The short version is that none of those words contains a killer. They are the grammar of a state that has learned to mourn the Jews it cannot bring itself to say were murdered by Lithuanians.

Watch closely this June, because the commemoration is the knife.

The same government that lays the wreath has, for years, honored the men who ran the state in whose name the killing was done. It will mourn the victims of the Provisional Government in the morning and keep the Provisional Government’s prime minister in the national pantheon in the afternoon. That is not an oversight. It is the design.

Begin with the courtyard.

On June 27, 1941, in central Kaunas, between fifty and sixty Jewish men were beaten to death in the open yard of the Lietūkis cooperative.[2]

They were made to gather horse manure by hand, then handed hoses and ordered to wash the ground where they would die. They were murdered with crowbars and iron bars, the hoses driven into them until some drowned or suffocated. One young man worked down the line with a bar and then posed for the camera over the bodies.[3] Civilians watched and applauded. Women stood among them.

When it was finished, a man stood among the corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion.[4]

This singular event at the start of the Lithuanian Holocaust removes any deniability that all Lithuanians knew exactly what was happening and who was doing the murdering.

Among the dead was Jurgis Štromas, who had represented independent Lithuania in........

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