Part 2 of 4: The day Lithuanians could no longer murder Jews with impunity

In Part 1, I exposed the formula Lithuanian diplomats deploy before audiences: Nazis, Soviets, and collaborators. Every word conceals a Lithuanian crime. What follows is what the formula was built to hide. These accounts come from the Jewish yiskor books — the memorial volumes compiled by the survivors themselves — and from the Koniuchowsky testimony collection of 121 signed survivor accounts gathered in displaced persons’ camps between 1946 and 1948.

Kvedarna: Screams Heard Across a Lithuanian Town

Kvedarna, a small town in the Tauragė district of western Lithuania. The Koniuchowsky testimony records what three Lithuanian partisans — Gedvilys, Jakas, and a third whose name is not recorded — did to three young Jewish women: Rivke Berelovitz, Sore Aron, and Mashe Yung. The Lithuanian partisans took the three girls from the ghetto to an empty Jewish house. They removed the girls’ clothing by force and raped them. Then they burned their sexual organs with lit cigarettes. The cries of the three girls could be heard throughout the town. Afterward, the three Lithuanian perpetrators boasted to their Lithuanian friends about what they had done. The town heard the screams and did nothing. The Lithuanian murderers expected and received social approval.

Telzh: The Storm That Inconvenienced the Murderers

Telzh (Telšiai), a city in the Samogitia region of western Lithuania. The testimony of Khane Pelts records what happened when one of the last groups of Jewish men was led to the shooting pits. Among them was her father, Gedalye Peltz. The men were ordered to strip to their underwear and stand at the edge of the pit. At that moment, a storm broke. The Lithuanian murderers did not experience a crisis of conscience. They simply did not want to get wet. They ordered the men to put their underwear back on and marched them back to the barracks to wait for better weather.

For three hours, the men sat in the barracks. They had seen what was in the pits. They sat, the testimony records, “like lumps of clay, like congealed stone statues.” Every one of them had broken bones and torn muscles from beatings. None could run. The rain stopped. The Lithuanians returned — refreshed, dry, and ready to resume. They marched the men back to the pit and murdered them all. The storm saved no one. It extended the terror by three hours while the Lithuanian murderers waited for comfortable killing conditions.

The testimony records that the Lithuanians wanted to stab the men with knives or cut their throats. The Germans would not permit it. When the Nazis restrain you from excessive cruelty, the historical record has delivered its verdict.

After the Nazis Left: Exclusively Lithuanian Crimes

What follows cannot be attributed to Germans. The Nazi occupation ended with the Soviet reconquest in mid-1944. No Einsatzgruppen remained. No German orders governed the treatment of Jews. Every murder described below was committed by Lithuanians, against Jews, on Lithuanian soil, without German instruction or participation.

The term “White partisans” requires definition. In postwar Lithuania, armed Lithuanian nationalist bands — many of them former collaborators with the Nazi occupation, some of them participants in the murder of Jews — organized armed resistance against the returning Soviet regime. They called themselves partisans. Lithuania today calls them freedom fighters and national heroes. In the Jewish testimonial record, they are called White partisans. For Jews who had survived the war, these were the same men, or the successors of the same men, who had murdered their families. They continued to murder Jews after the Germans were gone.

Eishishok: A Mother and Baby on the Doorstep

Eishishok (Eišiškės), southeastern Lithuania, approximately 35 miles south-southwest of Vilnius. A Jewish community that had existed for over 900 years. The Eishishok yiskor book records what happened after liberation. When the Red Army reconquered Eishishok in July 1944, surviving Jews returned: Shalom Sonenson, his brother Moshe, Moshe’s wife Zipporah, their children, and a handful of others. Out of a prewar community of thousands, a handful survived. They came home.

That night, White partisans accompanied by local Lithuanian gentiles from Eishishok surrounded the Sonenson house and opened fire. When the Jews’ ammunition ran out, the Lithuanian crowd broke down the doors. Zipporah Sonenson opened the door. The Lithuanian murderers shot her and her baby on the doorstep. No German ordered this. No Nazi supervised it. Lithuanians murdered a Jewish mother and her infant because surviving Jews were unacceptable. Afterward, a military division searched Lithuanian homes in Eishishok and found stolen Jewish goods. Fifty Lithuanian gentiles were arrested. A subsequent Lithuanian partisan attack freed every one of them.

Vorne: The Accusation That Gets Jews Murdered

Vorne (Varniai), a small town in the Telšiai district of western Lithuania, approximately 40 kilometers southeast of Telšiai. The yiskor book records that when Jews returned after fleeing during the initial bombing, they found their town under the exclusive control of Lithuanian nationalists. No Germans were present. Lithuanians singled out Jewish neighbors suspected of any connection to Soviet authority. Among the first victims was veteran teacher Tsevi Leibovitz, murdered by Lithuanians.

The accusation was “Soviet sympathizer.” In 1941, the penalty was death by Lithuanian hands. In 2024, Lithuania leveled the identical accusation against Artur Fridman — charging him under Article 170-2 §1 for allegedly approving Soviet crimes in a Facebook post. The instrument has changed from a rifle to a criminal indictment. The targeting of Jews for the accusation of Soviet sympathy has not. If Fridman had been in Vorne in 1941, the same charge Lithuania files through its courts would have been delivered through a bullet.

Luknik: The Rabbi, the Swamp, and the Girls

Luknik (Luokė), a county seat in the Telšiai district of western Lithuania, prewar Jewish population approximately 500 — roughly 40% of the town. Jews who returned found their homes looted by their Lithuanian neighbors. The rabbi, Shelomoh Kravitsky, was singled out. Lithuanian tormentors cut off half his beard, forced him to run while soaking him with buckets of water, and the Lithuanian townspeople watched. The Jews were concentrated in a barn, forbidden to speak to non-Jews, denied food and water. A Lithuanian guard stood at the well to prevent Jews from drawing water. They were forced to drink from a swamp. At night, Lithuanian auxiliary police threatened the young Jewish girls with death, then took them from the camp and raped them.

The Pattern Is Annihilation, Not Property

The conventional explanation focuses on property: Lithuanians had taken Jewish homes and possessions, and returning survivors threatened to reclaim them. This is real but secondary. The primary motive was the doctrine Škirpa articulated and Lithuanian society internalized: Jews were to be eliminated from Lithuania. The LAF called for “fundamental purging” and “complete liberation from the Jews.” Those who remained would not survive. When Jews emerged from forests, from Soviet evacuation, from partisan units, from the camps, they represented an existential affront to the program. A surviving Jewish baby was an unacceptable remnant. The program demanded total elimination, and every survivor was evidence of its incompletion.

As Eugene J. Levin documented in They Came Home to Be Murdered, these were not isolated incidents. They were structural outcomes of a society committed to the elimination of Jewish life. The program did not end when the Nazis retreated. It continued until an external force imposed a constraint that Lithuanian society never imposed on itself.

The yiskor books cannot be prosecuted. The Koniuchowsky witnesses cannot be indicted. The screams of Rivke Berelovitz cannot be silenced by a Lithuanian court. The testimony of Khane Pelts cannot be reduced to a “manifestation of anti-Semitism.” The blood of Zipporah Sonenson on her own doorstep cannot be attributed to Nazis, Soviets, or nameless “collaborators.” The murderers were Lithuanian. The record is permanent.

In Part 3, I will explain why May 9, 1945, is the date that ended Lithuania’s murder of Jews — and why Lithuania’s prosecution of Artur Fridman for marking that date tells the world everything it needs to know about a nation that has not changed.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)