March 15–Day of Rescuers of Lithuanian Jews

While Lithuania highlights 924 recognized rescuers, the deeper truth—illustrated even in the record of figures like my grandfather, Jonas Noreika—is that the country’s Holocaust history is largely a story of persecution and murder, not rescue.

March 15 was designated by the Lithuanian parliament to be observed annually with ceremonies honoring Lithuanians recognized as Righteous Among Nations for saving Jews during the Holocaust.

The date March 15 was chosen because on March 15, 1966, Ona Šimaitė—a Vilnius University librarian who helped Jews in the Vilna Ghetto—became the first Lithuanian recognized as Righteous Among Nations by Yad Vashem.

On March 15, as Lithuania again turns toward commemorating rescuers of Jews, I think of the unbearable burden of knowing that my own blood is implicated in the slaughter of Jews. I think of the people my grandfather helped deliver to humiliation, dispossession, ghettoization, and slaughter. And I think of the few Lithuanians who chose a different path and saved Jews when doing so meant real risk. I honor them. I do not honor my grandfather.

I am sorry that members of my family were involved in the slaughter of Jews. There is no comfort in lineage when lineage carries guilt. There is no refuge in patriotism when patriotism is used to bleach murder. I cannot undo what was done. I cannot restore the lives that were taken. But I can refuse the lie. I can refuse the hero story. And I can say plainly that Jonas Noreika was not a rescuer.

96 percent of Jews killed

That is why Lithuania’s state narrative focus on rescuers wounds me so deeply. The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania advanced the claim that my grandfather “actively participated” in rescuing Jews, even though the documentary record shows that as head of the Šiauliai district, he issued orders for the ghettoization and expropriation of Jews. An International Commission stated that nearly all the victims rounded up under those orders were subsequently murdered. Turning a man tied to that genocide machinery into a rescuer is not historical error. It is moral inversion.

It is also an insult to every genuine rescuer. A rescuer is not a costume to be draped over a compromised national hero. A rescuer is not a public-relations device. A rescuer is not a state decoration to be inflated at political convenience. To place my grandfather in that company is to degrade the people who actually chose conscience over cruelty. It takes the small number of Lithuanians who did something decent and uses them to launder the reputation of those who did not.

Lithuania has no right to claim the rescuers as its national self-portrait of behavior during the Holocaust while it continues to glorify men like my grandfather Jonas Noreika. A government cannot build monuments to a perpetrator, decorate him, defend him, and then wrap itself in the memory of rescuers as if the contradiction will go unnoticed. The irony is noticed by survivors, by scholars, by Jewish families, and by descendants like me who have had to claw our way through layers of family and state myth to reach the truth.

1 in 2,500 were rescuers: 0.04 percent

The numbers expose the fraud. Lithuania and its officials repeatedly cite 924 recognized Righteous Among Nations connected to Lithuania and promote the claim that the country ranks near the top of per capita in rescue. But 924 out of a 1939 population of roughly 2.432 million is about 0.038 percent. A rate of 0.04% does not describe a people. It describes an exception. One person in 2,500 is not a national trait. This is one person in a stadium crowd of perpetrators and bystanders. Yet the Lithuanian government has tried to turn that exception into the national narrative.

1 in 83 were perpetrators: 1.12 percent

And set against that tiny number of rescuers is the scale of annihilation–96 percent of the prewar Jewish population. Joseph Melamed, a Jewish scholar, estimated that there were about 30,000 Lithuanian murderers. Lithuania has built a moral identity around the smallest, safest slice of the rescue record while avoiding a genuine reckoning with the much larger record of participation in the murder, compliance, and profiteering.

I have already asked the Lithuanian government to revoke the honors given to my grandfather out of respect for his victims. The state has refused. It has chosen national vanity over moral clarity. It has chosen to preserve a false hero rather than face the people he helped destroy.

99.06 percent of Lithuanians failed

That refusal is why this commemoration, for me, is not clean. I do not reject honoring rescuers. I honor them precisely because they were rare, because they were brave, and because they were exceptions in a society where 99.06 percent of the Lithuanian people failed. When the state that honors rescuers also recasts my grandfather as one of them, the ceremony becomes hypocritical. It ceases to be remembrance and becomes manipulation.

What is needed now is not another ceremony built on selective memory. What is needed is a genuine national conversation grounded in facts. Lithuania needs a truth and reconciliation process worthy of the name. It needs to open the archives fully, stop protecting compromised heroes, revoke honors where they were wrongly bestowed, and tell its children that rescue was noble precisely because it was so uncommon, not because it expressed the character of the nation.

Wishing you truth and peace in the storms of your life,

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)