My grandfather signed orders connected to the ghettoization, expropriation, and liquidation of Jewish property in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. The Lithuanian state preserved those documents in its own archive. In 2019, IHRA experts warned Lithuania about the official effort to reinterpret that record through unsupported rescuer narratives and historical distortion. Yet the honors remained, the institutional alibi remained, and now a Jewish citizen faces criminal prosecution for challenging the state’s version of history. This article asks a simple question: after the warning, what did Lithuania do with the signature?

My grandfather signed the document. Lithuania preserved it. Its state historical institution had access to it. IHRA’s experts warned Lithuania in 2019 about that institution’s method. The question now is not whether the archive exists. It is what Lithuania did with the signature after it was warned.

20-year investigation

I have asked that question for years as a granddaughter, as a Lithuanian-American, as a Catholic, and as the author of Storm in the Land of Rain, first published as The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather Was a War Criminal. That book began as a promise to my dying mother to write a heroic biography of Jonas Noreika. It became the opposite: a twenty-year investigation into the evidence that my family, my community, and the Lithuanian state did not want to face.

I am writing this article now as part of a coordinated public record. Grant Gochin, Eugene Levin, Dillon Hosier and I are coordinating our articles because we are deeply concerned that Lithuania has placed Artur Fridman, a Lithuanian Jewish citizen, under criminal threat for historical speech. The possible punishment includes a prison sentence of up to three years. I am repulsed by the contrast: Lithuania never punished the Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrators whose signatures and offices helped destroy Jewish life, but it now seeks punishment for a Jew who challenges the state’s protected memory.

The signature is not a theory

In The Signature that Still Haunts Lithuania, I placed one document where it belongs: at the center of the case. My grandfather signed Šiauliai County Chief Order No. 3687 on October 15, 1941. The order is preserved in the Lithuanian Central State Archive, fund R-1099, list 1, file 2, folio 451. It directed local officials to sell items confiscated from Jews and deposit the proceeds into the District Commissariat’s account at the Reich Credit Bank in Šiauliai. He routed the order for execution to Col. Aloyzas Banys with one Lithuanian word: “Vykdyti.” Execute.

That document is not family gossip. It is not Soviet rumor. It is not an anti-Lithuanian smear. It is an archival record preserved by the Lithuanian state. My website now makes public the........

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