How selective memory transforms perpetrators into “rescuers”

I recently wrote about the irony of March 15—Lithuania’s Day of the Rescuers of Lithuanian Jews—and the distortion it represents: a country with 924 recognized rescuers, alongside 2.5 million bystanders and 30,000 perpetrators, branding itself as a nation of rescuers.

I noted that my own grandfather, Jonas Noreika, was one of the men Lithuania tried to rebrand as a rescuer, despite the documents he signed ordering thousands of Jews into ghettos and the seizure of their property.

My mother and grandmother told me my grandfather was a hero. Lithuania told me my grandfather was a hero. It took me twenty years to discover that the story was a lie. I wrote about it in Storm in the Land of Rain: A Mother’s Dying Wish Becomes Her Daughter’s Nightmare.

Personal Myth vs. Documented Truth

The method used by Lithuania in portraying my grandfather—isolating an ambiguous fragment, inflating it, and urging the public to see only that fragment to obscure his crimes—has been applied to others as well. One example is Ignas Vylius-Vėlavičius, who served as a guard at the Kaunas Fort prison when thousands of Jews were killed. He was also present when a small number of Jews were released. In the Lithuanian narrative, those few releases overshadow the thousands murdered in the same place.

How One Fragment Rewrites a Life

The most authoritative academic study of the early Kaunas killings, produced under the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania records that some seventy Jewish men were left alive at the Seventh Fort because they had been Lithuanian military volunteers, and that it was the Kaunas commandant Jurgis Bobelis who ordered their release.

Kaunas: Where the Killings Began

The same study places Vylius-Vėlavičius inside the prison-and-fort system during the very first days of organized mass murder in Kaunas. By the end of June 1941, Bobelis was already reporting on the establishment of a Jewish concentration camp. Jewish men and young people were being sent to the Seventh Fort. Women and children were being confined at the Ninth Fort. By early July, more than 3,200 Jews had been arrested. Most were murdered.

Command Inside the Killing System

A study published by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research identifies Lithuanian Captain Vylius as the officer transferred from the central prison in Kaunas to command the guard station at the Ninth Fort and its surroundings during the period of mass murder operations. According to his own testimony, the entire Ninth Fort garrison was under his command while the killings were taking place.

This is the part Lithuania does not want anyone to dwell on.

The entire Ninth Fort garrison was under his command while the killings were taking place.

That is supervision inside a killing system.

9,200 Jews murdered; 70 rescued

On October 29, 1941, that system murdered 9,200 Jews from the Kaunas ghetto at the Ninth Fort. Among them were 2,007 men, 2,920 women, and 4,273 children. That included infants and newborns. But Lithuania wants to honor him as a rescuer because, earlier that summer, Bobelis gave an order to release seventy Jews.

The Arithmetic That Cannot Be Ignored

It takes one order from someone else to release seventy Jews to turn a guard who supervised the killing of 9,000 Jews into a rescuer.

Lithuania’s memory culture keeps trying to make the few who were freed carry the moral weight of the thousands who were murdered. It cannot work. The arithmetic does not allow it. And the longer Lithuania insists on it, the deeper the dishonesty becomes.

What Makes a True Rescuer

If Lithuania truly wishes to honor the 924 Righteous Among the Nations, it should honor them for what made them righteous: they stood against the surrounding system. People like Ona Šimaitė, who smuggled food into the Vilna Ghetto and was arrested, tortured, and sent to Dachau for it. What Lithuania should not do is stretch the word “rescuer” until it covers men who served inside prisons, forts, and guard units during the extermination of their Jewish neighbors.

A Word Stretched Beyond Meaning

A small exception inside a system of mass murder does not redeem the system.

It does not redeem the men who served it.

And it does not redeem a country that, eighty-five years later, still cannot tell the difference.

International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, “The Day of the Rescuers of Lithuanian Jews.”

Yad Vashem, “Ona Šimaitė,” Righteous Among the Nations file.

Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Sužiedėlis, Mass Killings in Lithuania, on the Seventh Fort, Bobelis, the release of former Lithuanian military volunteers, and the Kaunas prison/fort killing environment.

Aya Ben-Naftali, “Collaboration and Resistance—the Ninth Fort as a Test Case,” YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, on Vylius’s command role over the guard station and the Ninth Fort garrison during mass murder operations.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Massacre in Fort IX,” on the October 29, 1941 killing of 9,200 Jews, including 4,273 children.

Silvia Foti, Storm in the Land of Rain: A Mother’s Dying Wish Becomes Her Daughter’s Nightmare, Regnery History.

See also: Silvia Foti, “Exception of 1 in 2,500 Becomes National Irony,” Times of Israel, March 2026; Grant Arthur Gochin, “The Indictment That Put Lithuania on Trial,” JNS, March 2026.

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

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)