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

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