UNESCO vote reveals Lithuanian duplicity

Perhaps the most ironic vote against the Palestinian UNESCO bid came from Lithuania, with its attempts to prosecute Holocaust survivors.

By DOVID KATZ
Lithuania holocaust memorial vandalized 311 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Lithuania holocaust memorial vandalized 311
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Yes, the Foreign Ministry saved some face from the “loyalty” of some East European EU/NATO states in Monday’s lopsided UNESCO vote on full Palestinian membership (107 to 14 in favor, with 52 abstentions).
Latvia, which had earlier voted against full Palestinian membership in the executive council, at least abstained in Monday’s general vote. Other abstentions included Estonia, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.
Perhaps the most ironic vote against the Palestinian bid came from Lithuania.
Within minutes of the UNESCO vote, Rolandas Kacinskas, minister plenipotentiary at the Lithuanian Embassy in Washington, e-mailed his Jewish list the one-liner: “This is just a quick note to let you know that at today’s UNESCO general assembly Lithuania voted AGAINST admitting Palestine as a full member of UNESCO” (red capital letters appeared in the original).
The vote might have been cause for rejoicing if not for Lithuania’s sad record of attempted prosecutions of elderly Holocaust survivors because they escaped the ghetto to join up with the anti-Nazi partisan resistance in the forests, or because they have the courage to tell the truth about the Holocaust.
It started in 2006, when former Yad Vashem director Dr. Yitzhak Arad, an eminent Holocaust scholar, who was earlier invited to join a historical commission on Nazi and Soviet crimes, was himself suddenly and absurdly accused of being a war criminal (for having fought with the anti-Nazi partisans).
Then, in 2008, police came looking for two elderly women, both Vilna Ghetto survivors. One of them, Dr. Rachel Margolis, an Israeli citizen who turned 90 last week in Rehovot, was probably targeted because she discovered a long-lost diary of a Christian Polish eyewitness to the genocide at Ponár, the mass murder site outside Vilnius. That diary identifies the killers as enthusiastic locals.
More recently, on August 30, just two months before this week’s UNESCO vote, liaison officers of Interpol (!) came, at the demand of Lithuanian prosecutors, to question 86-year-old Kovno Ghetto survivor Joseph Melamed, a Tel Aviv attorney and chairman of the Association of Lithuanian Jews of Israel, over a 1999 book he published identifying local Holocaust perpetrators, some of whom are nowadays glorified in Lithuania as “anti-Soviet heroes.”
LAST YEAR, the Lithuanian parliament declared 2011 to be a year of remembrance for the Holocaust. A week later, the same body declared that 2011 would (also) be a year of remembrance of the “heroism” of the Lithuanian Activist Front and other “anti-Soviet heroes.”
In 1941, these “heroes” unleashed the barbaric murder of their Jewish neighbors in dozens of locations even before the Germans arrived. The upshot is that the state has honored both the victims and the perpetrators, for different audiences, with no sense of moral dissonance.

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The dual declarations were part of a broader history of Holocaust obfuscation, whereby Baltic (and other East European) governments have tried to sell the notion that there were really two genocides that took place during the 1940s, one by Germany, one by the Soviet Union.
Known as the “red-brown equation” (the notion of absolute equality of Nazi and Soviet crimes), these countries are now spending a fortune to sell this nonsense to the West, even during trying economic times, when their noble and long-suffering peoples deserve rather wiser use of scarce resources.
As someone who has been treated very well by everyday folks for a dozen years in the heart of Vilnius, I can attest that the problem is one of elites, not of the fine everyday people, for whom history distortion is most decidedly not on the agenda.
Moreover, the government in Vilnius has turned a blind eye to a wide web of local anti-Semitism. In 2010, a court legalized public swastikas and the statesponsored Genocide Center continues to employ a “specialist” who was one of the organizers of last March’s neo-Nazi parade in central Vilnius (that itself proceeded with official permission).
Lithuania is one of the three Baltic states where the Nazis easily mobilized ample numbers of “Jew shooters” whose contribution to the genocide resulted in these countries having the highest rates of Holocaust murder in all of Europe (around 95 percent).
So efficient were the killers that Jews were imported for murder from far afield in Europe, and killers were exported to killing sites abroad.
It isn’t that the issue is a simple one. In the world of realpolitik, individuals and countries occasionally have to sacrifice important principles in order to secure current achievements. That would appear to be the case in this instance – Israel has sacrificed the sacred truth of the Baltic holocaust in exchange for Eastern European anti-Palestinian votes on the international stage.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, and a leader in the battle against the untoward rewriting of history in Eastern Europe, has put it like this: “The dilemma which Israel faces in dealing with Holocaust distortion, and local anti-Semitism, in Eastern Europe and especially in the Baltics, is that these countries, unlike their fellow EU members in Western Europe, have evinced absolutely no interest in the Palestinian cause, making it relatively difficult for Israel to criticize these failings. The resultant reluctance of Israel to use its influence to combat these dangerous phenomenon has reinforced the sense of impunity of those who seek to rewrite the history of the Holocaust, hide the crimes of their countrymen and relativize the Holocaust by equating Nazi and Communist crimes. As an Israeli by choice, I feel bitterly betrayed in this regard.”
There is no country on earth with Israel’s noble record of loyalty to its citizens.
It is time for Israel to stand up loud and clear to defend Yitzhak Arad, Rachel Margolis, Joseph Melamed and others, and to demand a public apology to all defamed Jewish anti-Nazi heroes.

The writer was a professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Vilnius University from 1999 to 2010. He is currently the editor of www.DefendingHistory.com.