THE YOUNG GIRLS, THE NUCLEAR PLANT, AND THE WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST
Again, by fair means or foul, I am drawn to the subject of Hurbn (in Yiddish: the genocide against the Jewish people by the Nazis and their collaborators) that I consider NOT being part of my topic and project Bat Kama At - my study and attempt to represent through education and art the history of girl's Jewish education in interwar Lithuania. Yet the way the annihilation of European Jews is treated in history and public speech needs to be pondered on to understand not the context (the context of my study being before the Hurbn) but how the echoes of the history of Jewish life reaches us, and through which obstacles.
I have already dealt with the obfuscation/denial/revitalization by the Lithuanian authorities of the participation of Lithuanian perpetrators in the mass massacres and extermination of the Jewish population and had numerous conversations, and sometimes controversial discussions about the "the double genocide theory", which is an attempt to question or undermine the crimes committed against the Jewish people as a unique historical event, and to shape an equivalency between the Holocaust and the Communist crimes against humanity. As writes Tymothy Snyder, "The mass murder of the Jews of Vilnius could not have taken place without the assistance of Lithuanians" 1).
In the text of 2002, written with Michel Grosman while Lithuania was still among the countries waiting at the door of EU, we were warning against the danger to let in countries that had not submit themselves to the necessary soul-searching exam of their responsibilities, exam that can be carried out mainly through the exercise of justice against perpetrators. In Lithuania, to my knowledge, no perpetrator has been brought to face justice. On the contrary, the government has started legal proceedings against Jewish anti-Nazi fighters, like Itzhak Arad 2) or Rachel Margolis, who allegedly committed atrocities against Lithuanian anti-Communists on behalf of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD.
The situation might become even more complicated and possibly worst in the months to come given the rivalry and military activity involved by the "grandes-manoeuvres" of NATO and Russia from the troubled and bloody limits of Ukraine to the edge of Belarus between Lithuania and Suwalki. Without going into the details of these movements relating to this geostrategic Great Game, it is easy to understand that each of the big actors in the game will not encourage the search for truth, but will mildly let it go for the ideological versions of its allies. So, in such context "anti-facist" or "ant-Nazi" may mean pro-Putin and an appreciation of the efforts of Lithuanian government to get to term with its history through the Commission the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania 3) may represent no more than a mere affirmation of the interests of the West. Not to mention what is playing out in the Middle-East.
Today, the witnesses are one by one disappearing, but we the witnesses of the witnesses, are still there to make sure that history will not be emptied from the memories of these crimes, and that the word of justice will be keeping its meaning in the present and in the future, at least through the right account of what has really happened, and of who is the criminal and who the victim.
These are important reasons to support the tireless activity of Efraim Zuroff to bring to trial the last war criminals, the murderers of the Jewish people that were able to enjoy a normal life to this day and didn't find any humanitarian reason to spare the lives of children, women, elderly and sick while they were in charge of perpetrating their horrifying crimes http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/the-last-nazi-hunter-efraim-zuroff-people-call-me-mr-holocaust-y/
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