I Have Seen This Before (Part 1)

The Soviet Union brutally occupied Latvia. I was born under Soviet rule and learned early what that meant: a kleptocratic dictatorship that controlled speech, corrupted truth, and punished dissent. The state decided what could be said about the past and penalized anyone who said otherwise. Thanks to my parents, I left that system in 1989, and I spent the next thirty-five years believing I would never have to watch a European government revert to Soviet methods.

In January 2015, Birutė Burauskaitė, then the Director General of Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, appeared on Lithuanian national television to discuss Antanas Baltušis-Žvejys. He had served as Chief of Police in Pilviškės in 1941, when Lithuanian neighbors murdered the town’s Jews. He was subsequently promoted to command the 3rd Company of the 252nd Lithuanian Police Battalion. His unit commanded the external guard at Majdanek.

Majdanek was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that between 80,000 and 110,000 human beings were murdered there. Approximately 59,000 were Jews. The camp contained gas chambers. It contained a crematorium. It contained mass shooting operations and slave labor units. The stench of burning human remains was so pervasive that civilians in Lublin complained about it openly.

When Burauskaitė was asked on national television about Baltušis-Žvejys’s service at this camp, her response—broadcast to the Lithuanian public in her official capacity as head of the state’s Holocaust research institution—was: “Visą kas yra pasakos ir pritempimas.”

“It is all simply tales and stretching the facts.”

I need every reader to stop and absorb what that means. The Director General of Lithuania’s state historical institution—nominated by the Prime Minister, confirmed by the Seimas, holding a statutory mandate to produce the official historical conclusions of the Republic of Lithuania—went on national television and told the country that a death camp where Jews were gassed, shot, starved, and burned was “tales.”

She was not speaking as a private citizen sharing an opinion over coffee. She was the legal voice of the Lithuanian state on Holocaust history. Her conclusions carried the authority of law. When the Genocide Centre produces a historical finding, that finding can be cited in criminal proceedings. Citizens can be prosecuted for contradicting it. That is not academic interpretation. That is state doctrine enforced through the criminal code.

And Burauskaitė used that authority to minimize Majdanek.

What the Guards Could See

The defense implied by Burauskaitė and repeated by Lithuanian apologists ever since is that Baltušis-Žvejys merely guarded the outside of the camp. As though the perimeter of a death camp were a morally neutral posting. As though the men stationed around Majdanek were watching empty countryside. This is a lie, and the physical structure of the camp destroys it. Majdanek covered approximately 2.7 square kilometers. It was surrounded by a double row of electrified barbed-wire fencing and watchtowers. The fence was not a solid wall. It was wire. The guards stationed along that perimeter could see directly into the camp—the barracks, the roll-call squares, the transports arriving, the selections being conducted, the smoke rising from the crematorium. Barbed wire does not block sight. It blocks escape. That is what it was designed to do, and the Lithuanian guards standing behind it knew exactly what they were holding in place.

Jerzy Kwiatkowski, a prisoner at Majdanek for 485 days, described what happened inside that wire. Jews arrived in transports and were separated—men from women, children from mothers. They were stripped, searched, and sorted. Those deemed unfit for labor were packed into gas chambers until the doors could barely close. Zyklon gas was released through openings in the ceiling. An SS man watched through an inspection window until the mass stopped moving. Others who did not fit in the chamber were sent to the crematorium shed alive, where executioners with iron pipes bludgeoned them one by one until they dropped. The walls of the execution room were splattered with brains. A trail of blood flowed from under the walls. When the crematorium could not keep pace, corpses were stacked on pyres, doused with gasoline, and burned in the open. The stench of burning hair, bone, and fat drifted across the camp when the wind shifted. According to Kwiatkowski’s account, published as 485 Days at Majdanek, every child was taken from its mother and gassed. Any mother who refused to surrender her child could join it in death. On November 3, 1943, machine guns were positioned along the wire and seventeen thousand Jews were marched to the killing area, forced to undress, and mowed down in trenches while music was played through loudspeakers to cover the sound of gunfire. By nightfall, not a single Jewish prisoner at Majdanek remained alive.

That is what the Lithuanian guards were guarding. Not a fence. Not a boundary. A death system visible through wire.

And the Director General of Lithuania’s state Holocaust institution called it “tales.”

Three Directors. Zero Corrections.

Here is what makes Burauskaitė’s statement not merely offensive but legally significant: it was never corrected. Not by her. Not by anyone who followed her.

Burauskaitė served as Director General until 2020. She was replaced by Adas Jakubauskas, who was fired by the Seimas within a year after employees accused him of politicizing the Centre’s work and after universities and the Lithuanian Institute of History refused to cooperate with his leadership because its activities, in the words of one parliamentarian, “do not meet scientific standards.” Jakubauskas was replaced by Dr. Arūnas Bubnys, who was confirmed by the Seimas in April 2021 despite being described by outside observers as a Holocaust revisionist who had glorified Nazi-era collaborators and minimized Lithuanian participation in the murder of Jews.

Three directors across eleven years. Not one issued a retraction. Not one published a correction. Not one said, on the record, that the Director General’s characterization of a Nazi extermination camp as “tales and stretching the facts” was wrong. In the institutional logic of the Lithuanian state, silence after a public statement by the Director General is ratification. Burauskaitė’s words were broadcast on national television in her official capacity. They remain uncorrected. They are, by operation of institutional continuity, the position of the Lithuanian government on the service of Lithuanian police at Majdanek.

Dr. Bubnys has now held the directorship for five years. Five years in which he has possessed the institutional authority and the professional obligation to review, correct, or retract any prior public statement issued by his predecessors in their official capacity. He has not retracted Burauskaitė’s characterization of Majdanek as “tales.” He has not corrected it. He has not distanced the Centre from it. By every principle of institutional responsibility, when a Director General inherits an uncorrected public statement made by a predecessor in official capacity and allows it to stand, he owns it. Burauskaitė’s words are now, functionally, Bubnys’s words.

This raises questions that Lithuanian prosecutors should find uncomfortable. If a private Jewish citizen can be criminally charged for a Facebook post that questions a national hero, on what legal basis does the sitting Director General of the state’s Holocaust research institution face no scrutiny whatsoever for presiding over the uncorrected public minimization of a Nazi extermination camp? If contradicting the Centre’s historical conclusions is a criminal act, is maintaining a public characterization of Majdanek as “tales” not itself an act of Holocaust distortion under the very statutes Lithuania claims to enforce? Does Article 170-2 apply only to Jews who question Lithuanian heroes, or does it also apply to Lithuanian officials who minimize the camps where Jews were murdered? And if the answer is that it applies only in one direction—if the statute protects the narrative but not the dead—then what, exactly, is the statute for?

I grew up in a system where the state told you what the past was and arrested you if you disagreed. I recognize institutional memory management when I see it. This is it.

Not Just Excused. Honored.

Baltušis-Žvejys was not merely tolerated by the Lithuanian state. On October 31, 2002, President Valdas Adamkus signed Decree No. 1965, posthumously promoting him to the rank of Colonel. A man who commanded the guard at a death camp where Jews were gassed, shot, bludgeoned, and cremated received a presidential honor. His service at Majdanek was treated as irrelevant. His role as Chief of Police during the murder of Jews in Pilviškės was treated as irrelevant. Germany has prosecuted concentration camp guards—accountants, filing clerks, perimeter sentries—for complicity in mass murder. Lithuania promoted the commander of a guard unit at Majdanek to Colonel.

As Grant Gochin documented in 2018, Lithuania’s position is that Holocaust perpetrators must be considered “completely innocent” unless tried and convicted during their lifetime. Lithuania vigorously opposed placing Holocaust perpetrators on trial during their lifetimes. The circularity is the point. Block the trial, then cite the absence of a trial as proof of innocence. Applied consistently, this standard would find Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot “completely innocent.” Lithuania does not apply it consistently. It applies it only to Lithuanians who murdered Jews.

That is Lithuania’s record: a death camp called “tales,” a guard commander promoted to Colonel, three directors who never corrected the lie, and a sitting Director General whose five-year silence has made the lie his own. That is the state that now claims the moral authority to prosecute a Jewish citizen for a Facebook post. In Part 2, I will show exactly how Lithuania’s criminal machinery is being used against Artur Fridman—and what the silence of Jewish institutions is costing him.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)