In Part 1, I showed that the Lithuanian state’s official position on the service of Lithuanian guards at Majdanek is “tales and stretching the facts”—and that three successive directors of the Genocide Centre across eleven years have never corrected it. Now I want to make clear exactly what Lithuania is dismissing.

What Baltušis-Žvejys’s Guards Lived With Every Day

The Majdanek State Museum and the eyewitness record of Jerzy Kwiatkowski—a prisoner for 485 days whose account the Museum calls one of the most important testimonies of the camp—do not describe a site where the perimeter was sealed off from knowledge of what happened inside. They describe the opposite. They describe a camp where the killing was visible, audible, and physically unavoidable to anyone stationed at its boundaries.

The Museum’s own documentation records that a tractor hauling a trailer loaded with the bodies of gassed Jews drove through the camp gate and out toward the Krępiec woods three to four times a day. The trailer was covered with quilts, but witnesses recorded that the wind regularly blew part of the covering aside, exposing limbs protruding from underneath. The entire load visibly shifted and swayed with every jerk of the tractor as it climbed the hill past the guard positions. That was not a hidden operation. That was a daily routine passing directly through the perimeter that Lithuanian guards controlled.

When the crematorium could not keep pace with the volume of murdered Jews, corpses were burned on open-air incineration pyres laid out at multiple points across the camp. The Museum records describe what witnesses saw: a huge fire surrounded by a low embankment, billows of grey and black smoke rising and blowing in every direction, the choking stench of burning human remains. Beside the fire lay piles of hundreds of bodies—emaciated, bruised, twisted, sometimes completely black from beatings. Workers pulled corpses by their hands and feet, swung them, and threw them to men standing on the embankment who heaved them onto the flames. Before the bodies were burned, gold was pried from the teeth of the dead and hair was cut from the heads of gassed women.

That smoke rose above the wire. That stench drifted across the perimeter. The guards did not need to enter the camp to know what was burning. The city of Lublin, more than a mile away, complained about the smell. The men stationed at the fence breathed it every shift.

And there was sound. The Hoover Institution’s analysis of Kwiatkowski’s account identifies what haunted him most: the permanent sound of mothers whose children had been torn from them and sent to the gas chambers. Kwiatkowski described the “crying, sobbing, and wails” as a constant feature of the camp’s atmosphere—not an occasional event but a condition, hanging over the camp the way the smoke hung over the pyres. Every guard at every post along that wire heard it. On November 3, 1943, when eighteen thousand Jews were marched to trenches and machine-gunned in waves, the SS played music through loudspeakers to mask the sound of automatic weapons—Kwiatkowski heard a tango, then a Strauss waltz, drifting from the direction of the crematorium. The guards stationed along the wire heard it too. They heard the music. They knew what the music was for.

That is the daily reality of a Lithuanian guard at Majdanek. Not distance. Not ignorance. Trailers of corpses passing through the gate. Smoke from burning bodies drifting over the fence. The permanent wailing of mothers. The smell of human fat and bone in your nostrils. A waltz playing while Jews were shot in trenches.

And the Lithuanian state’s official, uncorrected, institutionally ratified position on all of this is: “Tales and stretching the facts.”

A Chain of Integrity Failures

Burauskaitė knew what barbed wire is. Every adult knows what barbed wire is. A fence made of wire does not block sight. Anyone stationed at the perimeter of Majdanek could see the transports arriving, the selections being conducted, the smoke rising, and the pyres burning. Burauskaitė knew this when she went on national television and told the Lithuanian public that it was all “tales.” She said it anyway. That is not a lapse of judgment. That is a person who placed no value whatsoever on her own integrity.

The Lithuanian government knew it too. Burauskaitė’s statement provoked immediate public criticism. Objections were raised by researchers, by Jewish organizations, and by international observers—not once but repeatedly, over years. The documented record of these protests is extensive. It was impossible for the Lithuanian government not to know. And the government did nothing. No correction. No retraction. No institutional distancing of any kind. A government that watches its chief Holocaust historian dismiss a death camp as “tales” on national television, receives sustained public objection over years, and still refuses to act has demonstrated that it places no value on its own institutional integrity either.

Her successor, Adas Jakubauskas, was so openly dishonest that the Seimas had no option but to fire him within a year—universities and the Lithuanian Institute of History refused to cooperate with his leadership because his activities did not meet basic scientific standards. His successor, Dr. Arūnas Bubnys, ran for public office on a far-right platform and publicly celebrated Jonas Noreika and Kazys Škirpa—men whose documented roles in the murder of Jews are not in serious historical dispute. This is the man who, for five years, has possessed the authority and the obligation to retract Burauskaitė’s characterization of Majdanek as “tales” and has chosen not to. He is a trained historian who has published on Nazi-occupied Lithuania. He knows what barbed wire looks like. He knows what the guards could see. His silence is not an oversight. It is a choice. And that choice tells us that he, like every director before him, places no value on his own integrity.

The Man They Chose Instead

Artur Fridman is a real estate agent. A private citizen. A Jewish man who visited his grandfather’s grave on May 9, 2024, and posted on Facebook raising historical questions about a Lithuanian national hero. For that, Lithuania restricted his movement on January 8, 2025, and filed criminal charges on October 30, 2025, under Articles 170-2 §1 and 313 §2 (Case No. 02-2-00512-24). The Director General who called Majdanek “tales” retired with her pension. The real estate agent who questioned their hero faces criminal prosecution. That is not a failure of the system. That is the system performing exactly as it was built to perform.

Putting Lithuania on Trial

Before the Holocaust, Lithuania had approximately 220,000 Jews. Approximately 96.4% were murdered—the highest murder rate in Europe—carried out overwhelmingly by Lithuanian neighbors. Lithuania has never punished a single Lithuanian through its own courts for participation in the murder of Jews. Not one. In more than thirty years of independence, with named perpetrators documented in the Jäger Report and in the 121 signed survivor testimonies collected by Leyb Koniuchowsky, Lithuania has punished exactly zero of its own citizens for the murder of Jews.

Zero murderers punished. One Jew prosecuted. That is Lithuania’s ratio.

The prosecution’s own evidence exposes the fraud. Among the documents cited in Fridman’s indictment is LGGRTC letter No. 13R-645, which acknowledges that Ramanauskas-Vanagas was recruited by Soviet security services in January 1945 under the codename “Dzūkija.” Lithuania is prosecuting a citizen for raising a historical question that its own archival documentation partially answers in his favor. As Michael Kretzmer has documented, the Fridman prosecution is the structural inverse of the Eichmann trial: Israel put a Nazi bureaucrat on trial and exposed the system he served; Lithuania has put a Jewish citizen on trial and exposed the system that prosecutes him.

The Silence That Completes the System

The American Jewish Committee has issued no public statement. The Anti-Defamation League has issued no public statement. B’nai B’rith has issued no public statement. The World Jewish Congress has been silent. A state that murdered almost all of its Jews and never punished its own murderers is prosecuting a Jew for Holocaust-related speech, and the institutions that claim to speak for Jewish memory have said nothing.

As I wrote previously, Lithuania does not need to prosecute every Jew. It needs only one. One visible target is sufficient to teach every other mouth in Lithuania to remain closed. A criminal prosecution imposes its penalty long before any verdict: stress, cost, uncertainty, stigma, fear. Fridman is that target. And every day that Jewish institutions remain silent, they confirm to Lithuania that the cost of targeting him is zero. Their silence is not neutral. It is functional. It tells Lithuania: you may prosecute. You may restrict. You may intimidate. The institutions that claim to speak for Jewish memory will not intervene when Jewish memory is criminalized.

I Have Seen This Before

I was born under a regime that controlled historical narrative through state institutions and punished citizens who contradicted the official version. I left that system. I came to the West. I made films about the truth those regimes tried to bury. And now I am watching a European Union member state—a NATO ally—do precisely what the Soviets did: use institutional authority to establish an official past, and use criminal law to punish a citizen who challenges it.

A state that enforces institutional dishonesty about events that occurred within living memory—and mobilizes criminal law to maintain that dishonesty today—has forfeited any reasonable claim to credibility on any subject. If Lithuania’s official institutions will characterize a Nazi extermination camp as “tales,” ratify that characterization through a decade of institutional silence, and then prosecute a Jewish citizen for questioning the approved version of the past, then on what basis should any official statement from Lithuania be treated as reliable? A government that maintains historical fraud as a matter of state policy and punishes those who expose it is not a credible partner for the United States, not a trustworthy ally within NATO, and not an honest interlocutor for Israel or the Jewish world.

The documented record does not show a state that made mistakes and moved on. It shows a Director General who placed no value on her own integrity. A government that placed no value on its institutional integrity. A successor so dishonest he had to be removed. And a current director who ran for office celebrating Holocaust perpetrators and who has spent five years choosing not to correct a lie he knows to be false. At every level—personal, institutional, and political—Lithuania has demonstrated that it possesses no values that constrain its conduct. It has only the management of its image. That is not the conduct of an ally. That is the conduct of a state built on deceit.

The guards at Majdanek saw trailers of Jewish corpses pass through the gate every day. They smelled the smoke of burning bodies. They heard mothers screaming for their children. They heard a Strauss waltz played to cover the sound of machine guns murdering eighteen thousand Jews. Lithuania’s state institution called all of this “tales.” Three directors have ratified that position through silence. And now the same institutional apparatus is prosecuting a Jewish real estate agent for a Facebook post at his grandfather’s grave.

That is not memory. That is the machinery of forgetting, enforced by criminal law. I have seen it before, and I know exactly what it is. I call on the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, B’nai B’rith, and the World Jewish Congress to intervene publicly, forcefully, and immediately. Because a state that murdered 96.4% of its Jews and now prosecutes one of the survivors’ descendants for discussing how they were murdered has made this a test of whether Jewish institutional power exists for any purpose other than ceremony.

Readers unfamiliar with Lithuania’s Holocaust record should read Silvia Foti’s Storm in the Land of Rain, which documents how her own grandfather—Lithuania’s national hero Jonas Noreika—organized the murder of Jews, and how the Lithuanian state has spent decades laundering his record.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)