Lithuania at AJC: A Warning |
I follow Grant Gochin’s work on Facebook, X, Substack, and Times of Israel. I do it for two reasons. Professionally, I make documentary films about Jewish memory, and Grant has become a primary source on Lithuanian Holocaust evasion. Personally, he is my friend.
I asked him why his output has accelerated so sharply before May 1, 2026. He told me he is taking excerpts from his forthcoming book, Recognition Without Reckoning: Sovereignty, Continuity, and the Architecture of Historical Evasion, and putting them into public form before the American Jewish Committee hosts Lithuanian officials. The data was already assembled. The timing was the point.
I am a Jew. I am a filmmaker. With Andrejs Hramcovs, I produced and co-directed Baltic Truth, narrated by Dudu Fisher. My grandfather family murdered in Akniste along with 175 Jews of that small Latvian town. That gives me a Baltic vantage point, but this warning is about Lithuania.
The Lithuanian script is familiar
Lithuania will tell AJC that it has confronted its history. It will cite plans, committees, education programs, and diplomatic language. It will emphasize Soviet occupation. It will speak of tragedy, tolerance, reconciliation, and shared memory.
What it will not do is name the central fact. Lithuania did not merely suffer history. Lithuanians helped make the Holocaust happen.
Before the war, Jewish citizens served Lithuania. Thousands served in the Lithuanian Army between 1918 and 1923; hundreds volunteered; dozens died; Jewish veterans later formed their own veterans’ association. The state knew who these Jews were. It conscripted them, recorded them, decorated some of them, and marked others in internal passports as “żydas” – Jew. A Jew could be Lithuanian enough to serve the state, but not Lithuanian enough to be treated as part of the nation.
In 1941, that distinction became lethal. At the Seventh Fort in Kaunas, Lithuanian guards shot thousands of Jewish men in days. A small number of Jewish military veterans were spared because Lithuanian commandant Jurgis Bobelis identified them by name. The exception proves the institutional memory. Lithuania’s bureaucracy could distinguish a Jewish veteran from other Jews when it wanted to. It chose to save a few and destroy the rest.
By the end of German occupation, more than 96 percent of Lithuanian Jews had been murdered. After the Germans withdrew, Jewish returnees and rescuers were still murdered – this time, exclusively by Lithuanians, not with Nazi assistance. No Lithuanian has served punishment for the murder of Jews. That is the record Lithuania will try to manage in the AJC room.
The inversion is now criminal
The most current expression of that record is Artur Fridman.
On May 9, 2024, Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Lithuania, honored his anti-Nazi grandfather at a Vilnius cemetery and posted criticism of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, a state-rehabilitated partisan. Lithuania answered with criminal prosecution, including Article 170-2 §1, the memory statute it uses to police alleged denial or gross........