The Riga Witness, the Vilnius Defendant |
For five years, I researched and documented the history and legacy of the Baltic Holocaust while producing my documentary Baltic Truth, now available on Amazon Prime Video. The 220-page indictment against Artur Fridman is not an isolated event—it is a predictable continuation of the historical record I spent years researching and filming.
I was born in Riga. I grew up under Soviet rule. I left in 1989. For thirty-five years I believed I would not have to watch a European government recover the methods of the regime my parents took me out of. Then Lithuania filed Case No. 02-2-00512-24 against Artur Fridman.
I have stood in the killing fields of both Latvia and Lithuania. I have read survivor testimony in four languages. I have interviewed the witnesses Lithuania prefers to dismiss. The 220-page indictment against a Jewish citizen for a single Facebook post is not an aberration in the record I have filmed. It is the predictable terminus of the pattern that record describes.
I am not Lithuanian. I am not party to the litigation Grant Gochin has filed against Lithuania since 2015. I have no immediate family in Vilnius. The witness who speaks here did not pick this fight. The fight came for him because the state Lithuania has constructed eventually comes for everyone who keeps the record.
What Lithuania Chose to Build
Lithuania has the institutions on paper. Lithuania has a presidentially-established International Commission whose Sub-commission, in April 2019, publicly declared the Genocide Centre’s exoneration of Jonas Noreika “utterly unacceptable” and “offensive to the memory of the victims.” The Genocide Centre kept the exoneration. It is still official Lithuanian state position. Lithuania does not lack the institutions. Lithuania declines to use them.
Lithuania still defends, in monuments, plaques, school names, military rank, posthumous decorations, and ceremonies, men whose 1941 conduct helped organize the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. A state in regret would not, by 2026, sustain that hero canon. The reader is entitled to draw, from the documented conduct, the inference the conduct supports. Lithuania’s institutional posture toward 1941 is not mourning. It reads, on the record of honors maintained and corrections refused, as closer to satisfaction with the outcome than to grief over it. Lithuania achieved a proportional destruction of its Jews that no other European state matched. Lithuania continues to defend, decorate, and celebrate men who delivered that result.
Over thirty-five years and through every government since independence, the Genocide Centre was built, staffed, funded, and defended. Its findings were authored. Its silences were maintained. Its own commission’s April 2019 repudiation of the Noreika exoneration was filed and ignored, not absorbed and corrected, because absorption was never the plan. The Noreika certificate, the Brazaitis fabrication, the Škirpa cascade, and now the Fridman indictment are not the failures of an institution drifting toward truth. They are the outputs of an institution functioning exactly as intended. The choice was made at the founding. It has been remade every year since. The choice is the testimony.
What Vilnius Produced
On May 9, 2024, Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Lithuania, posted on Facebook from his grandfather Aron Fridman’s grave. Aron Fridman volunteered for the Red Army to fight Nazi Germany. Artur thanked him. Artur described the Lithuanian forest partisans of 1944–1953........