I was born in Riga, Latvia. My family suffered under Nazis and under Soviets. With my whole heart, I say emphatically — it is reprehensible to deny or minimize Soviet crimes, Nazi crimes, Latvian or Lithuanian crimes, or any crimes.

For Latvian and Lithuanian Jews, survival was not merely unlikely. It was intolerably fragile. To survive the Nazi invasion, a Jew had to flee east in panic, leave everything behind, and hope to outpace annihilation. To return after the war was to discover something worse: that survival itself could provoke murderous rage from your neighbors who would not tolerate even the remnant of Jewish life.

One family’s fate exposes that truth.

On the night of May 11–12, 1946 — one year and two days after the Nazis were driven from Lithuania — three Lithuanians dynamited the home of the Berelovitz family in Žemaičių Naumiestis, known in Yiddish as Neishtot. Four family members were murdered: Nekha Berelovitz, her daughter Hanah, her brother Asher Joselevitz, and Mordehai Berelovitz. A fifth, Shelomoh Berelovitz, survived only because the blast threw him through a window. The Yizkor record preserves the account.

The Berelovitz family had done what almost no Lithuanian Jew managed to do. When Nazis invaded on June 22, 1941, they escaped with the retreating Red Army, survived the war in the Soviet interior, and came home alive — severely damaged, carrying the weight of extreme suffering and what we now recognize as post-traumatic stress. They returned to their own house, in their own town. And their Lithuanian neighbors murdered them over a year after the Holocaust had ended in Lithuania.

At trial, one of the murderers explained why. He killed the Jews because he could not tolerate Jews returning to Neishtot and settling there again.

The motive was not robbery. It was not a personal dispute. It was not anti-Soviet resistance. It was Lithuanian annihilationist hate which could not tolerate a single living Jew continuing to exist. Before the Nazis arrived in Lithuania, Lithuanian leadership was calling for the elimination of Jews. Over a year after the Nazis left, Lithuanians were still carrying out that mandate.

What Neishtot Had Already Become

Before the Nazi invasion, approximately 100 to 110 Jewish families lived in Neishtot. Jews had been part of this town since the seventeenth century — 59% of the population in 1897. They built two synagogues, a Hebrew school, a library, and a communal life stretching from Neishtot to South Africa to Israel.

Within weeks of the invasion, Lithuanian........

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