Designed to deceive, not to inform |
Lithuania wants the Holocaust to be remembered as something done to Jews by a small number of criminals under German direction. The witness record says something much worse. It says the crime was not only committed. It was watched. It was watched in public, enjoyed in public, and converted into material gain in public as Jewish property was plundered while its owners were being degraded and destroyed.
That is not only what Jewish survivors said. It is also what Father Patrick Desbois found across the eastern killing fields: the Holocaust was carried out in public, with villages watching. The Lithuanian testimonies fit that pattern with brutal precision. They do not describe secrecy. They describe spectators, beneficiaries, and onlookers who treated the degradation of Jews as entertainment, opportunity, social instruction, and communal life.
As I have documented in 121 Witnesses Lithuania Cannot Prosecute, the foreword to The Lithuanian Slaughter of its Jews states plainly that the slaughter was widely known. Townsfolk saw Jews being confined, tortured, abused, and taken away. Peasants with wagons helped transport Jews and their property. Many local people appropriated or “inherited” Jewish homes, clothing, money, and goods after their owners had been marked for destruction. The witnesses do not describe an isolated conspiracy hidden from society. They describe a social field in which humiliation, robbery, and murder were encouraged, visible, and intelligible to the surrounding population.
Take Malke Gilis in Telzh. She testified that when Jews were driven through the streets, local Lithuanians stood on the sidewalks “enjoying themselves immensely,” throwing stones, barbed wire, and wood at them. Then came the Demon’s Dance. Jewish men were forced into a circle while Lithuanians with spiked sticks and whips beat them without exception. The men had to run, fall, rise, and run again under blows until some of the elderly collapsed and died. Malke Gilis says women and men from the city came to watch the velniu šokis, the “Demon’s Dance,” and that Lithuanians from town came running to enjoy themselves and applauded.
That is not passive presence. It is spectatorship as endorsement, agreement, celebration, and promotion. Women and men did not stumble upon the Demon’s Dance by accident. They came running. They applauded. And when a society’s civilian population — not its soldiers, not its officials, not its occupation administrators, but its ordinary townspeople — runs toward the public torture of its neighbors and applauds, the word........