Lithuania has repeatedly used a survivor-founded museum as cover for Holocaust distortion. The museum was warned, and kept providing the platform.

On June 11, the Government of Lithuania used Holocaust Museum LA’s reopening to claim “Lithuania’s place” in Holocaust memory. The museum had been warned, in writing, about exactly this. It welcomed Lithuania anyway.

The reopening deserves praise. After a major expansion, the survivor-founded institution opened the Goldrich Cultural Center, with new galleries, theaters, gardens, and a pavilion built around an authentic Holocaust-era railcar. Its inaugural exhibition, The Beautiful Game… The Untold Story, recovers the forgotten influence of Jewish players and coaches on modern soccer. The problem is not the exhibition. It is what the museum let the Government of Lithuania do with it.

The Lithuanian Consulate in Los Angeles announced that its deputy consul general and a staff member had attended the June reopening, praised chief executive Beth Kean, and then delivered the sentence the post was written for. The consulate said that Lithuanian artifacts in the exhibition “further underscore Lithuania’s place within the broader narrative of European Jewish heritage and the Holocaust.”

That phrase sounds inclusive. It performs a conversion. The Jewish civilization destroyed in Lithuania becomes part of Lithuania’s heritage; the destruction becomes a vague “experience”; and the state’s relationship to the Holocaust turns from a question of responsibility into a credential of belonging. The artifacts belong to Lithuanian Jews. They do not belong to the diplomatic reputation of the modern Lithuanian state.

What the consulate omitted

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that German forces and Lithuanian auxiliaries began the killing in June and July 1941, that Lithuanians carried out anti-Jewish riots, and that most rural Jews had been slaughtered by the end of August. More than ninety percent of Lithuania’s Jews were murdered. No country in occupied Europe murdered a higher proportion of its Jewish population. Most were killed close to home, in forests and pits near the towns where they had lived, and Lithuanians, police, and local officials were integral to the speed and reach of the slaughter. That local role is not a footnote. It is a principal element of the Holocaust in Lithuania.

The consulate’s post contains none of it. No perpetrators, no collaborators, no ghettos, no pits, no honors........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)