Since 2015 I have filed forty-nine formal submissions with Lithuanian state bodies. Eight lawsuits and international filings. Eleven to the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre. Five criminal complaints under Article 170-2. Eleven institutional submissions. Two to the Commission of Journalist Ethics. Twelve letters.[1] Not one produced a finding on the merits.

Lithuania’s answer has been consistent. I am a foreigner with a grievance. The controversy is manufactured. In February 2025 Laurynas Kasčiūnas — member of the Seimas, former Minister of National Defence, newly elected chairman of the Homeland Union — called me a Russian agent and called me trash.[2]

That answer rests on a premise: that the file begins with me.

It begins in Paris on December 30, 1921, in a letter signed by Leo Motzkin.

I know that because of a book almost nobody reads. In July I borrowed it through interlibrary loan from Duquesne University. Herbert von Truhart, Völkerbund und Minderheiten-Petitionen, Vienna and Leipzig, 1931. I could locate no openly accessible full-text scan. To consult the complete inventory you borrow the physical volume.[3]

Truhart recorded the fate of every minority petition submitted to the League of Nations from its founding to February 1931. Who filed. On what date. Against which state. Whether the League ruled it admissible. Whether the state answered. What the Council decided, with the page of the record where the decision was printed. He writes that he had not intended to publish, that he printed his findings privately in the autumn of 1929 and circulated them among the officials who ran minority policy in Europe, and that the work met with no attempt at refutation.

Truhart counted five hundred and twenty-five petitions, filed by nineteen peoples living in thirteen states. Lithuania was the respondent in thirty-four of the 525. Across all thirteen respondent states, thirty-three of the 525 were filed by Jews.[4]

Four of those thirty-three concerned Lithuania.

Motzkin’s memorial of December 30, 1921, invoking the eight principles Lithuania had offered the Committee of Jewish Delegations in Paris in 1919 while it was seeking recognition. A petition of the Joint Foreign Committee of London, June 10, 1925. A memorandum signed Zévi Aberson, Geneva, September 3, 1925, on the language question and the expropriation of Jewish land. And a letter to the Council’s rapporteur transmitting the interpellation in which the Jewish, Polish and German deputies of the........

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