Lithuania is prosecuting Artur Fridman for what he said about partisans. That is the simplest way to state the issue, and it is already damning.

I oppose the exculpation of Soviet crimes. I oppose the exculpation of Nazi crimes. I oppose the exculpation of Lithuanian crimes. The question here is not whether every harsh word ever used about partisans was elegant. The question is whether a democratic state may criminalize harsh speech about a category of men whom Jewish witnesses repeatedly described as robbers, tormentors, rapists, extortionists, hunters of escapees, guards, and killers.

Lithuania wants the public to hear the word partisan and think hero. The evidentiary record left by the victims repeatedly says otherwise.

The first fact Lithuania cannot evade is that the witnesses are not imposing the word partisan from outside. They are recording what the armed Lithuanians called themselves. The foreword to The Lithuanian Slaughter of its Jews says that self-described “partisans” took control of towns as the Soviets left, terrorized and abused Jews even before German power had stabilized, looted Jewish homes, carried out jailings, torture, and summary executions, and claimed Jewish property for themselves and their families. It also says Jewish women were raped and often murdered afterward, and that at times children were smashed against trees or broken on knees before being thrown into pits.

That is not my vocabulary. That is the book’s own summary of what partisans meant in practice.

These witnesses testified in displaced persons’ camps between 1946 and 1948—still uprooted, still stateless, still without institutional protection, and often only months removed from the events they described—while Lithuania later had decades, state resources, museums, commissions, prosecutors, and official institutions with which to build its counter-narrative.

Post-1990 Lithuania did not inherit the word partisan passively. It selected it, institutionalized it, and wrapped it in national honor. The state is not defending a neutral historical category from slander. It is defending its own chosen branding of men whose victims had already described them very differently.

Take Malke Gilis. In her testimony from Telzh, armed Lithuanian bands were already calling themselves “partisans” and openly ruling the town. Jews were driven into the streets while local Lithuanians stood on the sidewalks “enjoying themselves immensely,” throwing stones, barbed wire, and pieces of wood at them. Then came the torture spectacle the perpetrators themselves called the “Demon’s Dance.”

Men were forced into a circle. Lithuanians stood inside that circle with spiked sticks and whips. The Jews had to run in circles for hours. At a whistle they had to drop. If they did not get up fast enough, they were beaten again. Old men collapsed. Some died inside the performance. Townspeople came to watch and applaud. When it ended, the men were barely recognizable—heads split, eyes swollen shut, teeth broken out, bodies covered in blood. And this was still only a prelude. After the spectacle, groups of men were led away “to work” and shot in the forest.

Does the Lithuanian government intend to put Malke Gilis on trial for that testimony?

Take Khane Pelts. She testified that trucks carrying armed partisans drove in, looted what remained, dragged out all the men over fourteen, and began a second “Demon’s Dance” even worse than the first. Women and children heard the blows, the running, and the cries of “Hear O Israel.” She described rabbis’ beards being torn out together with flesh. She described men forced toward the pits after the “performance,” fathers hearing sons cry from the earth, and women later subjected to terror after the men had already been destroyed.

Does the Lithuanian government intend to put Khane Pelts on trial for that testimony?

Take Yente Alter of Rietavas. She testified that some Lithuanians who fought with weapons “gave themselves the name of ‘Partisans,’” and that civilian power in town lay in partisan hands. Germans and their “loyal assistants, the Lithuanian partisans” lined Jews up, aimed rifles at them, beat men with boards and fence wood, stripped and drenched them, shaved rabbis’ beards, and made torture into a daily program. Later, the partisans selected women, promised them a “kindergarten” for their children, and took women and children out to be shot. She also described the hunting of women who tried to escape.

Does the Lithuanian government intend to put Yente Alter on trial for that testimony?

Take Sheyne Beder of Biržai, my own aunt. She testified that armed Lithuanian bands blocked escape routes and shot Jews trying to flee. She described Jews beaten with sticks and whips at forced labor and “sadistically tormented and harassed” under Lithuanian guard. She described six Jewish girls forced to clean toilets with their bare hands; when they begged for cloths, they were ordered to remove their underwear, use it to wipe the filth, and then put it back on. She described Miriam Zelkovitz, sixteen years old, having her head shoved into a toilet bowl and flushed while the perpetrators laughed. She described Lithuanian guards later beating the girls, threatening to shoot them if they refused sex, and eventually exploiting them.

Does the Lithuanian government intend to put Sheyne Beder on trial for that testimony?

And in this record, the word partisan is associated not only with murder, but with systematic sexual violence against Jewish women and girls—rape, coercion, humiliation, and selection under threat of death—which makes Lithuania’s present effort to protect the honor of that word even more obscene.

This is not one town and it is not one witness. Telzh. Rietavas. Biržai. Different places, different witnesses, different routes of destruction. Yet the pattern repeats: self-described partisans, robbery, humiliation, extortion, sexual violence, confinement, shooting.

Serious scholarship does not rescue the state here; it makes the problem worse. Saulius Sužiedėlis writes that Lithuanian police and administrative structures accepted the German lead and at times acted on their own, and that Lithuanian police units supplied “the majority of the killers” in the destruction of provincial Jewry and at Paneriai and the Ninth Fort. He also rejects the fantasy that the perpetrators were merely a tiny fringe of criminals. They came from different strata of society. And he adds a point Lithuania’s apologetics hate: those who refused to kill generally were not punished for refusal, and officials who left their posts rather than continue in their duties generally were not punished either.

Choice remained. Agency remained.

The Jäger Report adds a German-authored evidentiary layer the state cannot dismiss as subjective victim memory. It records the killing of well over 137,000 people in Lithuania by late 1941, overwhelmingly Jews, in operations carried out with Lithuanian participation across town after town. This is not only a Jewish lament. It is German administrative evidence.

The state’s own honors system makes the contradiction worse. Lithuania later honored Jonas Noreika and praised his “heroic role as a partisan leader,” even though the historical record ties him to the ghettoization and expropriation of Jews in Šiauliai. That means the Lithuanian state itself actively chose to apply the honorific word partisan to a man linked to Holocaust perpetration.

This is why the correct doctrinal name for what Lithuania is doing is testimonial nullification. The victims said what these men called themselves. The victims said what those men did. The state has now decided that its preferred vocabulary for the killers outranks the victims’ own vocabulary for the same killers, and it is enforcing that decision through prosecution.

And Lithuania may say Fridman’s post was vulgar, not scholarly. That argument also fails. The testimonial record itself is more graphic than anything Fridman posted. It contains children’s heads smashed against trees, girls raped under threat of death, men forced to handle or lick corpses, fathers hearing wounded sons cry from pits, and teenage girls’ heads shoved into toilet bowls while armed men laughed. If offensiveness were the standard, the archive itself would be contraband.

It is not the obscenity of the words that troubles the state. It is the truth they point toward.

So let the question be stated plainly. If Fridman is to be prosecuted for what he said about partisans, does the Lithuanian government now intend to put the dead on trial too? Malke Gilis? Khane Pelts? Yente Alter? Sheyne Beder? Does it intend to prosecute Saulius Sužiedėlis for writing that Lithuanian police units supplied the majority of the killers? They already threatened me with criminal prosecution for pointing out Holocaust perpetration by their national heroes. Simply, truth in Lithuania is criminalized.

That is where Lithuania’s case collapses. It is not really defending truth. It is defending a word. More precisely, it is defending a state-chosen heroic meaning of the word partisan against the earlier and bloodier meaning left by the witnesses.

I am not an outside critic speculating at a distance. My own family was destroyed by the conduct the word “partisan” describes, and the Lithuanian state now uses criminal law to protect the honor of that word against the families of the dead.

Lithuania can prosecute Fridman. It cannot prosecute the archive.

And in that archive, the word partisan is already a statement of criminality.

A fully footnoted version of this article appears at: https://open.substack.com/pub/grantgochin/p/the-partisans-lithuania-celebrates

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