The Holocaust In Lithuania |
To Lithuanian historian Algimantas Kasparavicius, the greatest tragedy of 20th century Lithuania occurred not when it lost its statehood following the Soviet Union’s invasion in June 1940, but a year later, when Nazi Germany stormed into the country and proceeded to murder nearly all of its Jewish citizens in the Holocaust.
It goes without saying that some Lithuanians assign far more importance to Lithuania’s loss of independence than the mass slaughter of Jews. As the Lithuanian American historian Saulius Suziedelis acknowledges, many Lithuanians have had difficulty accepting “the historic weight of the Shoah,” in part because it competes with the Stalinist crimes committed by the Soviet occupiers between 1940 and 1941 and again from 1944 until 1990.
Nevertheless, Lithuanian historians, journalists and human rights activists have devoted increasing attention to the vanished world of the Litvaks, or Lithuanian Jews, since the restoration of Lithuania’s sovereignty in 1990.
As Suziedelis writes in Crisis, War, And The Holocaust In Lithuania (Academic Studies Press), a superior academic work accessible to a general readership, an understanding of the enormity of the Shoah in this Baltic state requires knowledge of what was destroyed in four short years. Proceeding from this assumption, he devotes about the first third of his massive book to the rich pre-1940 history of Lithuanian Jewry.
Suziedelis, a professor emeritus at Millersville University of Pennsylvania and an expert in Russian and East Central European affairs, begins with the settlement of Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. By the mid-18th century, the substantial Jewish community there, rooted in a culture steeped in the Yiddish language, was the largest in the Diaspora. Suziedelis explores it at length without getting bogged down in jargon or minutiae.
Under Russian imperial rule, Lithuania lay within the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement, to which most Jews in Russia were forcibly confined. “Here, until the early 1900s, mass violence against Jews was virtually unheard of,” he claims.
Lithuania, he points out, was the birthplace of the Bund, the General Jewish Workers Union, a socialist movement that looked askance at Zionism and would be an important institution in Poland after World War........