I Told the Truth—Lithuania Didn’t Care |
After exposing my grandfather’s role in the Holocaust, I watched a nation double down on denial—and turn against those who speak out.
I spent years doing everything I was told a person of conscience should do.
I met with the directors of the Lithuanian Genocide Center Birutė Burauskaitė and Arūnas Bubnys to show them the truth about my grandfather Jonas Noreika. They did not care. I tried to meet with Lithuanian officials. I wrote, I pleaded, I documented, I published, I exposed my own family’s lies and my country’s lies, and still Lithuania did not care.
That hurts me to the very core of my Catholic soul.
Because this is not abstract for me. This is my family. My own family was used by the Lithuanian government to falsify my grandfather’s record and protect Lithuanians from the bitter truth of their role in the Holocaust. My family’s pain, confusion, silence, and divided loyalties were folded into a state project of Holocaust distortion. That is one of the most painful realizations of my life. It was bad enough to discover that my grandfather participated in crimes against Jews. It was worse to discover that the government of Lithuania was still using his descendants, his memory, and his honors as instruments of deception.
Writing Against a National Myth
That is why I wrote my book, The Nazi’s Granddaughter. I did not write it to attack Lithuania. I wrote it because I could no longer live inside a lie. I had been asked on my mother’s deathbed to preserve my grandfather’s memory. Instead, the truth forced me to confront what that memory had been used to hide. The book became a record not only of my grandfather’s crimes, but of Lithuania’s refusal to face them. And that refusal has not ended. It has hardened into policy.
I begged the government of Lithuania to withdraw my grandfather’s honors. A man tied to the destruction of Jews should not be honored by a democratic state. It shows complete disregard for his victims. It makes a mockery of every ceremony for rescuers, every speech about tolerance, every wreath laid at a massacre site. You cannot honor rescuers with one hand and preserve the honors of perpetrators with the other. That is not remembrance. It is hypocrisy.
Turning a Symbol into Evidence
I have already taken one step that I hope will matter. I donated the medal—The Cross of the Vytis—Lithuania awarded my grandfather to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I hope the museum will one day use it to help build a memorial not only to the Jews my grandfather helped murder, but also to the ongoing injustice committed by Lithuania in denying, minimizing, and laundering those crimes. That medal is a perfect emblem of Lithuania’s Holocaust distortion. Lithuania gave a man who was part of the genocide machinery—responsible for the murder of up to 14,000 Jews—its highest medal, posthumously, for his role in fighting Communism.
The Trial that Changes Everything
And I now would like to pay close attention to the trial of Artur Fridman. This case is not only about one Jewish man in Lithuania. It is about whether a state can prosecute speech in order to defend a false Holocaust narrative. In a 220-page criminal indictment, Lithuania accuses Artur Fridman of committing speech crimes through a Facebook post by challenging the state’s approved Holocaust-era narrative. His supposed crime is that he said on Facebook that men Lithuania still honors as heroes were implicated in Holocaust-era wrongdoing and that the state’s institutions were lying about them. Fridman also accused the national hero Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas of being a Soviet/KGB agent who betrayed his comrades.
Many Lithuanians, including partisans, were enlisted by the KGB to spy on each other. The Genocide Center’s own records show this. Even in my own research I discovered that one of my grandfather’s closest friends—Viktoras Ašmenskas—was enlisted by the KGB to spy on my grandfather. He may have been the one to betray my grandfather to the KGB. Instead of prosecuting Ašmenskas, the government paid him to write a book about how heroic my grandfather was in fighting the Communists and to avoid any mention of his role in the Holocaust.
Remembrance or Deception?
If Lithuania had faced the truth about Noreika when confronted with it, if it had withdrawn his honors, opened the files, corrected the record, and treated Jewish suffering with honesty, then perhaps it could claim some moral seriousness now. But it did none of those things. It protected the lie. It protected a dishonest honor. It protected the fraud. And now it is prosecuting a Jewish citizen for speech about the very reality it still refuses to acknowledge.
That is why the Fridman case matters so much.
A state that protects a false record and then prosecutes those who challenge it is not enforcing the law. It is enforcing silence.
That is not the behavior of a state seeking justice. It is the behavior of a state seeking diversion.
I know what it cost me to say publicly that my grandfather was not a hero—but a monster. I know what it cost me to publish the truth when my own country and parts of my own family wanted silence instead. I know what it means to stand against a national myth that has been protected for generations. That is why I cannot watch the Fridman case as though it were someone else’s problem. It is part of the same story. First Lithuania defended Noreika. Now it prosecutes a Jew. The method has changed. The purpose has not.
The purpose is still to protect the narrative—that all Lithuanians fought bravely against the Communists and had nothing to do with killing Jews.
A Reckoning Still Delayed
But this time Lithuania may have overreached. Through the law of unintended consequences, it may have handed the world a legal forum in which its own fraud can be examined. It may have created, through its hostility to one Jewish citizen, the very process that will expose what it spent decades trying to hide. If that happens, then Artur Fridman’s case will become far larger than the charges against him. It will become a test of whether truth can finally force its way into a system built to exclude it.
I hope Lithuania is forced to explain why it honors men like my grandfather. I hope it is forced to explain why it kept those honors after the truth was shown to it. I hope it is forced to explain why it ignored the pleas of descendants, researchers, litigants, and witnesses. And I hope it is forced to explain why, instead of correcting the record, it chose to prosecute a Jewish man.
Wishing you truth and peace in the storms of your life,