Carts, Sacks, and Certificates

In Valkininkai, the Jews were robbed before they were murdered, and the theft was carried out on official paper.

I was born in Riga. I grew up under Soviet rule. I left in 1989. For five years I researched and filmed the Baltic Holocaust for my documentary Baltic Truth. I have stood in the killing fields of Latvia and Lithuania. I have read survivor testimony in four languages. And because I was raised inside a state that moved property by decree, that authorized a seizure with a stamp and called it law, I recognize the document at the center of the Valkininkai record on sight. It is a certificate. It permits a man to take his neighbor’s cow. It was issued by the town administration while the cow’s owner was still alive.

The witness is Leyzer Goldman. He was a blacksmith, born in Valkininkai in 1895, resident there his whole life before the war. In December 1947, in the Bad Reichenhall displaced-persons camp, he gave his account to Leyb Koniuchowsky, who was recording the testimony of the few Lithuanian Jews who had survived to speak. Goldman reviewed it, approved it, and signed it. Copies were preserved through YIVO and Yad Vashem.[1] I make the provenance explicit because Lithuania’s defenders reach for the same reflex every time a Jew names a Lithuanian killer: Soviet propaganda. I know what Soviet propaganda is. I grew up reading it. A confession extracted in a Soviet courtroom and a testimony signed by a free man in a displaced-persons camp in the American zone are not the same kind of document, and no one who has handled both can pretend otherwise. Goldman’s account is a record. It was not manufactured. It was preserved.

Goldman makes the sequence impossible to sanitize. After the Lithuanian administration took over civilian authority in the town, Jews were forced to labor, beaten, humiliated, and robbed. A Jewish committee was made responsible for meeting the administration’s demands. One month after the Germans arrived, Jews had to surrender their cattle to the town administration. They also had to give up bicycles and radios. The same happened in the Jewish farming villages. Jewish farmers were left without cows and without horses.[2]

Then came the part the modern Lithuanian state cannot fold into “tragedy.” Near Selo, also called Degsnės, a village had burned during the German advance. Its peasants moved in among the Jewish farmers of Selo. They did not arrive empty-handed. They arrived with certificates from the town administration permitting them to take cows from the Jews. Goldman’s words belong in the indictment of Lithuania’s memory: they inherited everything while the Jews were still alive.[3]

Read the verb again. You inherit from the dead. To inherit from a living man is impossible — unless the paperwork has already counted him among the dead. Goldman’s word is exact. The certificates treated living Jews as an estate to be distributed. The neighbors were not stealing from people they expected to face again. They were collecting from people the state had already removed from the future.

That is not looting. Looting is disorder. This was order. A certificate is not a mob; it is a state instrument, a paper bridge between public power and private gain. It told the recipient the theft was authorized, the Jew that resistance was pointless, the village that the law had changed: Jewish property was available, and the administration would seal the transfer. I have watched a state use paper this way. It is how a regime makes its citizens into participants without firing a shot.

Murder created beneficiaries. Houses, cattle, horses, tools, bedding, shops, and fields do not vanish into abstraction. They move. They are occupied, redistributed, sold, inherited, nationalized, and finally absorbed into postwar and post-Soviet property histories no one is eager to reopen. The dead had neighbors. The neighbors had carts.

This is why the Jews of Valkininkai must be remembered as more than a column of victims at a pit. They were traders, artisans, peddlers, farmers, and orchard keepers. Selo and Leipunis were Jewish agricultural settlements. The community had schools, a library, a synagogue, a study house, Zionist organizations, merchants, blacksmiths, leather workers, and water carriers. The Olkeniki memorial book preserves photographs of Jewish labor in the area: Jews plowing, a leather worker, a tradesman in his doorway.[4] If the Jew is remembered only as a corpse, the stolen cow disappears with him. The Yizkor book reverses that erasure. It restores the economy that existed before the murder. It shows what was there to be taken.

The deportation completed the theft. On September 21, 1941, the men were assembled in the market square and marched under armed guard toward Eišiškės. At Eišiškės they were held in a barn and stripped of whatever they still carried; some had put on their best clothes, some had put on two suits, and the guards took it all. The next day, the first day of Rosh Hashanah, wagons were brought from the town and the countryside.[5] The convoy that carried Jewish families to their deaths was also a property convoy: it moved the people and their possessions in the same wagons, in the same direction.

The dates were not an accident. The recall from the peat bogs fell on the Sabbath; the removal of the women and children fell on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. Across the occupation the Germans and their Lithuanian executants returned to this calendar deliberately — striking on the Sabbath, on the eve of festivals, through the Days of Awe — because an assault timed to a holy day adds desecration to robbery and murder. The choice of the day was part of the cruelty. A people commanded to seek life in the Book of Life were carried off on the morning the book is opened.

Frame it correctly and the meaning is unmistakable. This was not looting after a massacre; it was theft as preparation, as administration, as evidence of knowledge. People do not bring carts and sacks to an uncertain event. They bring them when they already know that Jewish ownership has been marked for termination, that the police and the partisans will not intervene, and that the new rule is settled: Jews no longer hold property, because Jews are being removed from the category of protected life. Armed men surrounded the town and fired into the air while the women and children were taken from their homes with the last remnants of domestic life.[6] Bedding and dishes are the material culture of a home, and to carry them off that morning was to turn Jewish domestic existence into spoil before the murder was finished.

A Holocaust history told without property is not merely incomplete. It omits motive, participation, and benefit. It severs the murder from the society that profited from it. It converts theft into tragedy and beneficiaries into bystanders. The Lithuanian destruction was not only ideological. It was distributive. Someone received the cow.

The state prefers the other story. It photographs restored synagogues. It does not restore Jewish cemeteries; Jews restore them, and the state then markets those Jewish-funded sites to draw Jewish tourists and their spending. It builds museum language around “vanished” communities and speaks of tolerance and heritage. But in Valkininkai the Jewish heritage did not vanish. It was taken. The wooden synagogue burned in the June 1941 bombing; the movable wealth was extracted; the farms were redistributed; the last possessions were carried away; and the people were carried toward death.[7]

A rescuer can be honored, and a rescued life must be remembered. But rescue does not cancel the economy of participation. Every cow transferred before the murder, every certificate authorizing a seizure, every house entered, every wagon loaded, every garment stripped in the barn at Eišiškės belongs to the same history. A state that counts its rescuers and refuses to account for its beneficiaries has not remembered the Holocaust. It has prepared a defense.

This is the record Lithuania is now trying to police. It is prosecuting Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen, for historical speech, and it leans on a state memory apparatus that has spent decades narrowing the very record Goldman left. A state that murdered 96.4 percent of its Jews and has not punished a single Lithuanian for the murder is not entitled to decide, by criminal statute, which Jews may describe how the property of the dead changed hands. The questions Goldman’s testimony forces are not rhetorical. Who got the cows? Who got the horses? Who moved into the houses? Who carried away the clothing, the furniture, the bedding, the tools, the radios, the bicycles, the dishes? Who farms the fields? Who, today, lives inside the benefit of a theft the state has reclassified as a vague misfortune?

Goldman did not write a treatise. He gave testimony. But because he watched the machinery from the ground, his account holds the architecture of the crime: administrative demand, authorized seizure, neighbor benefit, armed removal, stripping at detention, transport of household goods, and murder. That is not accidental plunder. That is genocide carried out as redistribution. I recognized the certificate the moment I read it, because I have seen what a state can do with a stamp.

Eugene J. Levin is the founder and president of Dim Bom Productions, LLC, and the producer of the documentary Baltic Truth.

[1]Leyzer Goldman, born August 15, 1895, blacksmith, resident of Valkininkai; testimony recorded by Leyb Koniuchowsky in Bad Reichenhall, December 21, 1947, and translated by Jonathan Boyarin, May 18, 1994. Koniuchowsky recorded survivor testimonies in Yiddish after liberation; the witnesses reviewed and signed their accounts; copies were deposited with Yad Vashem and YIVO.

[2]Goldman testimony: Lithuanian civilian administration took over; Jews were forced to labor and robbed; Jewish committee had to satisfy Lithuanian administrative demands; one month after German arrival, Jews had to surrender cattle, bicycles, and radios, including in the Jewish villages.

[3]Goldman testimony on Selo / Degsnės: peasants from a burned village moved in with Jewish peasants; they brought certificates from the town administration allowing them to take Jewish cows; Goldman states that they inherited Jewish property while the Jewish farmers were still alive.

[4]Olkeniki in Flames, introductory and appendix materials: Jewish occupations in Valkininkai, Selo, and Leipunis; Jewish communal institutions; Appendix 3 photo gallery showing Jewish work in the Olkeniki area, including plowing, a leather worker, sleighs, and a likely blacksmith/tradesman.

[5]Goldman testimony: men marched to Eišiškės, held in a barn, and stripped of their possessions; on September 22, wagons carried women, children, elderly, sick, and household goods toward Eišiškės.

[6]Goldman testimony describes the September 22 wagons carrying bedding, clothing, and dishes together with women, children, old people, and the sick, while partisans surrounded the town and fired into the air.

[7]Olkeniki in Flames records the burning of much of Valkininkai, including the synagogue and study house, during the June 1941 bombing; Goldman’s testimony records later property seizure by Lithuanian administration and armed partisans.