Genocide Center’s Pattern Is Proof of Distortion

The Genocide Center’s defense of my grandfather is not revealed by any single false claim. It is revealed by a pattern that never changes: every error, every omission, every ruling points in the same direction–only his innocence of being involved in killing Jews despite overwhelming evidence proving otherwise. After 40 years of believing the official story about Jonas Noreika, I came to recognize that consistency itself as evidence.

Raised Inside the Story

My grandfather was Jonas Noreika. In Lithuania he is General Storm, an anti-Soviet partisan honored with a school, plaques, street names, and a state biography. I was raised inside that story. I learned him as a hero before I could read, and I kept him that way for forty years.

The state institution that certifies the heroes — the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, the body Lithuanians call the Genocide Center — has ruled, and re-ruled, that he did not take part in the murder of Jews. I once believed that ruling. Then I read the documents my mother left me, the orders he signed, and I stopped. So when I tell you how the story is built, I am not guessing.

Error Does Not Move in One Direction

That is why the thing I notice now is not any single falsehood. It is the sameness.

The Center does not make a scattered variety of mistakes about Jonas Noreika. It makes one mistake, over and over, always in the same direction. An institution that was honestly trying and sometimes failing would err in both directions. It would occasionally be too hard on the hero and occasionally too soft.

The Center is never too hard on the hero. Every ruling, every finding, every letter lands on the same side. That is not what error looks like. Error scatters. This does not scatter.

Two Standards of Proof

Anything that points at my grandfather’s guilt is held to the proof of a courtroom: corroborate it, date it, name the source, survive every objection. Anything that points to his innocence is believed on sight. A child carried food to Jews; a priest remembered him fondly; a rescuer is said to have known him. No document is asked for. The family anecdotes are entered as fact.

But Aleksandras Pakalniškis, who sat in the commandant’s office in Plungė and placed my grandfather inside the events, as the one who gave orders to kill all the Jews, is told his memory is not confirmed.

The full record of how that was done is now public,[1] and I will not repeat it here. I only want to point at its shape, because the shape is the confession.

When the Method was Turned on Me

I know the shape from the inside, because the Center eventually aimed it at me.

When I asked a Lithuanian court to correct the record on my grandfather, the Center answered that I had not been a participant in the events, that I was not yet born, and that I was not a professional historian.[2] All true. None of it touches a single document my grandfather signed.

That is the whole technique in one sentence: discredit the person at the door so you never have to let the evidence inside.

They used it on the witnesses. They used it on the outside researchers. They used it on me, the granddaughter who came carrying the family’s own papers.

From Mistake to Decision

If this were honest work done badly, notice would fix it. I gave them notice. I asked them, in writing, to withdraw the honors.

They did not correct anything. They entrenched.

In December 2019 the Center reaffirmed its conclusion clearing Noreika, and when it was asked to annul that conclusion it refused, describing the December finding as the natural continuation of its findings from 2015, 2017, and 2019 — an integral and comprehensive whole.[3]

Read that as the admission it is. They were not revisiting the question. They were welding each conclusion to the last so that none could be pried loose.

A person who makes a mistake and is shown the proof will reconsider. A person who is shown the proof and answers by reinforcing the mistake has stopped making a mistake. He has made a decision.

The Pattern Extends Beyond Noreika

And it is not only my grandfather.

The same maneuver runs through other files. For years the Center insisted that the United States Congress had exonerated Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, the prime minister of the 1941 Provisional Government on whose watch the killing began. Congressman Brad Sherman challenged that claim in writing more than once, stating plainly that no such exoneration exists.

The Center did not correct it.[4]

One false finding can be an accident. The same trick, in case after case, defended after every correction, is not a series of accidents. It is a practice.

The Language the Center Cannot Stop Speaking

This is what I want people outside Lithuania to understand.

You are not looking at a research body that keeps getting my grandfather wrong. You are looking at a method that is working exactly as designed, and the proof is its consistency.

Honest inquiry produces a mess of conclusions pointing every way. This produces one conclusion, every time, pointing at exoneration.

I recognize it because I was taught to produce that same conclusion, faithfully, for most of my life. Then I read the documents he signed, and I stopped.

The Center has read the same documents. It has not stopped.

That refusal, repeated until it is seamless, is not a defense of history. It is a confession written in the one language the Center cannot help speaking: the language of doing the same thing every single time–clear a Lithuanian’s guilt of participating in the Holocaust because it was only the German Nazis who did that. Only the Nazis can take all the blame.

Wishing you truth and peace in the storms of your life,

Silvia Foti

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[1]For the documented anatomy of the method — the treatment of Aleksandras Pakalniškis, the laundering of an old émigré attack into a state finding, and the loop of findings citing findings — see Grant Gochin, “How Lithuania Discredited Its Witness,” Substack.

[2]Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania, submission to the Vilnius Regional Administrative Court, October 1, 2018, arguing that the author was not a participant in the events, was not yet born, and was not a professional historian. Quoted in Silvia Foti, “Lithuania’s 80-year denial of its Holocaust role: That’s gaslighting,” Times of Israel.

[3]Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania, “On the Provision of Information,” February 11, 2020, describing the December 2019 finding as a continuation of the Center’s 2015, 2017, and 2019 findings and as forming an integral and comprehensive whole, static-cdn.toi-media.com.

[4]On the same maneuver repeated in the case of Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, prime minister of the 1941 Provisional Government, and the Center’s refusal to correct the false claim of a United States congressional exoneration, see Gochin, “How Lithuania Discredited Its Witness.” My own account of the family record is in The Nazi’s Granddaughter (Regnery History, 2021), published in some markets as Storm in the Land of Rain.