I Was Not the First to File

Since 2015 I have filed forty-nine formal submissions with Lithuanian state bodies. Eight lawsuits and international filings. Eleven to the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre. Five criminal complaints under Article 170-2. Eleven institutional submissions. Two to the Commission of Journalist Ethics. Twelve letters.[1] Not one produced a finding on the merits.

Lithuania’s answer has been consistent. I am a foreigner with a grievance. The controversy is manufactured. In February 2025 Laurynas Kasčiūnas — member of the Seimas, former Minister of National Defence, newly elected chairman of the Homeland Union — called me a Russian agent and called me trash.[2]

That answer rests on a premise: that the file begins with me.

It begins in Paris on December 30, 1921, in a letter signed by Leo Motzkin.

I know that because of a book almost nobody reads. In July I borrowed it through interlibrary loan from Duquesne University. Herbert von Truhart, Völkerbund und Minderheiten-Petitionen, Vienna and Leipzig, 1931. I could locate no openly accessible full-text scan. To consult the complete inventory you borrow the physical volume.[3]

Truhart recorded the fate of every minority petition submitted to the League of Nations from its founding to February 1931. Who filed. On what date. Against which state. Whether the League ruled it admissible. Whether the state answered. What the Council decided, with the page of the record where the decision was printed. He writes that he had not intended to publish, that he printed his findings privately in the autumn of 1929 and circulated them among the officials who ran minority policy in Europe, and that the work met with no attempt at refutation.

Truhart counted five hundred and twenty-five petitions, filed by nineteen peoples living in thirteen states. Lithuania was the respondent in thirty-four of the 525. Across all thirteen respondent states, thirty-three of the 525 were filed by Jews.[4]

Four of those thirty-three concerned Lithuania.

Motzkin’s memorial of December 30, 1921, invoking the eight principles Lithuania had offered the Committee of Jewish Delegations in Paris in 1919 while it was seeking recognition. A petition of the Joint Foreign Committee of London, June 10, 1925. A memorandum signed Zévi Aberson, Geneva, September 3, 1925, on the language question and the expropriation of Jewish land. And a letter to the Council’s rapporteur transmitting the interpellation in which the Jewish, Polish and German deputies of the Lithuanian parliament itemized eleven statements their own government had made to the League that did not correspond to reality.[5]

Lithuania answered one of the four, in a document written to cover the Polish filings with the Jewish submission folded in.

On September 5, 1925, the Council closed the matter. It declared that it relied on the prudence of the Lithuanian government, and expressed the hope that the government would succeed in dispelling whatever apprehensions still existed among the country’s minorities.[6]

That is the whole outcome. No finding. No remedy. No supervision. No date by which anything was to be done.

It was not exceptional. Truhart grouped the 525 petitions into 314 complaint cases. Only fifty were officially handled — twenty-one by the Council and twenty-nine by Committees of Three. His summary of what that produced runs to one sentence: in no case was a complainant granted their full right by the Council. Not one of the fifty, in eleven years. The remaining 264 never received official consideration by the Council or a Committee of Three.[7]

Sixteen years after the Council relied on Lithuania’s prudence, 96.4 percent of Lithuania’s Jews had been murdered.[8]

I make no claim that the League could have prevented that. The claim is narrower. The Jews of Lithuania used the one international remedy available to them, correctly, through the recognized organizations, on documented facts, four times. The remedy produced an expression of hope. They knew by September 1925 what it was worth, and they had sixteen years to consider it.

Against the fourth of those four petitions, in the column where he recorded what the League did, Truhart printed a question mark.[9]

He had the official record, the Secretariat’s statistics, and access to the men who ran the system. He could not establish that anything happened to it.

The machinery explains why. Of 344 petitions received after 1923, eighty-two were removed from the procedure by the Secretary-General on his own personal assessment, a power the Council expressly confirmed to him in 1929. The petitioner was never told. A complaint could be terminated by one official, without a stated reason, without notice, and without the Council ever learning it had been made.

The procedural dismissal I have spent four decades documenting is not a Lithuanian invention. The pattern was already embedded in the international system to which Lithuania answered.[10]

What has changed is the direction.

A hearing in the case of Artur Fridman is scheduled for August 26, 2026. On May 9, 2024, at Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius, Fridman posted on Facebook after visiting the grave of his grandfather Aron Fridman, a Jewish soldier of the Red Army who fought Nazi Germany. Seventeen months later prosecutor Kristina Minko signed a 220-page indictment against him under Articles 170-2 §1 and 313 §2 of the Criminal Code.[11]

For a century the state’s answer to Jewish complaint about Lithuanian history was procedural termination. The complaint was received, registered, circulated and filed. Nobody was punished and nobody was vindicated.

It is now a criminal charge, and the Jew is the defendant.

In 1925 the Lithuanian deputies told the Council that proceedings against three former members of the Constituent Assembly, for having submitted a complaint to the League, had not been discontinued, and that an investigating judge was still inquiring into their case — while Lithuania’s own representative told that same Council that no such proceedings existed.

A hundred and one years later the state has stopped denying it.

The record

The full archival account runs to some eleven thousand words and sixty-seven sourced footnotes. It covers the eight principles of August 1919, the constitutional assurances of 1920 and 1921, the electoral construction three of Europe’s leading jurists found baseless, the day in December 1924 when the Lithuanian parliament wrote išskiriant mažumas — excluding the minorities — into its own procedure and told Jacob Robinson there were no places, the repeal of Jewish autonomy in 1925, and the disposal of the whole record in Geneva.

It is published as There Are No Places.

The full document, with all footnotes and archival references, is also available as a PDF.

The documents are not obscure. They sit in the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva, under Minority Questions, dossier 9556, in volumes R1653 and R1654. They have been open for decades. So far as I can establish, no Jewish organization currently engaging the Lithuanian state has read them.

Lithuania has never suffered from a shortage of promises to Jews. What it has never encountered is an institution prepared to determine whether it kept them.

[1]Gochin submission record, 2015–2026: eight lawsuits and international filings; eleven submissions to the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania (LGGRTC); five criminal complaints under Article 170-2 §1 of the Lithuanian Criminal Code; eleven institutional submissions; two complaints to the Commission of Journalist Ethics; twelve letters. Documentation held by the author.

[2]Statements of Laurynas Kasčiūnas, February 2025. Kasčiūnas served as Minister of National Defence during 2024 and was elected chairman of the Homeland Union (TS-LKD) on 9 February 2025. Documentation held by the author.

[3]Herbert von Truhart, Völkerbund und Minderheiten-Petitionen: Ein Beitrag zum Studium des Nationalitätenproblems (Vienna and Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1931), 181 pp. Borrowed by interlibrary loan from the Gumberg Library, Duquesne University, July 2026. A search of HathiTrust, the Internet Archive and Google Books in August 2026 located no publicly accessible full-text scan.

[4]Ibid., 8–9. Upper Silesia is excluded from the count and treated separately.

[5]Ibid., 87, section III (Litauen), items 1–4.

[6]Ibid., 108. Council decision of 5 September 1925, 35th Session, Journal Officiel VI, No. 10, pp. 1339 and 1452.

[7]Ibid., 16. Of 314 complaint cases, 21 reached the Council and Committees of Three reported on a further 29.

[8]Approximately 96.4 percent of Lithuania’s Jewish population was murdered between 1941 and 1944, the highest murder rate in Europe. Embassy of Israel in Lithuania, “Commemorating IHRD in Lithuania, 2025,” stating that over 200,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered, “the highest percentage of any country in Europe.”

[9]Ibid., 87, item 4. The entry reads Behandlung durch den Völkerbund: ?

[10]Ibid., 17. Of 344 petitions received after the Council resolution of 5 September 1923, 236 were referred to Committees of Three; 82 were excluded from the procedure by the Secretary-General on the basis of personal assessment; for 26 the decision could not be established. The power was expressly confirmed to the Secretary-General by the Council decisions of 8 and 13 June 1929 (ibid., 173 and 177). On non-notification: ibid., 174, recording that under the system in force no communication was made to a petitioner regarding receivability or non-receivability, and that a petitioner inquiring after the fate of a petition was told only whether a member of the Council had directed the Council’s attention to the subject.

[11]Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24, Vilnius District Prosecutor’s Office, indictment filed 30 October 2025, 220 pages, signed by prosecutor Kristina Minko; charges under Articles 170-2 §1 and 313 §2 of the Criminal Code. Written pledge not to leave the country imposed 8 January 2025.