Lithuania Had 36 Years. I Had 36 Days.

One researcher, 374 filings, and a question Lithuania’s institutions have yet to answer

Between September 18 and October 22, I sent 374 distinct filings to Lithuanian institutions. Of these, 213 ask for a correction, a review, an investigation or an appeal. Another 159 ask for records the state already holds. Two ask Lithuania’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance to forward documented submissions.

I am one person. Lithuania has universities, professional historians, state archives, museums, ministries and a government-funded center for researching the crimes of occupation. It has had 36 years of restored independence.

I did not discover this history in 36 days. The evidence took decades to gather. What I did in these weeks was place it before the institutions responsible for Lithuania’s public history and ask them to answer. Today, October 23, is the 36th day.

My question is simple. Why does Lithuania still publish accounts of the Holocaust that leave out Lithuanian perpetrators whom its own records identify?

The dead are counted. The killers are not named.

Take Darbėnai, a small town in Kretinga district. Lithuania’s national encyclopedia, the VLE, records that about 1,000 camp prisoners and local residents were killed there, and that the town’s Jewish community, about 540 people, was annihilated in 1941. The Lithuanian verbs are nužudyta and išžudyta: “were killed” and “were annihilated.” Neither says by whom.

The local tourism authority is plainer. It states that Darbėnai policemen and auxiliary policemen killed about 320 Jewish women and children.

In 2015 the historian Alfredas Rukšėnas, writing in Genocidas ir rezistencija, the journal of Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Center (LGGRTC), identified 33 local men: 32 police and auxiliary police and one municipal official. In his abstract’s words, they “indirectly contributed” to the genocide of Darbėnai’s Jews. That wording is a limit, and I respect it. It does not make all 33 men shooters.

So three Lithuanian public sources address the murder of Darbėnai’s Jews. They differ in whom they hold responsible. The tourism authority names the police. The state’s own research journal names local men. The national encyclopedia names no one.

Darbėnai is not a convenient exception. I have filed 63 correction requests with the encyclopedia, some covering more than one entry. The pattern repeats. In Papilė, the encyclopedia attributes the July 22, 1941 killing to an order of the German occupation authorities. After my request, Akmenė’s regional encyclopedia revised its entry to name local participants and their roles. The national encyclopedia says it added a link to a scholarly study but did not revise its wording. In Biržai, the encyclopedia states that about 3,000 people, mostly Jews, “were shot” in the Astravas forest in August 1941. It does not say by whom. Biržai’s own tourism center names German Gestapo officers, a Linkuva auxiliary police unit, Biržai’s Lithuanian police and Lithuanian white-armbanders. Elsewhere, too, the Jewish community is “destroyed.” Centuries of Jewish life before 1941 shrink to a line. The Lithuanian participation recorded in local sources, heritage files or published research does not reach the national entry. Each proposed correction must stand on its own sources, and each one cites them.

The work has so far covered 66 localities, among them Papilė, Palanga, Jurbarkas, Švėkšna, Obeliai, Gargždai, Jonava, Marijampolė, Utena, Panevėžys, Biržai, Kelmė, Šiauliai, Telšiai, Plungė, Raseiniai, Alytus, Tauragė, Trakai, Švenčionys, Ignalina, Kaišiadorys, Dusetos, Giedraičiai and Jieznas.

What 374 filings are, and what they are not

They are not 374 copies of one complaint. Each request is counted once, however many institutions receive it. The count leaves out 80 supplements, corrected resubmissions and notices; 34 forwarded messages; and 37 replies, payments and follow-ups. It also leaves out eight requests that recipients have registered but for which I have not yet located the sent email. An argument about historical honesty has to rest on honest arithmetic. The count stops at October 22. Today alone I filed a new appeal, a new request to the Foreign Ministry and ten further submissions in matters already open.

The requests differ because the institutions differ. The encyclopedia is asked to correct an entry. A municipality is asked about its memorial or its tourist text. An archive is asked for files so that a claim can be tested. None of them can do another’s job.

The eight Darbėnai requests are published together as a 229-page reading copy. They went to the national and regional encyclopedias, the municipality and museum, heritage officials, two national archives, the Vilna Gaon Museum and the local school. Four recipient bodies or administrative channels have confirmed registration: Kretinga municipality, the Ministry of Culture and its Cultural Heritage Department, the Special Archives and the Darbėnai school. The ministry and the department each registered DRB-003, although I have not yet located my original sent email for it. The LGGRTC received five of the requests as copies and registered all five. The remaining requests await confirmation of receipt. The signed originals are kept separately, because merging signed files can break signature verification.

One day at the President’s Office

On October 22 alone I sent the President nine applications and supplements about historical figures who hold, or held, state honors. They are published in full as a 106-page file. Read them and judge their quality for yourself. Separate records requests sent the same day are not in that file.

Over the whole period I have asked for review of 13 honored individuals. These requests do not declare anyone guilty, and they do not question resistance to Soviet rule. They ask whether the honors took account of evidence about conduct in 1941 and 1942. A later honor cannot settle an earlier question.

On October 23 the LGGRTC answered three of my requests about Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejys. It confirmed that when it granted him posthumous volunteer-soldier status in 1997, its file contained no information about his service in the 252nd Police Battalion. It also confirmed that no study of his individual conduct had ever been made. It has now promised one, with no deadline, and has postponed any change to its published texts about him until that study is done. It declined to give me the 1997 decision documents.

Finding the documents

Much of this work is simply finding records that already exist. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act lets anyone request federal records. I have asked the Justice Department, immigration authorities and the National Archives for any files on people and organizations in this history. Asking whether a file exists does not imply that anyone was investigated.

In the same weeks I sent 55 records requests to archives and agencies in 11 countries and the European Union, including the United States, Germany, Poland, Israel, the Netherlands, Ukraine and Russia. A document held in Moscow is judged like any other: by its provenance, content and corroboration. Requesting it endorses nothing about Russia’s version of history.

At home I ask Lithuania’s Central State Archives and Special Archives for the police, administrative and court files behind the public story.

Original records matter. On October 2 the LGGRTC acknowledged that it had not examined the 1970 Lübeck judgment before making assertions about how that case ended. Readers can compare its claim with the German material I have published.

What the state now knows

Every filing identifies the disputed text, supplies the evidence and asks for a reasoned answer. The work costs me time and money and earns me nothing.

Registration matters. When an institution registers a submission, it creates a dated official record. On October 22 the LGGRTC registered the copies it received of five Darbėnai requests as Nos. 7R-1445, 7R-1447, 7R-1448, 7R-1449 and 7R-1450. It received them as copies and was not asked to decide them. From that day the Center may dispute my conclusions or produce better evidence. It cannot say the evidence was never placed before it.

Some institutions have already acted. Biržai’s tourism center corrected its Lithuanian-language page on the Pakamponys killing site; its English versions are not yet corrected. The Akmenė library corrected its regional encyclopedia entry on Papilė, as I described in “My Shtetl Chose the Truth.” The Vilna Gaon Museum reports that it corrected two texts about rescuers to identify local collaborators, police, auxiliary units and informers; I have not yet independently verified the published pages. On October 23 the Kelmė regional museum accepted corrections naming Kelmė’s white-armbanders, auxiliary policemen and German soldiers among the killers, with publication set for November 4. A promise is not a published correction, and I will check what actually changes. Palanga said it will correct its municipal text once it receives the Center’s conclusions; the text is unchanged in the meantime. Others have refused. On October 23 the LGGRTC told me that nothing had changed its opinions on Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, although it had amended the wording on its website in August. Most other replies so far are registrations and acknowledgments. I will report what each institution decides.

Where an institution refuses, I appeal. On November 17 Lithuania’s Administrative Disputes Commission will hear my appeal against the LGGRTC’s refusal to correct two of its 2018 letters, a dispute I described in “Lithuania Told Congress It Fixed the Lie.” On November 18 the Commission will examine my appeal against the Foreign Ministry’s refusal to forward my evidence to the IHRA. Today I filed a third appeal, against the LGGRTC’s answer on Brazaitis.

In January the government adopted a 157-measure plan against antisemitism and xenophobia. It promises to confront “historical distortions” and “Holocaust denial and trivialisation.” The plan will be judged by what the state prints, honors, teaches and corrects.

Jewish organizations and international partners that work with Lithuania, including the partners in the EU-funded PRISMA project, should apply the same test. A meeting is not an endorsement. But credibility should not be lent before the evidence is examined.

Why I publish the record

I publish this work so that anyone can check it: on my Lithuania Project website, in its public document catalogue, in my Times of Israel articles and on Substack. The combined files let journalists, historians, officials and descendants read exactly what I submitted. The public catalogue now indexes 390 entries. These are documentary catalogue entries, not 390 complaints or 390 separate findings.

The research also feeds my doctoral dissertation, which aims to develop a method for detecting and resisting the institutional rewriting of history. Not every archive page belongs in a dissertation. What does not, I publish, so that a researcher a hundred years from now can find the documents, the questions I asked, and the answers I received or never received.

Why I do it

About 212,000 of the 220,000 Jews living under Nazi occupation in Lithuania were murdered, roughly 96 percent, according to figures from Efraim Zuroff and Dov Levin. Their lives cannot be returned. They can still be given the truth.

I do this because I love my people and mourn the Litvak civilization that was destroyed. Jews and Lithuanians lived side by side for more than six centuries. Our towns held synagogues, scholarship, music, commerce and generations of family life. I want that world remembered as something that lived, not only as something that was murdered. Hundreds more towns and villages remain to be examined. My main constraint is time.

For many Litvak families, the word Lithuania still means death. I have looked for a path to reconciliation, and I still want one. It has to be built on our shared history as it happened. That means confronting Lithuanian participation in persecution and murder, not only commemorating anonymous victims and honoring rescuers.

Lithuania is a member of the European Union and NATO. That standing does not certify its history. If an established European democracy can leave documented perpetrators out of its national memory, no country should assume its own past is safe from rewriting. My work is one effort to make the evidence harder to bury.