Lithuania uses 0.04% to launder 96.4%

Lithuania’s Rescuer Day whitewashes Holocaust guilt. A rescue rate of 0.04 percent is not evidence of national virtue. It is evidence of moral scarcity. Lithuania has turned that scarcity into propaganda. Lithuania’s fraud is to take that rarity and market it as normal.

Yad Vashem recognizes 924 rescuers from Lithuania. Out of a population of roughly 2.5 million at the time, that is just 0.04 percent—about one person in 2,500. That is not a national characteristic. It is a statistical exception. In a group of 2,500 Lithuanians, one rescued Jews. The other 2,499 did not. Yet Lithuania builds its self-image around the one and uses that solitary exception to obscure, excuse, and deny the conduct of the other 2,499.

Each year Lithuania marks March 15 as the Day of the Rescuers of Lithuanian Jews. The date was chosen because on March 15, 1966, Ona Šimaitė became the first Lithuanian recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. In itself, there is nothing wrong with honoring rescuers. They deserve honor. What is wrong is using them as political cover. Lithuania has built a public ritual around the rarest fragment of wartime conduct and inflated it into a national self-portrait.

That inversion would be dishonest anywhere. In Lithuania it is grotesque, because Lithuania had the highest Jewish murder rate in Europe during the Holocaust. The commonly cited figure is 96.4 percent. That means the country in which rescue was rarest is also among the clearest cases where rescue cannot honestly be used as a national alibi.

This is the context in which the commemoration must be judged. A country with a 96.4 percent Jewish murder rate cannot construct innocence out of 0.04 percent.

Lithuania does not merely honor rescuers. It simultaneously preserves space in its national pantheon for men directly implicated in the murder of Jews. That pattern is documented and institutional, not incidental.

Jonas Noreika, as head of the Šiauliai district under Nazi occupation, signed orders dealing with the confinement of Jews and the disposal of Jewish property. The record is not rumor. It is not family memory. It is not ideological interpretation. It is administrative paper bearing his name and office. Yet Lithuania’s state apparatus moved to launder him, culminating in efforts to present him as a rescuer of Jews.

Juozas Brazaitis served as acting prime minister of the Lithuanian Provisional Government in 1941 — the same government that oversaw the initial mass murder of Jews in the first weeks of the German occupation. Lithuania has honored him as a national figure.

Kazys Škirpa founded the Lithuanian Activist Front, which issued explicitly antisemitic proclamations before the German invasion and helped organize the violence that followed. He is memorialized in Lithuanian public space.

Antanas Šemaška commanded units responsible for massacres of Jews. He too has been accorded honors by Lithuanian institutions.

This is not a pattern of isolated oversights. It is institutional policy. And the method by which Lithuania executes that policy is precise, deliberate, and effective.

In 2023, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis visited Yad Vashem, ostensibly to honor his great-grandmother, Righteous Gentile Ona Jablonskytė-Landsbergienė. His words were carefully chosen. He spoke of Jews “brutally murdered in Lithuania” — passive construction, no agent named, no nationality attached to the killers. What he did not say was that his great-grandfather, Gabrielius Landsbergis-Žemkalnis, served as infrastructure minister in the Lithuanian Provisional Government and was directly tasked with establishing the 7th Fort concentration camp in Kaunas, where Jews were murdered. One great-grandparent rescued a single Jewish girl. The other helped build the machinery that murdered thousands. Landsbergis presented only one of them to the world, at our most sacred institution of Holocaust memory. As documented in Dorian Grey Landsbergis, this is Lithuania’s signature technique: extract the rescuer, erase the perpetrator, present the fragment as the whole.

The same pattern operates at the institutional level. As documented in Enabling Genocide, Lithuanian state institutions have systematically enabled and protected Holocaust distortion — not through crude denial, but through excruciatingly calibrated language, selective commemoration, and the deliberate omission of Lithuanian agency in the murder of Jews. Every word is chosen. Every perpetrator is quietly repositioned. Every rescuer is amplified into a national symbol. The result is a false picture assembled entirely from true fragments — more dangerous than an outright lie precisely because it is harder to refute.

The rescuers deserve better than that.

They were exceptional precisely because the society around them was not. Their moral significance lies in their rarity. If rescue had been normal, Lithuania would not have murdered 96.4 percent of its Jews. If rescue had been typical, there would be no need to single out 924 names from a population of millions. The state’s fraud is to take the very fact that makes rescuers worthy of honor — their rarity — and convert it into evidence of collective innocence. That is not remembrance. It is laundering.

Lithuanian institutions and affiliated bodies openly frame Rescuer Day as a national point of pride. State and quasi-state commemorations describe the day as an annual civic event, with schools, government offices, and public institutions all enlisted in the ritual. That alone would not be objectionable if the same state had also shown a willingness to draw a firm line between those who saved Jews and those who helped murder them. But it has not done that. Instead, it has repeatedly and deliberately muddied the categories.

That is why the ceremony cannot be read innocently. Under honest conditions, a rescuer day would teach that these men and women were admirable because they defied their surroundings. Under Lithuania’s current memory regime, the same day is used to imply that the rescuers somehow reflected the nation as a whole. They did not. They stood against what the nation had become — and by continuing to honor the murderers alongside the rescuers, Lithuania reflects what it still is.

There is a simple moral test. A state that truly wishes to honor rescuers must also protect the distinction between rescuer and killer. It must not manipulate that distinction for nationalist convenience. It must not elevate hearsay over signed orders. It must not honor men implicated in ghettoization and mass murder while asking the world to applaud ceremonies for moral courage. It must not turn the tiny number who saved Jews into cover for the vastly larger reality that Jews in Lithuania were hunted, dispossessed, concentrated, and murdered with extraordinary speed.

Lithuania fails that test.

The answer is not to stop honoring rescuers. The answer is to stop misusing them. Honor Ona Šimaitė. Honor every person who risked death to save a Jew. But honor them truthfully: as exceptions, not representatives; as refutations of national failure, not proof of national innocence.

Until Lithuania can do that, its Rescuer Day will remain compromised. A country cannot market moral scarcity as virtue. It cannot use the rare courage of a few to whitewash the conduct of the many. And it cannot demand credit for rescuers while preserving honor for men like Noreika, Brazaitis, Škirpa, and Šemaška.

The rescuers deserve remembrance. Lithuania owes them something harder than ceremony. It owes them the truth.