Lithuanian Holocaust Fraud

Transcript of speech delivered to the Gross Family Center for the study of antisemitism and the Holocaust on December 17, 2023.

Lithuanian Holocaust Fraud

I am honored to be with the Gross Family Center for the study of antisemitism and the Holocaust. Thank you Lauren Gross. My focus today will be the unfolding of the Holocaust in Lithuania, and some commonalities with the savagery and denialism of the massacres of October 7 by Hamas, where echoes of the Lithuanian Holocaust were repeated.

We Jews say, “Never Again”. What exactly does that mean? While lyrical, what is our responsibility? Our responsibility must go beyond the words.

To Lithuanians, we were their neighbors, their friends and their co-workers. Then, they turned on us. By the end of the Lithuanian Holocaust, there were only a few thousand Jews remaining, whom Lithuanians had not yet found, or not yet managed to murder.

The joyous orgy of destruction in both Lithuania and in Southern Israel on October 7 devised the most creative, pitiless, painful methods of murdering innocents for their crime of being Jews. Lithuanians and Gazans both sliced open pregnant women and decapitated their unborn fetuses. Gazans baked a baby in an oven. A Gazan academic asked if they had used baking powder when baking the baby. To those who want Jews dead, we are not human. Supposedly, we are said to deserve this for our ever evolving crimes, which never need fact or evidence for conviction.

Most of us here, now, are alive because our families were fortunate enough to be able to leave Europe before they were able to murder us. Some of us who are here, now, are because our families were fortunate enough to survive those horrors. We are the remnants, still alive to remember and speak the truth. Our families’ voices will not be stilled through apathy or forgetfulness. Our families’ voices must be heard.

My Grandparents were Lithuanian Jews. They were lucky to leave Lithuania for South Africa prior to the Shoah. Approximately 100 of my relatives who remained behind were slaughtered. My focus for the past 30 years, has been, and continues to be, on what happened in Lithuania, who committed the crimes, and the lies Lithuania teaches today.

And now my focus has been forced to widen. I see antisemitism everywhere I turn. What do I tell my college age son right now? Does he have to be scared?

How can I protect him as we are in different cities?

If we were in the same city, could I protect him? NO!

Why does he have to be scared in the United States of America?

Will my son be a victim of violent antisemitism like so many other Jewish students? Will he be forced to stand in the corner of his University classroom with the other Jewish students for his professor to prove a falsehood?

Should I tell him before he walks into history class that he should not be alone?

Chaverim, is this truly happening in America? Today?

Just as in America, Lithuania should have been where our families could have lived in peace and safety, grown, contributed to society, and been buried with dignity. Instead, Lithuania had the highest murder rate of Jews in all of Europe. It was safer to be a Jew in Nazi Germany, than it was to be a Jew in Lithuania.

Less than 1% of Holocaust perpetrators were ever held to account for their crimes. In Lithuania, that number remains zero.

I identified the murderer of my own family in the Lithuanian Holocaust. To my shock and disgust, I discovered that he is celebrated as a beloved and admired national hero in Lithuania. His name is Jonas Noreika.

It is fact that Noreika personally was responsible for the savage and senseless slaughter of up to 14,500 of our Jewish family members. 14,500.

Currently however, Noreika has been re-written in Lithuanian history as a heroic rescuer of Jews. I have filed approximately thirty legal actions inside Lithuania demanding truth. I have been blocked at every single turn. Every case was dismissed on a legal technicality without ever examining the issues. No Lithuanian Court has been willing to adjudicate Lithuanian Government Holocaust frauds.

The government of Lithuania enforces and applauds these falsifications. A result is that I currently have pending criminal charges against me in Lithuania – for “slandering” their heroes.

In 2018, Jonas Noreika’s granddaughter, Silvia Foti, stepped forward to bravely expose her grandfather’s crimes in her book “The Nazi’s Granddaughter”, now republished as “Storm in the Land of Rain”. Silvia identified the Lithuanian Government’s Holocaust revisionism as the “greatest criminal cover-up of the 20^th Century”. Silvia, and I have now combined efforts to show the world that mass human rights violations, and genocide, can not and will not be covered-up, or excused.

I have published numerous Holocaust Survivor testimonies from Lithuania in my blogs in the Times of Israel. They are harrowing to read. A normal human mind cannot comprehend the horrors that were so enthusiastically inflicted upon our families by ordinary Lithuanians. I ask you to please read the testimonies and remember the facts. I guarantee you will be shocked by what you read. In every one of these testimonies, the Survivors describe how Lithuanians murdered Jews.

Either all of the Survivors were cumulatively, consistently, and collaboratively lying in their eyewitness testimonies, or the Lithuanian Government is committing Holocaust revisionism, and distortion. Who is the liar? The Survivors or the Lithuanian Government? Which is it?

There are approximately 400 people in this room. Look around you my friends. Had we been in Lithuania, only fourteen of us would have survived to write one of those testimonies. Who among us would have been the survivor?

There were fewer than 1,000 Nazis posted in Lithuania. These included secretaries, drivers, cooks and auto mechanics. Nazis enabled the Lithuanians to slaughter our families. The Lithuanians voluntarily performed the atrocities, with zeal, and relish. Exactly the same as on October 7 when ordinary Gazans crossed the border en masse so they too could murder a Jew, and rape a young Jewish girl. When presented the opportunity with no apparent consequences, Lithuanian behavior was repeated on October 7.

Lithuanians certainly were not and are not truthful about their crimes. They either mewl about having been victims and claim they heard nothing, saw nothing, did nothing, and knew nothing, OR, they claim they were just too busy rescuing Jews to notice the reality. Now, I ask you – do you believe that?

Michael Kretzmer, an English-Litvak documentarian, made a harrowing documentary titled “J’Accuse!”.

In the first 12 months on the international film festival circuit, it has already garnered 137 awards or nominations. The world is finally willing to hear the facts of the Holocaust in Lithuania. The veil has been lifted. Except, ironically, in Lithuania itself.

Thirteen years after Jonas Noreika was exposed as a prime Holocaust perpetrator and the genocidal murderer of my own family, Lithuania declared him a national hero, honoring his supposed courage and humanity. In a similar fashion, Palestinian murderers of Jews as honored as “martyrs” and their families are awarded state pensions.

Since Jew killing was a worldwide sport, Lithuanians were not satisfied murdering just their own Jewish citizens, so, they travelled all over Europe, volunteering to work in the Concentration Camps so they could also torture, rape and murder Jews in other countries, as well as bloodsoaked locations such as the Warsaw Ghetto. Lithuanian army contingents travelled to neighboring countries to gleefully slaughter as many Jews in Europe as they could. After all, to them, a Jew is just a Jew.

Another in their disgusting pantheon of Jew murdering heroes, Antanas Baltušis, served as the leader of the guards at the Majdanek Concentration Camp. The Lithuanian Government claims Baltusis only served on the outside of the camp, and therefore was unaware of what was happening inside. Do they really expect ANYONE to believe that? Have you ever heard of a guard serving on the inside of a gas chamber?

The Lithuanian Government claims the very leader of the guards was oblivious to the screams, stench, smoke and blood of those actively being murdered one meter from him? By his own subordinates! Preposterous!

The distortion, revision and lies carefully constructed by the Lithuanian Government are so blatantly crude, that one wonders, who do they think will actually believe it? We are not that naïve. They cannot treat us with such contempt to think we are fools to their deceptions. We WILL NOT be victimized again. Even so, TODAY Baltusis remains their national hero.

Yet another of their heroes, Kazys Škirpa, early on called for the “elimination” of Jews from Lithuania.

In 1939 there were approximately 250,000 Jews. Now there are only about 2,500. 99% of Lithuanian Jews have been “eliminated”. Skirpa’s plan of mass murder and ethnic cleansing is the most successful program of its kind, in human history. It is the most successful initiative Lithuania has ever devised and undertaken in its entire history.

Our families were termed “useless eaters”. Our children were placed into effective “meat grinders”. Butchering was the only Lithuanian solution for our people. They deemed us unworthy of life and ineligible to exist. They dehumanized us and demonized us. They incited their public to perpetrate genocide on us, just as today, Hamas calls for the elimination of Jews from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

80% of Lithuanian Jews were “eliminated” prior to the dictate of Hitler’s “Final Solution”. The government of Lithuania officially says Skirpa’s call to “eliminate” Jews was just a mere “incident of antisemitism”. – “A mere incident”? 220,000 Jews murdered, and the call for our genocide was just a “mere incident” of antisemitism.

I have provided the Lithuanian Government with more than a dozen names of their heroes who were Holocaust perpetrators. They. Do. Not. Care.

According to the post Holocaust legal Nuremberg definition, every single member of Lithuania’s wartime Provisional Government falls into the category of a Holocaust perpetrator. When they claim it was “only” Lithuanian degenerates who were murdering Jews, they are LYING. It was from the very top of their national leadership, on down. Studies show that in some villages, it was up to 50% of the Lithuanian population that participated in Holocaust crimes.

The Lithuanian government tells us that the only ones to blame for the Holocaust were the “Nazis and their collaborators”. This stance has been created to focus only on Nazis and to distract from Lithuanians.

They ignore the fact that Lithuanians began murdering Jews even before the Nazis arrived in Lithuania. The fact is that Nazis gave Lithuanians weapons and Lithuanians enthusiastically murdered Jews.

While Lithuanians and Nazis shared the same basic ideology; even in their own barbarity, the Nazis were appalled by the extreme, brutal, predilections and inhumanity of the Lithuanians.

Yad Vashem declared 0.04% of Lithuanians were Righteous Gentiles. 0.04%.

That leaves 99.96% of Lithuanians who were either perpetrators, bystanders, or unable to prove their claims they were rescuers.

Lithuania did not and has not punished a single Holocaust perpetrator, instead, they converted many of their murderers into their national heroes. The Lithuanian lies that perpetuated today, are responsible for murdering our families yet a second time.

There is not a single piece of evidence that Nazis punished any Lithuanians for refusing to murder a Jew. The infinitesimally small number of Lithuanian rescuers were rescuing the Jews NOT only from Nazis, but from – FELLOW LITHUANIANS!

Privately, some members of the Lithuanian government and their diplomats admit the truth. But they insist that “education requires time”. How much time do they need? After 80 years – time is up. Facts are simply facts. Facts do not change with age.

Through my legal actions, I have been able to expose the Lithuanian President, Prime Minister, Parliament, Public Prosecutor, Heritage Department, Mayor of Vilnius, every single one of their Courts including both of their Supreme Courts, as participants in the national program of Holocaust deception. Thus, I have become persona non grata in Lithuania. My legal cases stand as permanent proof that 78 years after the end of the Shoah, Lithuania is a country that elevates Holocaust fraud.

Lithuania’s strategy is to delay, obstruct, stonewall, boycott or destroy discussion. They will not engage in a factual, bilateral conversation. Their communication is by approved talking points, they will not accept questions, because they have no legitimate answers. They hope people like me, Sylvia and Michael will get so tired, or so defeated, we will give up. We will not.

Lithuania’s comprehensive and deliberate lying about the greatest crime in the history of the world, begs the question – is there anything they will not lie about?

Thankfully my friends, WE are not alone in this fight. Many governments, organizations and individuals have voiced their staunch disapproval of Lithuania’s Holocaust deceptions, including – the Directorate-General for Justice of the European Commission, the Government of Germany, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the US State Department, the US Congress, Lithuania’s own Presidential Commission, Simon Wiesenthal Center, American Jewish Congress, the Lithuanian Jewish Community, the European Jewish Community, the World Jewish Congress and many more. Recently, in a report to Congress dated May 2023, the US State Department, again, and for the umpteenth time, noted the deception in clear and unambiguous terms.

On September 21 of this year, Chairman of Yad Vashem, Ambassador Dani Dayan, delivered a speech to the Parliament of Lithuania. Directly facing the Prime Minister, he deconstrued some of Lithuania’s Holocaust frauds and called for Lithuania to become truthful. They continue to ignore him.

Lithuania is impervious to truth, they simply reissue the same falsified talking points and hope that the lies eventually stick as the fabricated truth.

Our only recourse is the Court of Public Opinion. And that is all of us here today.

When they look us in the eye and misrepresent, they are insulting us and treating us with contempt. More importantly, when Lithuania covers up the crime of genocide and avoids culpability, it shows current and future mass murderers that they too can get away with murder. It has worked for Lithuania, and it will work for others. This places our future generations at risk. We are not just addressing this for our ancestors, we are doing this to protect our children.

Holocaust revisionism IS antisemitism. Defining the murderers of Jews as national heroes IS insulting the victims and insulting to every one of us. Rewriting history to declare the murderers as innocent or heroic is dehumanizing to EVERY Jew.

Silvia Foti’s book, “The Nazis Granddaughter” and the documentary J’Accuse! have become our best means of exposing the authentic memory of the Holocaust. We have already educated an estimated half million people worldwide. Yet, we have not been able to educate the government of Lithuania.

Lithuanian diplomats have been invited to showings of J’Accuse! and book presentations of The Nazis Granddaughter in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Warsaw, Krakow, London, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, Cape Town, Johannesburg and even in Lithuania itself. In EVERY case they have either ignored the invitation or claimed not a single government employee, locally or internationally, is able to attend in person, or by Zoom, as they are all just too busy. Do they think we are stupid?

So, what does “Never Again” really mean? While we allow and tolerate a European government to invert Holocaust truth, we negate the meaning of “Never Again”. It is incumbent upon us to act.

That we are unable to achieve even the most basic truths from Lithuania about their Holocaust crimes is abhorrent.

Should we expect the same denial, distortion and revision from Hamas over their October 7 massacres? After all, if a EU and NATO member can re-write the facts of the most documented crime in history, why should we expect Hamas to be any different?

With each generation, the Holocaust becomes diminished. We must preserve the authentic memory of the Holocaust. It is easier for Lithuania to pretend our cause does not exist. We know the truth. We remember. And we must teach our future generations well. We are the protectors and guardians of Holocaust history.

Lithuanians murdered our children.

Lithuanians murdered our parents.

Lithuanians murdered our grandparents.

Lithuanians extinguished our humanity.

Lithuanians demolished our personhood.

Lithuanians stole our businesses and our assets, and they are now stealing our history.

Are we going to do what they expect us to do?

Are we going to stand idly by?

For the memory of our families and for our own dignity, Lithuania CANNOT win.

Lithuania WILL NOT win.

WE will not let them win.

We will NOT stand idly by.