A witness named the woman killing Jewish children. Lithuania’s Genocide Centre keeps the word “marginal.”

Two women smashed Jewish children’s skulls with a large rock and killed children by striking their heads together beside a killing pit near Raseiniai. Dina Zisa Flum, hidden in hay nearby, described watching them in August 1941. In the testimony Efraim Zuroff later published, she named one: “One of the women was the student Klimaite.”

The testimony was recorded on April 4, 1945. In 2020, Lithuania’s state-funded Genocide and Resistance Research Centre published a book describing Lithuanian participation as “supporting cast and thus essentially marginal.”

The woman at the pit had a surname. The children had their skulls broken. The state institution has an adjective it refuses to surrender.

One book and the children it records

On printed page 40 of The Holocaust in Lithuania 1941–1944, Darius Furmonavičius makes Lithuanian participation conditional, then infers its marginality from the SS command structure. He also suggests others were involved “whether these people wanted to or not.”

Turn to printed page 265. Arūnas Bubnys’s Dimitravas account identifies Skuodas squad members and local volunteers as shooters and records children thrown into pits and buried alive. It reports an excavation finding no gunshot wounds on the children’s remains. The following page records 415 children among the victims of Raseiniai’s final killing period.

One publisher printed both the diminished responsibility and the murdered children. Its compiler wrote the account of children buried alive. The account is in the Centre’s own book.

German organization of the Holocaust does not make a Lithuanian who personally kills a child peripheral to that killing. Organizational rank describes a place in a hierarchy. It does not reduce the act performed by the person at the pit. The Centre must defend the inference it published, rather than answering a different question about who ruled occupied Lithuania.

This essay continues my examination of the language used to obscure Holocaust crimes, following What Lithuania Means When It Says “Vanished,” “Lost,” or “Perished”; The Germans Called Them Lithuanians. Lithuania Will Not.; Jäger Kept the Ledger. Lithuanians Filled It.; and “‘Marginal’ Rapes”. Each returns the reader from a general formulation to the acts and the people it obscures. Here, the victims are infants and children.

The student was named

In his January 2021 article, Zuroff called the woman “the student K.” In his June 2023 review, he published the surname Klimaite in the quoted testimony. The name was public.

Zuroff’s investigation sought to establish whether one of two emigrants was the woman Flum had identified. The Canadian candidate died in 2022; the identification remained inconclusive, Global News reported in 2024.

The failure to complete an identification leaves a historical task unfinished. It does not answer the testimony about what happened at the pit. Researchers must establish who the student was and what became of her.

Zuroff also reported that Flum’s statement was omitted from the published collection The Lithuanian Slaughter of Its Jews, without an explanation. The omission makes access to the original testimony especially important. Her account must be available for examination, quotation and comparison with the other surviving records.

Mothers and children selected

The history reconstructed in my 2022 Raseiniai series and current town report identifies the local machinery of confinement and selection.

The Raseiniai Region History Museum’s 2018 documentary publication, printed pages 98–99, reproduces a 1947 statement under the name Zisla Faumienė. She described women being divided according to whether they had small children. Mothers and children were marched away; younger, childless women were held back.

On printed page 101, Abramas Lazarskis’s September 30, 1947 statement describes personally seeing ghetto chief Aleksas Grigaravičius shoot Berman and Smulevskienė. It also describes his selection of prisoners and appropriation of their belongings.

Selection was an act. Guarding was an act. Taking a mother and child toward a killing ground was an act. The history of their murder must identify the people who made each stage happen. A general statement about German command cannot perform that work, and cannot erase the responsibility those records attribute to local officers.

Children killed before their mothers

At Darbėnai, Alfredas Rukšėnas’s 2015 study in LGGRTC’s journal describes children killed before their mothers. Killing groups alternated with men stripping newly arrived victims. Bubnys’s provincial study, printed pages 39–40, describes mothers with small children selected for removal and children thrown alive into the pit.

Sorenia Zimonaite’s published testimony, document 83, describes infants killed against trees. The Darbėnai report places that account alongside the research identifying the local police’s operational roles.

At Kaušėnai, the Plungė report records another named witness. In The Jewish Page of Plungian History, Jakovas Bunka recounts Juozas Mineikis’s description of hiding near the killing site as a teenager and seeing mothers and children murdered, including babies struck against trees.

At Gargždai, Bronius Saliklis’s translated August 2, 1945 statement attributes the pistol killings of about twenty children to Ildefonsas Lukauskas and another policeman. The report also examines a published 1945 exhumation account that inferred burial alive for seven children whose bodies showed no injuries.

The Skuodas report follows women and children to Dimitravas and Alka. Bubnys identifies the Skuodas auxiliary police, local volunteers and shooting commander Mykolas Vitkus. His account of children buried alive is the one reproduced in the Centre’s 2020 volume.

Marginal, to whom?

The mother watching her child killed did not need an SS organizational chart to identify the person doing it. Historians need that chart to reconstruct command. They also need the witness, the local officer’s name, the selection order and the account of what happened to the child. Command and direct perpetration must both remain visible.

The publisher kept the word

The Centre published the passage and, in decision No. 55R-1130 of November 3, 2026, signed by Arūnas Bubnys as acting Director General, declined to correct or annotate it. The request was registered September 21, 2026 as 7R-1167.

I examined that refusal in “‘Marginal’ Murders” and Fuzzy History. Furmonavičius wrote the marginality passage. Bubnys compiled the volume, wrote the account of children buried alive and signed the refusal to correct the disputed characterization.

The editorial question is why the publisher retains a general reduction of local responsibility alongside its own accounts of direct killing.

Calling the passage scholarly interpretation does not reconcile those accounts. The Centre must explain how it reached its conclusion about marginality and how that conclusion survives the conduct described in the sources.

What must now be produced and corrected

LGGRTC must withdraw or substantively correct page 40’s marginality formulation and account for the direct perpetration its own volume records. Independent scrutiny under parliamentary oversight must compare the passage, the underlying evidence and the signed refusal. The Centre cannot answer this challenge simply by reaffirming its confidence in its author.

Yad Vashem must obtain and produce the original Flum testimony from the Koniuchowsky collection, with its complete archival locator and any available translation. The Lithuanian Special Archives must search for and produce any Soviet-era investigative records naming the Raseiniai student Klimaitė, including spelling variants, or explain what was searched and what was found. These are demands for documented access; any lawful restriction must be identified.

The children’s deaths were recorded. Witnesses named perpetrators. The Centre’s own compiler described children buried alive. The institution he headed then preserved the word that diminishes local participation.

Which part of personally killing a Jewish child was marginal?

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Source note

Institutional authorship establishes what the Centre published. The historical case rests on the documents and testimony it cites. Flum’s 1945 testimony is quoted through Zuroff’s publications; its original Yiddish manuscript has not been independently inspected here. The museum’s 1947 witness, also rendered Flaumienė, was recorded as born in 1900 in Bedančiai, daughter of Cifikas. She may be the same survivor; the identity is unresolved, and the two records are not counted as independent witnesses. The Darbėnai, Plungė and Gargždai passages retain their named testimonial or published-study attributions. Zimonaite’s dates and basis of knowledge require comparison with the original interrogation; Bunka transmits Mineikis’s account; the Gargždai burial finding is a reported forensic inference. Events and counts from different sites are not combined. Page 40 does not specifically assess Flum’s allegation, and 55R-1130 is an editorial response, not an adjudication of it. No motive is inferred from the omission of her statement from the published collection.

Corrections and source-based disagreements: ggochin@gmail.com