‘Marginal’ Slavery
We Were Slaves in Lithuania. Lithuania Calls It Marginal.
Next spring, at Seder tables around the world, a child will ask why this night is different from all other nights. The family will answer with the sentence at the heart of the Haggadah: Avadim hayinu le-Pharaoh be-Mitzrayim. We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.
For generations, Jews have retold an enslavement more than three thousand years old. The Mishnah requires each of us, in every generation, to see himself as though he personally came out of Egypt. We eat the bitter herb so that the slavery stays in the mouth and does not retreat into a textbook.
That leaves a question I cannot put down. We keep Pharaoh’s whip alive across three millennia. We do not keep the Lithuanian county head’s labor order, the Lithuanian policeman’s rifle or the hands a Lithuanian farmer tied, though all of them belong to the lifetime of people still alive.
In 1941, Jews were enslaved in Lithuania. Lithuanian officials listed them, Lithuanian police guarded them and Lithuanian farmers worked them, under rules the German occupier wrote. Most of them were then murdered.
Lithuania’s state Genocide and Resistance Research Centre published, on page 40 of its 2020 Holocaust volume, a description of Lithuanian participation as “essentially marginal.” The passage gets there by pointing up the German chain of command. I asked the Centre to correct or annotate it. On 3 November 2026, it refused.
In this series I have set that one sentence beside the murders, the rapes, the murdered children and the plunder. Now I set it beside the slavery.
A note on sources. Nothing here depends on the Centre’s authority. Where I quote the Centre, I treat its words as claims about itself, not as proof. The facts come from wartime documents, from historians working outside the Centre, and, where it cuts deepest, from the Centre’s own pages.
Avadim hayinu: we were slaves in Lithuania
The occupier did not hide what the system was. On 13 August 1941, Reich Commissioner Hinrich Lohse ordered that Jews fit for work be drafted for forced labor. The historian Joachim Tauber, in Arbeit als Hoffnung, shows that their pay was to cover bare subsistence and was not to match the work done. In April 1942, Franz Murer told Vilnius employers in writing that the assignment of Jews to work “ist Zwangsarbeit”: it is forced labor. The money for that labor went into the Reich Commissioner’s budget.
The orders came from the Germans. The lists were made by Lithuanians.
On 7 August 1941, the Lithuanian head of Kaunas county ordered lists of all Jewish males aged 12 to 60, with their trades, for labor deployment. The order went to Lithuanian township heads and Lithuanian police posts. It reached down to boys of twelve, a year short of their bar mitzvah, to be recorded by trade.
The next day, the Lithuanian head of Alytus county reported to the Lithuanian Labor Organization Department, sorting the Jews of his county into age groups for work. On 20 July 1941, the Lithuanian Activist Front staff in Joniškis recorded that 30 to 40 Jews were used every day on roads and bridges. Under the Lithuanian General Council for Internal Affairs sat an Inspectorate of Forced Labor Camps, which supervised the camps and regulated their finances. The historian Christoph Dieckmann found its camp statutes, issued on 1 October 1941. When the German Security Police complained in 1943 about conditions in the camps of the state peat trust, the Generalkommissar replied that the camps had to use “freely recruited Lithuanians” as guards.
The Centre calls this marginal.
Ma nishtana: four questions for the Centre
Pravieniškės was a forced-labor camp east of Kaunas. Dieckmann describes it in 1941 as mainly a labor camp for Jews. The Centre’s own journal records that the prisoners who worked its peat bog and forest “už darbą negaudavo jokio atlygio”: they received no payment for their work.
The same article records about 280 Jews shot at Pravieniškės in August 1941 and 253 more in September. It says the guards carried out the executions. For the killings of 1941, it names no one. The Yahad map of killing sites attributes the September shooting to members of a Lithuanian self-defense battalion, together with German troops.
Forced labor without wages is slavery. The Centre wrote down the missing wages itself.
So here are four questions for the Centre, in the form every Jewish child knows.
- Why is an order that reached down to boys of twelve marginal?
- Why is a peat bog where prisoners worked for nothing, and where about 533 Jews were shot, marginal?
- Why are farmers who bound women’s hands and feet and drove them to the pits marginal?
- Why are policemen who marched women and children to a labor camp, and then shot them, marginal?
The Centre’s answer rests on rank. The Germans gave the orders, so the Lithuanian part was secondary. Rank tells you who signed the directive. It does not tell you what happened to the boy on the list, the prisoner on the bog or the woman whose hands were tied. For each of them, the Lithuanian official, guard and farmer were the slavery. They were the ones in the room.
Maror: the women of Telšiai
The bitter herb at the Seder is meant to make the eyes water. Let it be Telšiai.
In the summer of 1941, the Jewish women of Telšiai were held at Geruliai. Their husbands, fathers and sons had already been shot. Yad Vashem’s record of the site preserves a survivor’s words: farmers would come to the camp and forcefully take the girls to work in the fields.
Khane Pelts survived to testify, and I set out her account in an earlier article. Some peasants, she said, kept the women to spare themselves the cost of servants, and “exploited the women with hard work.” Before Christmas, the women were ordered back, supposedly for health examinations. “Many peasants bound the hands and feet of their Jewish women and took them back.” Those who were a little late “brought the bound women directly to the pits near the Rainiai compound.”
Tauber records that the farmers paid the occupation authority three rubles a day for each Jewish woman. The farmer paid the German. Tauber’s account records nothing paid to her. She was taken by force from a camp where her family’s killers stood guard. She could not refuse and could not leave. When the farmers had no more use for her, they tied her hands and feet and delivered her to be shot.
The farmer paid three rubles for her day’s labor. What power did she have to refuse?
Work, then the pit
At Dimitravas, in Kretinga county, the sequence was the same, only faster. Dieckmann writes that about 500 Jewish women and children from Skuodas were marched there at the end of July 1941 by 20 Lithuanian policemen. Those who could not keep up were shot on the road. The rest were put to farm work. The camp was run by a Lithuanian, Edmundas Tyras.
In mid-August, Dieckmann records, Lithuanian policemen from Skuodas and local volunteers shot the women and threw the children into the pits alive. A Soviet commission later counted 510 bodies: 385 women, 94 adolescents and 31 children. It found no gunshot wounds on the children. Forty girls kept back for work were moved to Darbėnai and murdered there.
In Kaunas, thousands of Jews were marched every day from the ghetto to the Aleksotas airfield. “Given no wages,” Yad Vashem writes, “the workers subsisted on starvation rations.”
At Žiežmariai, Lithuania’s national encyclopedia records Jewish road-builders held in railway wagons under a guard of local residents. Every prisoner, children included, had to go to work each morning. In May 1943 the camp held 1,200 Jews. Many were moved out that June. In December, the prisoners still held there were taken to Paneriai. The sick were shot, and the able-bodied men were made to dig up and burn the bodies of murdered Jews.
Work did not save these Jews. It delayed their murder for as long as someone found them useful.
Dayenu
At the Seder we sing Dayenu, “it would have been enough,” and count the gifts one by one.
The Centre’s word deserves its own count. Had the record held only the murders, it would have been enough to strike the word. Only the rapes, and it would have been enough. Only the murdered children. Only the plunder. Now add the slavery.
How much more does the Centre need?
“We were slaves to Hitler in Germany”
The survivors did not wait for anyone’s permission to put their own slavery into the Seder. In April 1946, they gathered in Munich for the first Passover after liberation, led by the U.S. Army chaplain Abraham Klausner. The Haggadah they used was written by a Lithuanian Jew, Yosef Dov Sheinson, a Hebrew teacher from Kovno who had survived slave-labor camps in the Dachau complex. Klausner’s preamble said it plainly: Pharaoh and Egypt had given way to Hitler and Germany. Sheinson rewrote the opening line: “We were slaves to Hitler in Germany.”
Then came the moment that belongs to the youngest child. At every Seder table in the world, a small voice asks why this night is different. In Munich there was no small voice. The children had been murdered, and the Center for Jewish History calls their absence the first and most painful difference of that night. A survivor who was there later recalled that when the time came for the Four Questions, the room began to weep. Grown men, who had carried stones and dug graves, sat at the table and could not begin. Then one man asked the child’s question himself, and the others joined him, as JTA reported.
Next spring, a child will ask that question again. Somewhere in that room should be the memory of the children who could not ask it in Munich, and of the women in Telšiai who were never asked anything at all before their hands were tied.
That is the precedent. Survivors who had been slaves months earlier made their own enslavement part of Passover. Sheinson’s opening line named the German master. He was writing in Germany, among the ruins of his own family, and owed no one a complete indictment.
Lithuania owes one, and it has had eighty years. A 2011 Centre study says provincial Jews were most likely “not regarded as a serious labor force.” Not serious enough to be kept alive. Serious enough to be listed by trade, guarded on the bog, rented to farmers and returned bound to the pits.
The IHRA working definition of Holocaust denial and distortion lists, as distortion, intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the impact of the Holocaust or its principal elements, including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany. Lithuania is a member of IHRA. IHRA has not ruled on page 40. The Centre, however, was shown the record and expressly kept the word. Measure that conduct against the definition its own state adopted.
Say it about America
Try the word on another history. Suppose an institution of the American government called the overseers, the slave patrols and the slave traders “essentially marginal,” because the laws were made elsewhere, and refused to correct it. No museum, university or official would stand beside it, and no Black American would be asked to prove that the overseer mattered to the man under his whip. American slavery was a crime of whips, rape, stolen children and auction blocks, but it ran on a cold arithmetic: an enslaved man was capital, and a dead slave was a loss on the books, so his owner kept him alive to work. In Lithuania, no one carried a Jew on the books. The Jew was a body waiting for a pit, and when the work ran out there was no sale and no inheritance, only bound hands and a trench. That was not a labor system that happened to kill. It was a killing system that paused for labor. So why do we Jews accept the word? Lithuanian officials are welcomed by Jewish organizations and photographed at Jewish events while the state’s Genocide Centre keeps “marginal” in print. No Black community in America would sit for that photograph.
Be-khol dor va-dor: in every generation
The Haggadah says that in every generation they rise up to destroy us. It also says that in every generation we must see ourselves as though we left Egypt. The two sentences belong together. Memory is how Jews answer those who would erase them.
Pharaoh is not distorting anything. A European Union member state is, today, with a state budget behind it.
The Centre can still act. It can correct or annotate page 40. It can answer the forced-labor record, document by document. And the Seimas, to which the Centre answers, can ask why it refused.
Until then, I ask every rabbi, every community and every family that will sit at a Seder table this Passover to add one more remembrance to the night:
We were slaves in Lithuania. We were listed by Lithuanian officials, guarded by Lithuanian police and worked on Lithuanian farms, within the lives of our parents and grandparents. Lithuania’s Genocide Centre calls their part marginal. Tonight we remember them, and we refuse the word.
Let the youngest child ask a fifth question: Why on this night do we remember Telšiai, Dimitravas, Pravieniškės and Aleksotas? Let the answer be: Because the state that holds their records calls the Lithuanian part marginal, and we will not let that word stand.
What was marginal about binding a woman’s hands and feet and delivering her to the slaughter pits?
