The Defense’s Last Witness Drew the Map

A commemorative drawing handed to me by one of my grandfather’s most devoted defenders placed him in command of the 1941 uprising in western Lithuania—and revealed what that defender chose to remember, and what he left out.

In June 2013, I sat in a one-room apartment in Aukštieji Šančiai, on the eastern edge of Kaunas, across from a man of eighty-nine. He was the last living participant in the five-day Lithuanian uprising of June 1941. His friends called him the Computer, because he could still produce any date or name you asked him for.

His name was Damijonas Riauka. He had served with my grandfather, Jonas Noreika, in the Lithuanian Activist Front, and he had spent more than twenty years assembling documents and broadcasts and leaflets to keep my grandfather’s memory clean. He translated roughly three thousand pages of my grandfather’s KGB interrogation transcripts from Russian into Lithuanian for my mother. Where the Soviet text said bandits, he wrote partisans.

He told me that what he called “the campaign by the Jews” against my grandfather was getting worse, and that it was more important than ever that I finish the book my mother had made me promise to write. The one that would clear the family name.

The Evidence He Handed Me

Then he gave me a drawing.

One sheet, hand-lettered in ink and washed with colored pencil. A banner across the bottom reads 1941 m. Sukilimas Lietuvoje, the 1941 Uprising in Lithuania. Cartoons run down the left margin inside barbed wire strung with drops of blood. A laurel wreath runs down the right. In the center, in ruled boxes, is the command structure of the uprising.[1]

He gave it to me as evidence for the defense.

The Six Districts Under Noreika

The center of the sheet branches from Kaunas into four regional commands. The third is labeled Žemaitija. Inside it Riauka listed six districts: Šiauliai, Telšiai, Mažeikiai, Kretinga, Tauragė, Raseiniai. Beneath the districts, in smaller letters, he wrote four words.

Vadas kpt. Jonas Noreika.

Commander, Captain Jonas Noreika. He gave my grandfather the rank and the command, over six western districts, in the summer of 1941, inside a document drawn to honor him. In Riauka’s world, command was the honor.

There is a second line, easy to miss, higher on the sheet. Riauka wrote that in the spring of 1941, at German order, the insurgents were told what they would be called, and the name given was TDA, Tautinė darbo apsauga. Not that the Germans approved a name. That the Germans issued one. And of all the names available, that one: Tautinio darbo apsaugos batalionas is the Kaunas formation whose men shot Jews at the Seventh Fort that summer and which was folded into the German police battalion system before the year was out. The standard chronology dates the TDA battalion to the final week of June 1941. Riauka placed the German naming in the spring. A commemorative drawing made decades later cannot resolve that discrepancy. But on the account preserved by one of the uprising’s own defenders, German direction preceded the first shot.

What the Map Remembered—And What It Didn’t

Now the part I cannot get out of my head.

Riauka counted. Rainiai, seventy-five victims. Pravieniškės, four hundred fifty. Juodupė, seventeen. Roughly nine thousand five hundred political prisoners liquidated. Thirty-four thousand two hundred sixty deported to Siberia between June 14 and 18, 1941. Not thirty-four thousand. Not about thirty-five thousand. Thirty-four thousand two hundred sixty. He named four of the dead in Kaunas because he knew their names. In the Aukštaitija box he recorded that three brothers named Meliūnai died at Kamajai.

Three brothers from one small town, on a chart of a nation’s history, because he thought they belonged on it.

He drew nothing about the Jews.

Not one destroyed Jewish community in the six districts under my grandfather’s command. Not one Jewish death. Not one Jewish name. Lithuania had the highest murder rate of Jews in Europe, and in Telšiai, Mažeikiai, Kretinga, Tauragė, Raseiniai and Šiauliai the Jewish communities were destroyed within months of the uprising Riauka spent his life commemorating. He listed those six towns as territory and left every person in them off the page.

This is a man who could not round a number. The precision is the point. That was not a lapse of memory in someone whose memory was his reputation.

The Six Names, Two Different Records

On December 1, 1941, Karl Jäger compiled his summary of executions carried out in the area of Einsatzkommando 3. Telšiai is on it. Mažeikiai is on it. Kretinga, Tauragė, Raseiniai and Šiauliai are on it.[2] Riauka named the command territory. Jäger named the killing territory. The same six place-names appear in both records, during the same period.

The Missing Link in the Official Story

Riauka did not draw the killings. He drew the command. Two months after the date on his own chart, as chief of the Šiauliai district, my grandfather signed the order that sent the Jews of that district to Žagarė. That chain has been set out in full elsewhere and I will not repeat it here. What Riauka’s sheet adds is the earlier link. He put Noreika in command of Šiauliai before the state ever admitted he was there.

Lithuania today runs a settled position on its wartime past. What was done to Lithuania and what was done to Lithuania’s Jews are placed on one scale and declared to balance, and anyone who insists otherwise is treated as an enemy of the nation. That position has a bureaucratic address. It is maintained by the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, defended by the Prosecutor General, and enforced through Article 170² §1 of the Criminal Code.

Riauka’s sheet is that same disposition before it became policy. Lithuanian dead counted to the individual. Jewish dead absent. Not denied, not disputed, not argued about. Simply not present.

Damijonas Riauka did not write the doctrine. He drew it.

The Doctrine Before It Became Policy

The pattern was older than Riauka. The Lithuanian state promised Jews national autonomy in 1919, in writing, when it needed international standing, and gave the Jewish National Council a written assurance in 1920 that the promise would go into the constitution. In 1921, when it needed Vilnius, it designed for Polish-speakers an entire architecture of minority rights, complete with elected minority bodies, a cabinet ministry and a League of Nations guarantee, and laid it before the League itself.[3] It got its recognition. The Ministry for Jewish Affairs was gone by 1924. Twenty years later, Ernestas Galvanauskas, the Lithuanian statesman who signed the 1921 minority-rights submission, appears on Riauka’s roster of the founders of the Lithuanian Activist Front in Berlin.

The Evidence Is Now Being Used Against A Jew

Artur Fridman is being prosecuted in Case No. 02-2-00512-24 under Article 170² §1 of Lithuania’s Criminal Code.[4] According to the indictment, the allegedly criminal positions include: that the Lithuanian Activist Front coordinated with the Germans, that it was organized by region, and that its leadership included men Lithuania honors as heroes.

All three are on Riauka’s sheet. In Lithuanian. In the hand of a Lithuanian nationalist who took part in the uprising and drew the thing to celebrate it.

Riauka was never summoned. No prosecutor demanded a retraction. No institution classified his archive as gross distortion. He lived out his years free, died in 2018, and the drawing sat in my house the whole time.

The same state is prosecuting a Jew for saying less than what he drew.

What the Drawing Does and Does Not Prove

I want to state the limits before anyone states them for me. This is not a 1941 record. A caricature of Roosevelt, aggregate deportation totals, the date of the Gorky executions: none of that could have been drawn in 1941. It is a commemorative reconstruction made years later by a man who was there. It does not prove a killing.

Here is what it is. A Lithuanian-language, Lithuanian-authored, nationalist document, drawn by a self-identified participant in the June 1941 uprising, naming Captain Jonas Noreika as commander of the Lithuanian Activist Front in Žemaitija, listing the six districts under that command, recording that the insurgents were named at German order, and omitting the destruction of the Jews of those districts entirely.

The Source the Defense Says Does Not Exist

A central claim in the Genocide Centre’s defense of my grandfather has been that no credible Lithuanian source places him in command of the LAF in Žemaitija in the summer of 1941. The Centre has spent years building and defending that claim. Here is a Lithuanian source produced by the defense’s own witness and entrusted to me as evidence for that defense. It has been in my possession since 2013.

When I first understood what was in that middle box, I wrote that my grandfather’s involvement now looked incontestable, and that a man who really led the uprising across Žemaitija must have held enormous power.[5] I did not want to write that sentence. The document made it unavoidable.

The Map Will Go to Washington DC

The original sheet is still in my physical possession. I have promised it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Damijonas Riauka gave it to a Lithuanian family so that it would be kept. It will be kept. It will be kept in Washington, in the archive of the museum that exists because of what happened to the people he left off the page.

I do not write this against Lithuanians. Most of the people I met in Kaunas were kind to me, including the ones who disagreed with everything I had come to say. My quarrel is with a state apparatus, a research centre and a political class that have decided the reputation of a dead officer outweighs the truth about two hundred thousand murdered Jews, and that have found a criminal statute to enforce the decision.

Riauka was not part of that apparatus. He was an old man in a small room who wanted his friend remembered as a hero, and who was honest enough, and precise enough, to draw the whole structure while he was at it.

The evidence was not seized from the defense. It was handed over by the defense. The defense’s last living witness drew the map, in his own hand, in his own colors, with his own legend.

The full sheet, transcribed and reproduced with ten annotated photographs, is available here: The Defense’s Last Witness Drew the Map (extended analysis, PDF).

Wishing you truth and peace in the storms of your life,

Silvia Foti

[1]Damijonas Riauka, 1941 m. Sukilimas Lietuvoje [The 1941 Uprising in Lithuania] (pictogram), in the author’s possession; described in Silvia Foti, The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather Was a War Criminal (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2021), chapter 14, “An Unreliable Witness,” endnote 1. The sheet is reproduced and transcribed in full, with ten annotated photographs, at https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/08/Foti-The-Defenses-Last-Witness-Drew-the-Map.pdf.

[2]Karl Jäger, Gesamtaufstellung der im Bereich des EK 3 bis zum 1. Dezember 1941 durchgeführten Exekutionen, Kaunas, December 1, 1941.

[3]League of Nations Archives, Geneva, R1653/41/18339/9556, Minority Questions — Protection des Minorités en Lithuanie (1922); League of Nations, C.95.M.54.1921.VII, Report by M. Hymans on the Conference at Brussels, Annex 4 (Lithuanian delegation submission of May 30, 1921, signed E. Galvanauskas). Both files are set out in the extended analysis linked above.

[4]Republic of Lithuania, Criminal Code, Article 170² §1; prosecution of Artur Fridman, Case No. 02-2-00512-24.

[5]Foti, The Nazi’s Granddaughter, 131.