The Ministry of Memory

Why I petitioned IHRA to review Lithuania’s membership

Orwell gave his invented tyranny a Ministry of Truth, and gave the Ministry a single task: keep the record obedient to the state. Facts that embarrassed power were dropped into what he called the memory hole and were gone. The warning in Nineteen Eighty-Four was never only about lying about the present. It was about who decides what happened. A government that can fix what is remembered can fix, downstream, what a citizen is still permitted to say is true.

In Holocaust memory, Lithuania has built something close to that. Not a single ministry. A working system, and its first instrument is vocabulary.

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell showed how soft words are made to carry hard crimes, how language defends the indefensible by quietly removing the actor from the act. Lithuania’s murdered Jews did not “vanish.” They did not “perish.” They were not “lost.” Those are the words Lithuanian official memory reaches for, and not one of them contains a killer. The people behind those verbs were hunted, registered, robbed, marched, and shot, in large part by Lithuanian men who knew the victims’ names, their streets, and the faces of their children. When the state does name the local killers at all, it calls them “collaborators,” a word that hands the initiative back to Germany and demotes the men who organized the murder to someone else’s helpers.

The arithmetic is not in dispute. Of roughly 220,000 Jews in Lithuania in June 1941, about 212,000 were murdered, the most complete destructions of any Jewish community in occupied Europe. Around two thousand four hundred remain today. The Lithuanian state has not punished any Lithuanian for those murders. None of that is hidden by “vanished.” Only the hand on the rifle is.

A single rephrased verb is the smallest unit of the apparatus I am calling the Ministry of Memory. The larger machine is assembled from state-funded research bodies, prosecutors, diplomats, commemorative offices, public-relations formulas, and select Jewish institutional encounters and diplomatic partners willing to accept engagement without answers. Its product is national innocence, manufactured out of documentary contradiction.

I have now filed a formal petition with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance asking IHRA to review, and if necessary to suspend, downgrade, or revoke, the member-country status of the Republic of Lithuania.

The petition asks IHRA to require a Lithuanian response, publish or summarize it, set corrective benchmarks, issue a reasoned assessment, and consider suspension, downgrade, or revocation if Lithuania refuses cure.

Before I filed, I gave Lithuania notice and a window to answer. The Consul General in Los Angeles confirmed receipt and forwarded the petition into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the embassy in Washington. The window closed on June 2 with no answer on the merits. On June 3 I filed a supplement recording the silence. In a case built on the refusal to cure, the refusal to answer is not a gap in the record. It is the record. The petition is now filed; the silence is now filed with it.

This is not a fresh accusation. It is a demand that IHRA act on a warning its own experts already issued. In April 2019 the chairs and recent chairs of IHRA’s own expert working groups issued a statement of grave concern about the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre and its treatment of Jonas Noreika. The documentary record places Noreika at the center of the ghettoization and expropriation of Jews in the Šiauliai district in 1941. The Centre had nonetheless recast him as a rescuer without direct evidence of his own rescue activity. The experts tied the whole performance to IHRA’s Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion. The people who wrote that statement were the expert chairs and recent chairs IHRA relies on to apply its own distortion standard.

Seven years have passed. Lithuania has not corrected the record. It has defended it, repeated it, and given it the protection of the state. I have put forty-nine formal submissions before Lithuanian state bodies since 2015. None produced cure. Lithuania has not been left in ignorance; it has been left in possession of the documents.

I have written separately about how the apparatus handles a Jew who objects. When Lithuania’s Consul General in Los Angeles answered twelve questions this spring about the prosecution of Artur Fridman, she dealt with the eight procedural ones and left the four that mattered untouched. She did find room to describe my published work as marked by a “consistently adversarial position toward Lithuanian state institutions.”

I accept the word. I am adversarial to the lie, not to the country; to the honoring of murderers, not to the Lithuanian people. On what grounds should I not be?

The Holocaust problem in Lithuania is no longer confined to 1941. It is what the state does with 1941 now: which dead it renames, which killers it decorates, which files it quietly corrects and which it shields, and which sentences it is willing to hand to a prosecutor.

That last item is where the case turns. On October 30, 2025, the Vilnius District Prosecutor filed a 220-page indictment against Artur Fridman, a Lithuanian Jewish citizen, under Article 170² §1 of the Criminal Code, the statute covering public approval, denial, or gross trivialization of recognized international crimes, the Holocaust among them. The charged conduct was a Facebook post he wrote at his grandfather’s grave. The grandfather had fought Nazi Germany in the Red Army. Five weeks later, on December 4, 2025, a Vilnius court convicted the Lithuanian party leader Remigijus Žemaitaitis under the same statute for inciting hatred against Jews. The statute is not dormant. It works. It is simply pointed in chosen directions.

It has never been pointed at the state-aligned distortion IHRA flagged in 2019. Not at the Centre. Not at the rehabilitation of Noreika. Not at the machinery that turns signed orders for ghettoization and plunder into a story of rescue and national honor. I asked Lithuania to apply the statute there years before Fridman was charged. It refused, and refused again.

First the state removed the Lithuanian perpetrator from the sentence. Then it prosecuted a Jew for putting him back.

That is what the petition puts to IHRA. The mechanism it asks for runs through the Alliance’s own expert bodies, on a defined clock, with a reasoned public assessment due within ninety days and the corrective benchmarks aimed squarely at the Centre and the Noreika file. The remedy is institutional because the violation is institutional.

The defense Lithuania will raise is predictable, and the petition answers it in advance. This is not a charge of collective guilt. Lithuania had rescuers. Their courage was real and it should be honored. The fraction of Lithuania’s prewar general population recognized as Righteous, about four hundredths of one percent, is not the problem. The problem is the use of that fraction as the moral face of the state while the rest of the record, the organizers, white-armbanders, auxiliary police, property administrators, local participants, and postwar offices that wrote the euphemisms, is moved out of the frame.

Orwell would have recognized the economy of it. The Ministry of Memory does not need to deny the Holocaust. It needs only to rename enough of it. It does not deny that the Jews are gone; it says they vanished. It does not deny that Noreika signed the orders; it says the documents are not the whole man. It does not reject IHRA; it joins IHRA, cites IHRA, stands beside IHRA for the photograph, and then declines IHRA’s standard at the exact moment the standard reaches Vilnius.

So the real question the petition forces is not about Lithuania. It is about IHRA. A definition that binds only weak actors and convenient enemies is not a standard. It is scenery. The 2019 statement named the institution, the man, the documents, and the standard Lithuania refused to apply to itself. If membership in the Alliance now confers immunity from the Alliance’s own findings, the membership has been turned against its own purpose.

The dead do not need a Ministry of Memory. They need sentences with the subject left in. They need the men who acted named as the men who acted, and the state that guards their reputations named as the state. They need Jewish institutions to stop lending their good name to the euphemism. They need IHRA to treat its own definition as a rule rather than a backdrop.

The Jews of Lithuania did not vanish. The grammar came afterward, and made them disappear a second time.

My petition asks IHRA to read the sentence with the killer still in it.