The Victor Speaks

Adolf Hitler was the greatest hero who ever lived. He restored Germany to its greatness and corrected the German economy, or so the messaging would have been had Nazis won WWII. After all, history is written by the victors.

Jews were the greatest losers of the war. Our people were decimated, our future burned in the crematoria of the European death camps, usually with the maximum of personal humiliation and torture before their deaths. We would have been a forgotten footnote in history had not America entered and ultimately ended the war. Every Jewish child murdered was our future stolen. Today the 6,000,000 murdered would have been many times that number, we would have been a large and strong people. The adversity Israel and Jews currently face is partly because our population numbers are so small. We are revisited with the consequences of the slaughter every day.

In Lithuania history has also been written by the victors. In 1990 Lithuania threw off the shackles of the Soviet Union and reclaimed their country, they won their battle, and so Lithuania set out to re-write their history, a new, polished history, devoid of inconsequential and inconvenient facts.

Jonas Noreika, the monster responsible for the murder of between 14,000 and 16,500 Jews in northwestern Lithuania, was reinvented as an anti-Soviet warrior. His Jewish victims didn’t need to be remembered. The children he was responsible for murdering, the very future of the Jewish nation, were inconsequential. Noreika sought Lithuanian independence and so he is one of Lithuania’s greatest heroes.

Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas, a great Lithuanian hero who also objected to the Soviets, had, inconveniently, been the commander of the concentration camp guards at the Majdanek concentration camp, where approximately 78,000 Jews were murdered. Majdanek was the most public of all Nazi concentration camps. The good citizens of Lublin, Poland, complained about the smell and the sights of the slaughter of our Jewish families, both inside and outside of Majdanek. The Lithuanian Government brushed off Baltusis’s crimes, claiming he served outside the camp and furthermore, unlike the citizenry of the local city, he was unaware of the crimes he so vigorously guarded. After all, having opposed the Soviets surely made him a Lithuanian national hero. Jews. Who cares?

Kazys Skirpa was Lithuania’s ambassador to Germany. It might have been Skirpa who first suggested to Hitler the wholesale mass murder of Jewish children and families. Skirpa called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the soil of Lithuania and 220,000 Jews were murdered, and so the soil of Lithuania was cleansed of Jews. But Skirpa did not like Soviets, and that made him a Lithuanian hero. Jews? The victors get to write the history.

Krikstaponis was the anti-Soviet hero who was in charge of a Lithuanian battalion which slaughtered Jews in Lithuania and wherever else he and they found them. Even the Nazis were horrified by the sadism of his unit and objected to his cruelty. But Krikstaponis did oppose the Soviets, and Jews do not count, so Lithuania records Krikstaponis as another of their greatest national heroes.

These are but four out of many. Jews lost, Lithuania won, and so Lithuania gets to write and record history. Many of the worst genocidal monsters of the Holocaust are today listed among Lithuania’s greatest national heroes. The ending of the grand history of Lithuanian Jewry and the participation of their national heroes in the slaughter of Jews from Lithuania elsewhere does not merit any consideration at all in Lithuania.

The Lithuanian Government vociferously objects to her heroes being slandered by facts, so vociferously in fact, that in October of 2018 the Government plans to go to court to defend the good reputation and heroic status of their Nazi collaborator Jonas Noreika. Seventy-three years after the Shoah, Lithuania, a member state of the European Union and NATO, will stage a legal defense of a genocidal Nazi monster who is responsible for at the very least the murder of 14,000 Jews. This from a nation which regularly proclaims their love of Jews and constantly strives to attract Jewish investment and tourism.

Jews watch on as spectators as the victor asserts his victory. Who among us will stand up to this travesty?