There Were No Germans in Town

Leyzer Goldman tells us who governed Valkininkai while its Jews were regulated, robbed, assembled, and marched away.

In my previous article, Carts, Sacks, and Certificates, I followed a piece of paper. The administration in Valkininkai issued certificates permitting Lithuanian peasants to take cows from Jewish farmers while those farmers were still alive. The document joined public authority to private gain. It told the recipient that the seizure was permitted and the Jewish owner that the protection of law had ended.

The same testimony forces another question. Who was the public authority behind the certificate? Who governed the town while Jews were forced into labor, marked, robbed, confined, assembled, and taken away?

For five years, while researching and filming Baltic Truth, I learned to ask that question at every site. “Nazi occupation” tells us who conquered the country and created the genocidal system. It does not, by itself, tell us who stood in the municipal office, who delivered the order, who guarded the market square, who entered the Jewish home, or who marched the column. History becomes evasive when command and execution are collapsed into one convenient phrase.

The witness here is Leyzer Goldman. He was born in Valkininkai in 1895, worked as a blacksmith, and lived in the town throughout his life before the war. In December 1947, in the Bad Reichenhall displaced-persons camp in the American occupation zone, he gave his account to Leyb Koniuchowsky. Koniuchowsky recorded it in Yiddish. Goldman reviewed the account, approved it, and signed it.[1]

I insist on the provenance because the accusation of “Soviet propaganda” has become Lithuania’s automatic answer whenever Jewish testimony becomes inconvenient. Goldman was not testifying in a Soviet courtroom. He was not in Lithuanian custody. He was a survivor speaking in a displaced-persons camp, little more than two years after the war. Copies of the testimony were preserved through YIVO and Yad Vashem, and Jonathan Boyarin later translated it into English.[2]

The document is not a polemic. Goldman does not offer a theory of collective guilt. He describes the government he encountered.

After German forces entered Valkininkai, he says, civilian administration passed to Lithuanians from the town and from the Lithuanian interior. Jews were sent to daily labor and beaten there. Their possessions were taken. Jewish workers were expelled from the Jewish-owned paper factory. Jews were required to wear identifying marks. A Jewish committee was created to receive the demands of the Lithuanian administration and to make the Jewish population comply with them.[3]

Then Goldman gives us the sentence that removes the blur: “There were no Germans in town. Only a few frequently came.”[4]

Read the sentence carefully. It does not absolve Germany. Nazi Germany conquered Lithuania, imposed the racial program, and created the conditions for mass murder. German responsibility is foundational. But foundational responsibility does not erase the identity of the people who exercised power locally. If Germans were usually absent from the town, someone else was governing it. Goldman tells us who.

The administration was Lithuanian. Its demands reached the Jews through a committee created for that purpose. Property was surrendered to the town administration. Local police summoned and detained Jews. Armed Lithuanian partisans gathered the men, guarded the column, and marched it toward Eišiškės. When people weakened, they were shot. The next day, armed men surrounded the town while women, children, the elderly, and the sick were removed.

This is the machinery behind the certificate I examined in my previous article. The certificate was not an isolated favor granted to a greedy neighbor. It came from the same local order that controlled Jewish labor, Jewish movement, Jewish property, Jewish food, Jewish identification, and finally Jewish removal. The paper and the rifle were instruments of the same authority.[5]

Valkininkai was a small town linked to the Jewish agricultural settlements of Selo, also known as Degsnės, and Leipunis, also known as Lieponys. Goldman estimated that roughly 900 Jews lived across the three communities. They were not an anonymous population. They were traders, artisans, peddlers, farmers, orchard keepers, blacksmiths, leather workers, parents, children, and neighbors. The surrounding villages were Lithuanian. The people taking the cattle and entering the homes lived close enough to know exactly whose property they were receiving and whose family was being removed.[6]

Distance is useful to an alibi. Berlin is far away. “Occupation” is abstract. A certificate bearing local authority is not abstract. A policeman at the door is not abstract. A partisan with a rifle at the market square is not abstract. A neighbor arriving for a cow while its Jewish owner is still alive is not abstract.

Goldman’s chronology is orderly. First came forced labor, beatings, and humiliation. Then came the identifying marks and the Jewish committee. Then came the demands for cattle, bicycles, radios, and other property. Arrests and shootings followed. Jews were forbidden to leave town and struggled to obtain food. On September 21, 1941, males above approximately twelve or thirteen were ordered to gather in the market square. About 300 men from Valkininkai, Selo, and Leipunis were marched toward Eišiškės under armed guard. The women, children, elderly, and sick were taken the next day.[7]

This was not a sudden riot. A riot does not create a committee, allocate labor, issue property certificates, restrict movement, assemble an age-defined population, assign guards, control a route, and arrange transport. Those are administrative acts. The murder did not arrive in Valkininkai as a single explosion of violence. It was prepared through government.

Lithuania’s preferred language begins at the top of the chain and stops there. “The Nazis murdered the Jews.” Yes. But in Valkininkai, Goldman saw Lithuanian administration beneath German rule. That distinction is not revisionism. Erasing it is revisionism.

A country may honor rescuers, and it should. A rescued life is sacred. But the rescuer cannot be used to make the administrator disappear. One Lithuanian who hid a Jew does not erase another Lithuanian who issued the order, took the cow, guarded the square, marched the family, or fired on the road. Moral courage and participation belong in the same history because both occurred in the same society.

Goldman’s testimony joins the stages. Lithuanian authorities demanded Jewish property. Lithuanian peasants arrived with authorization to take it. Lithuanian police and partisans enforced the new order. Lithuanian partisans assembled and marched the Jews. Other armed partisans surrounded the town when the remaining families were removed. The certificates, the guards, and the column are not separate stories. They are one local record.[8]

That record is no longer only about 1941. Lithuania is prosecuting Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen, for historical speech while the state’s memory institutions continue to reduce Lithuanian agency to vague categories. A state may dispute a speaker. It may answer him with documents. What it cannot legitimately do is make the abstraction enforceable by criminal law while treating the survivor’s specificity as dangerous.

Goldman did not say that Germans were uninvolved. He said something more precise and therefore more threatening to the national defense: Germans did not need to remain in the town for the persecution to function. Lithuanian authority was already present. It could regulate, dispossess, confine, assemble, and deliver the Jews.

In my last article, I asked who received the cow. This testimony also answers who authorized the taking and who controlled the human beings from whom it was taken. The answer is preserved in a signed Jewish record from 1947. Lithuania can challenge the evidence, but it cannot honestly blur it.

There were no Germans in town. Only a few came. Yet the Jews were marked, robbed, confined, assembled, marched, and murdered. Germany created the genocidal system. In Valkininkai, Lithuanians made it work on the ground.

[1] Goldman’s biographical details and the attestation of the testimony are in the Goldman appendix: Leyzer Goldman, born August 15, 1895, blacksmith, resident of Valkininkai; testimony recorded by Leyb Koniuchowsky in Bad Reichenhall, December 21, 1947; translated by Jonathan Boyarin, May 18, 1994.

[2] The introductory note to the Goldman testimony explains that Koniuchowsky recorded survivor testimonies in Yiddish after liberation; that the witnesses reviewed and signed their accounts; that copies were deposited with Yad Vashem and YIVO; and that Jonathan Boyarin later translated the interviews into English.

[3] Goldman testimony, section “The Lithuanian Administration: Torture and Regulations Against Jews,” describing the takeover of civilian administration by Lithuanians, forced labor, beatings, robbery, firing of Jewish workers, Jewish identifying marks, and the committee required by the Lithuanian administration.

[4] Goldman testimony, section “The Ghetto Is Set Up; Jews Arrested and Shot,” stating that no Germans were in town and that only a few came from time to time.

[5] The same Goldman sequence identifies the Lithuanian administration, Lithuanian bandits, local partisans, and police in the escalation from regulation to theft, arrest, forced march, and killing.

[6] Goldman gives the approximate Jewish populations of Valkininkai, Selo, and Leipunis and notes that surrounding villages were Lithuanian; the testimony also describes Jews in Valkininkai as traders, artisans, peddlers, farmers, and orchard keepers.

[7] Goldman’s chronology runs from June 1941 German entry, Lithuanian administrative takeover, forced labor and property seizure, police arrests, prohibition on leaving town, September 20 recall from peat work, September 21 assembly of men, armed march toward Eišiškės, and later murder.

[8] Goldman testimony, sections on the Jewish committee, property surrender, peasants receiving authorization to take Jewish cows, the September 21 march, and the September 22 removal of women, children, elderly, and sick to Eišiškės.