VALKININKAI, CHAPTER IV

The Safer Place Was German-Controlled

Leyzer Goldman’s escape route ran out of Lithuanian-administered space and into a Nazi-administered town.

The first chapter followed the property. The second followed the authority. The third followed the calendar. One fact still demands its own treatment: the escape route.

One of the most damning facts in the Valkininkai record is not that Germany was innocent. Germany was not innocent. Nazi Germany created the genocidal framework, conquered the territory, and made the destruction of the Jews possible. The damning fact is more specific: in Leyzer Goldman’s account, the immediate zone from which a Jew had to escape was the Lithuanian-administered local order.

Goldman was among the Jewish men assembled in Valkininkai on September 21, 1941. They were told that they were being taken to work in Eišiškės and would live in a ghetto. Some believed the story. Others understood that they were being taken to be shot. About 300 men from Valkininkai, Selo, and Leipunis were marched under armed guard. Goldman concluded that the destination was death. In the Gireikis forest, he escaped.¹

After slipping away, Goldman was stopped by Lithuanian partisans. He bought his release with a gold watch and made his way to Woronowa, also rendered as Voronova and known today as Voranava in Belarus. The introductory note to his testimony states the point with extraordinary bluntness: Voronova was “controlled only by the Germans.” There, Goldman found temporary refuge in the ghetto.²

The survivor did not flee German-controlled space into Lithuanian safety. He fled Lithuanian partisans into a town controlled by Germans. That does not turn Germany into a protector or the Voronova ghetto into safety. Goldman later lived through the destruction of other ghettos and saw death repeatedly. The immediate comparison remains historically explosive: at that moment, for that fugitive, the zone of Lithuanian local control was more lethal than the German-administered town to which he ran.³

The English foreword to Olkeniki in Flames describes the broader pattern. Some Jews from the Valkininkai and Eišiškės areas escaped beyond the area controlled by Lithuanians into Nazi-administered towns in what is now Belarus. There, they found temporary comparative safety and time to consider what to do next after witnessing what had happened in Lithuanian-administered areas.⁴

This is not a moral exoneration of Germany. It is a geographical indictment of Lithuania. The Jewish witness is not ranking regimes in the abstract. He is mapping danger. Lithuanian-administered space meant local knowledge, Lithuanian guards, Lithuanian town administration, Lithuanian police, Lithuanian partisans, Lithuanian property seizure, Lithuanian villagers taking Jewish goods, and Lithuanian escort to slaughter. German-controlled space still meant Nazi domination. In Goldman’s immediate experience, however, it could temporarily mean the absence of the local Lithuanian machine that had already marked him for death.

Modern Lithuanian Holocaust rhetoric collapses agency into occupation. Occupation becomes the solvent. Once the word is spoken, local structures disappear. Administration becomes circumstance. Police become background. Partisans become “collaborators,” a category made to float free of nation, institution, command structure, social environment, political ideology, and property interest. The Jew is murdered by occupation itself.

Goldman does not permit that erasure. He describes an environment in which Lithuanians took over the civilian administration; Jews were beaten at labor; Jewish possessions were robbed; demands were transmitted through a Jewish committee under Lithuanian authority; property had to be surrendered to the town administration; police summoned Jews who were then imprisoned or killed; and partisans gathered, guarded, marched, and stripped the Jews.⁵

The flight to Voronova is the forensic hinge. It shows that Lithuanian participation was not decorative and was not a footnote beneath German initiative. It was the immediate operating danger for Jews in Valkininkai. Goldman escaped not from a German convoy but from a Lithuanian-partisan convoy. He did not bribe an SS officer with his gold watch. He paid Lithuanian partisans to let him live.⁶

The same abstraction sits behind Lithuania’s prosecution of Artur Fridman. Lithuania is not merely disputing details. It is disciplining historical speech in a way that protects the state’s preferred alibi. If a Jew says too clearly that Lithuanians murdered Jews, the state claims historical falsification. If Jewish memorial books say the same thing, the state does not prosecute the books; it ignores them. If Koniuchowsky’s witnesses identify Lithuanian administration and Lithuanian killers, the state does not indict the testimony; it makes the living Jew reachable.

Goldman’s route also complicates the diplomatic use of rescuer memory. Lithuania can always produce a rescuer. Goldman survived, in part, because of later acts of refuge and because Jewish partisans created their own routes of survival. Rescue does not erase administration. A Lithuanian farmer who saved a Jew does not cancel Lithuanian partisans who marched Jews to death. A German officer such as Major Karl Plagge does not convert Germany into a rescuer-state.⁷

Goldman’s route forces the honest sentence: a Jew from Valkininkai fled Lithuanian partisans and found temporary refuge in a town controlled by Germans. That is not a paradox. It is evidence. It records the layered reality that Lithuania’s memory machine works to hide: German genocidal power above, Lithuanian administration and execution below, Jewish death at the center, and modern state language trying to bleach the local hand from the record.

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Source notes

1. Leyzer Goldman testimony, September 21 sequence: men over twelve or thirteen assembled in the market square, were placed under guard, were told they were being taken to work in Eišiškės, and were marched in a column of about 300 men from Valkininkai, Selo, and Leipunis under approximately forty armed partisans.
2. Olkeniki in Flames, Appendix 4, introductory note to the Goldman testimony, p. A-11: Goldman escaped during the September 21 march and made his way to Voronova, described as “controlled only by the Germans,” where he found temporary refuge in the ghetto.
3. Goldman’s testimony states that after reaching Woronowa he lived through the destruction of Jewish communities in Ivia, Novogrudok, Lida, and Woronowa, reached the Vilna Ghetto, and eventually joined the Jewish partisan group led by Abba Kovner.
4. Olkeniki in Flames, “Foreword to the English Translation,” pp. xii–xiii: Jews from the Valkininkai and Eišiškės areas escaped beyond Lithuanian-controlled territory into Nazi-administered towns in present-day Belarus, where they found temporary comparative safety after witnessing events in Lithuanian-administered areas.
5. Goldman testimony, June–September 1941 chronology: Lithuanian takeover of civilian administration, forced labor, robbery, a Jewish committee operating under Lithuanian demands, surrender of property to the town administration, police arrests, and armed partisan transport toward Eišiškės.
6. Goldman testimony, escape sequence: Goldman left the group in the forest, was stopped by Lithuanian partisans, gave them a gold watch, and reached Woronowa.
7. The foreword to Olkeniki in Flames discusses Rabbi Kalman Farber’s later survival in part through Major Karl Plagge’s HKP operation, while the Goldman appendix records Lithuanian administration and partisan action against the Jews of Valkininkai. The existence of rescue does not erase the machinery of persecution.