Vulgarity and Belief

On December 27, 2019, Lithuania’s national broadcaster published an interview with Birutė Burauskaitė, then director of the state Genocide and Resistance Research Centre. The title should be read slowly: Genocido centro vadovė: svarbu ne istorinis išsilavinimas, o tikėti tyrimų rezultatais. “Genocide Center Director: History Education Not Important, Believing in Research Results Is.”

Read that again.

Not method. Not training. Not archival discipline. Not the discipline of history.

Belief.

The director of the state body charged with adjudicating Holocaust memory on Lithuanian soil told the national broadcaster that the test was whether her staff believed their own results. That was the litmus paper. Internal conviction. Faith in the product.

Six years later, that sentence explains the whole machine.

The seven articles in this series set out the record. Rule of Law, One Way showed the one-way operation of Lithuanian legality. The Predicate to the Rescuer Fraud traced how a Soviet-era rehabilitation certificate was laundered into a Holocaust exoneration. Lithuania’s Counterfeit Rule of Law showed what happened when state oversight was asked to correct state falsehood. A Director Lied on the National Broadcaster reconstructed Burauskaitė’s false claim that a court had endorsed LGGRTC methodology. Two Refusals and a Photograph placed the press-ethics refusals side by side. I Wanted the Child at the Pit to Know I Tried moved the record to Strasbourg. The Treaty Body That Will Not Adjudicate moved it to Geneva.

The Times of Israel record makes the same point in public terms: The Prosecution of Artur Fridman, The Doctrine Lithuania Never Revoked, A Question for Jewish Organizations, Why Lithuania Prosecutes a Jew for May 9, and What Lithuania’s Formula Conceals.

This is not the eighth legal brief.

The legal record is there. The documents are there. The links are there. Lithuania has answered through prosecutors, courts, state historians, deflections, refusals, and silence.

This is about what remains after the file is complete.

What is the responsibility of one Jew to the Jewish child at the pit?

And have I met mine?

I do not know how to answer that without shame. No one alive in 2026 can meet that responsibility. The child is dead. The family is dead. The town is dead. The language spoken in the street is gone. The synagogue is gone. The school is gone. The shops are gone. The cemetery is broken. The neighbors lied. The officials signed. The killers aged. The state inherited the record and learned to manage it.

Approximately 220,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered. I do not write that as a number. I write it as bodies. Twisted bodies. Children’s bodies. Old women’s bodies. Fathers who heard their sons still crying from pits. Mothers holding babies. Young innocent girls raped in front of their helpless parents before being shot. Jews stripped, beaten, humiliated, robbed, marched, and thrown into holes in the Lithuanian earth.

And Lithuania called the demand for truth “vulgar pressure” — vulgariam spaudimui.

That was March 8, 2019. The same institution that called the demand for truth vulgar told the national broadcaster on December 27, 2019 that belief mattered more than evidence. One framework, published twice — in March, on the demand for truth as “vulgar,” and in December, on belief as the test of historical work. Every forum since has been measured against the rule Lithuania set for itself.

That is not interpretation. That is the language Lithuania’s Holocaust-memory apparatus permitted around the demand that its record be corrected. The bodies lie restlessly in pits across Lithuania, and the descendants who ask for the truth are called vulgar.

Not the murder.

Not the rape.

Not the theft.

Not the laundering.

Not the transformation of perpetrators into patriots.

The demand for truth.

That is the obscenity. That is the state revealing itself.

I accept the word. I will not run from it. If it is vulgar to ask why a 1991 anti-Soviet rehabilitation certificate became a Holocaust exoneration, then I am vulgar. If it is vulgar to say that “lost Jews” were not lost but murdered, then I am vulgar. If it is vulgar to ask why no Lithuanian has served punishment for the murder of Jews, then I am vulgar. If it is vulgar to name the men who signed the orders and the institutions that protected their reputations, then I am vulgar.

The dead were not murdered politely.

The lie about their murder will not be dismantled politely either.

Lithuanian civility has been the cover. Commemoration without accountability. Wreaths without names. Education without perpetrators. “Shared tragedy” without Lithuanian agency. “Difficult history” without the signed order. “Holocaust remembrance” without the courtroom consequence. Believe the research results. Believe the ceremony. Believe the ambassador. Believe the action plan. Believe the photograph.

No.

Belief is what a church may ask for.

A state historical institution must show evidence.

I have spent years asking for evidence. I have filed nearly thirty actions in Lithuania’s courts. Every one was dismissed on procedural grounds. None reached the merits. I paid lawyers, researchers, translators, advisors. I funded cemetery work. I wrote. I filed. I appealed. I lost. I went back. I lost again. I kept going.

There was no practical benefit to me. No estate. No property. No pension. No inheritance. No public office. No settlement. No title. No social standing. No new friends. No reward that could explain the cost.

There was only the child at the pit.

I expected Lithuania to lie. States lie. Institutions protect themselves. National mythologies do not surrender because a descendant arrives with documents.

What I did not expect was how little the Jewish institutional world would do when the same state now chose a living Jew.

Artur Fridman is a Jewish citizen of Lithuania. The Republic of Lithuania has prosecuted him for a Facebook post after he visited Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius to honor his grandfather, Aron Fridman, a Jewish Red Army soldier who fought Nazi Germany. Lithuania produced a 220-page indictment for him. It found paper. It found prosecutors. It found machinery.

Where is the machinery for him on our side?

Where are the emergency statements? Where are the lawyers? Where is the press conference? Where is the delegation? Where is the communal outrage? Where is the demand that Lithuania stop using criminal law against a Jew while refusing to correct its own Holocaust-memory frauds?

I am naming the organizations because Dubnow told us what to do.

Simon Dubnow, on the way to his murder in the Riga ghetto, is remembered for the command: Schreibt un farschreibt. Jews, write it down.

So write it down.

American Jewish Committee. World Jewish Congress. European Jewish Congress. B’nai B’rith International. Anti-Defamation League. YIVO. World Jewish Restitution Organization. National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry. Yad Vashem. Simon Wiesenthal Center. Claims Conference. AIPAC. JewishGen. LitvakSIG. David Labkovski Project. Lithuanian Jewish Community. Good Will Foundation. Beit Vilna. Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel. Every organization that has met Lithuanian officials, accepted Lithuanian invitations, appeared in Lithuanian diplomatic photographs, negotiated with Lithuanian ministries, issued statements about Lithuania, received access, received praise, received medals or awards, received funding, or traded in the currency of Jewish memory connected to Lithuania.

Go on the record.

In writing.

In public.

On social media.

Fridman’s apparent crime was a public Facebook post. The response cannot be whispered in a corridor, buried in a diplomatic email, or softened into “ongoing dialogue.” It must be public because the prosecution is public. It must be written because the indictment is written. It must be on social media because Lithuania chose to criminalize a social-media post.

Say whether Lithuania’s prosecution of Fridman is acceptable. Say whether a Jewish citizen should stand alone against the state. Say whether Holocaust-memory law may be used against a Jew while state institutions that distort the Holocaust receive diplomacy. Say whether you will support him. Say whether you will fund his defense. Say whether you will demand dismissal. Say whether you will meet Lithuania again without raising his name.

Say something.

Because the test is not whether Lithuania invites you.

The test is whether you protect a Jew when Lithuania prosecutes him.

And if you remain silent, Lithuania will understand the silence. It will give you a medal, an award, a photograph, a reception, a title, a place at the table. That will be the signal to the Jewish community: silence is rewarded; confrontation is vulgar; access is preserved by abandoning the Jew who needed you when the prosecutor came.

If that is the bargain, then do not speak about Lithuania again. Do not raise money on Lithuanian Jewish memory. Do not post photographs at Ponary. Do not praise “progress.” Do not sit on panels. Do not accept another Lithuanian official’s language about remembrance. Do not use our dead as institutional scenery.

I am told, at intervals, that I should also write about Russia. The accusation is meant to move the subject. I reject it.

Russian denial of Russian crimes is reprehensible. Russian glorification, erasure, and imperial falsification are reprehensible. I object to them as I object to Lithuanian falsification. Denial of crimes is denial of crimes. The uniform does not change the moral category.

But I am one man. I have no staff. No institution. No budget. No department. No foundation. No communications team. No diplomatic corps. No paid historians. No government grant.

I chose the file closest to my family’s grave.

That is not an acquittal of Russia. It is a statement of capacity.

Lithuania would prefer to use Russia as a shield. That must not work. A murdered Jewish child is not less murdered because the state distorting the record belongs to NATO. A perpetrator does not become safer to honor because his defenders speak fluent European values. A prosecutor’s indictment does not become morally neutral because the defendant is inconvenient. A photograph with Jewish leaders does not become harmless because the caption says remembrance.

What can we do to protect Artur Fridman when we cannot even protect the truth for 220,000 known Jewish murder victims?

That is the question.

If the answer is “nothing,” then say so. Let the donors hear it. Let the boards hear it. Let the descendants hear it. Let the Jewish world understand what its institutions are, and what they are not.

I cannot protect the dead. I tried. I am still trying. I cannot promise that I can protect Fridman. I can only say this in print: if he is left alone, the failure will not be Lithuania’s alone. It will belong to every Jewish institution that knew, watched, calculated, and stayed quiet.

The director of the Genocide Center told Lithuania that belief mattered more than historical training.

The Genocide Center called the demand for truth vulgar pressure.

I believe the dead.

I believe the documents.

I believe the pits.

I believe the child.

And if the price of that belief is vulgarity, then let the word stand.

Because at the pit, politeness saved no one.