What Lithuania Did to Its Rescuers

Yom HaShoah begins at sundown Monday, April 13, and continues through nightfall on Tuesday, April 14. Across the Jewish world, communities pause to remember the six million. Across Lithuania, the state will prepare another ceremony about its rescuers. This article is about the distance between these two acts.

Lithuania has a street named after Ona Šimaitė. It has memorial plaques, ceremonies, Life Saving Crosses. It repeats the phrase “over 900 rescuers” in diplomatic settings and public commemorations, as reflected in LRT’s coverage of Lithuania’s Day of Rescuers of Jews and in a Government of Lithuania statement noting 924 recognized rescuers. It does not say “0.04%.” Set against a wartime population of roughly 2.5 million, 924 rescuers is about one in every 2,700 people. “Over 900” sounds like a movement. “0.04%” sounds like what it is: evidence of how rare rescue actually was, in a country where 96.4% of the Jews were murdered—the highest murder rate in Europe.

What Lithuania still does not tell the world is what happened to rescuers before rescuers became useful to them.

What Lithuanians Did

During the Holocaust, Lithuanian neighbors, police, auxiliaries, and opportunists had adapted themselves to Jewish disappearance. That adaptation became its own system of enforcement. To rescue a Jew was not merely to defy German authority. It was to violate Lithuanian communal norms — norms that treated Jewish absence as settled and anyone who disrupted it as a threat.

The postwar treatment of rescuers shows what Lithuanian society actually thought of them before the state discovered they could be repackaged as moral capital.

Zofia Lawrynowicz, born Sofija Laurinavičienė, and her husband Antanas Laurinavičius rescued seven Jewish women in Telšiai. Yad Vashem’s record is explicit about what followed. After the war, many Lithuanians looked at her differently. Fearing for her life, she took the children and fled to Poland. Her husband returned later to Telšiai but Soviet authorities did not allow him to rejoin the family, and he remained there alone until his death. The Lithuanian hostility—not Soviet bureaucracy—made flight necessary. Before the rescue story became useful to Lithuania, it could destroy a rescuer’s life inside Lithuania.

The danger was not only ostracism. The Lithuanian Jewish Community has publicly recorded that armed Lithuanian nationalist partisans regarded rescuers of Jews as enemies and planned to kill them as supposed Soviet collaborators. Bishop Vincentas Borisevičius personally met with Lithuanian guerrillas in the summer of 1944 to ask them not to pursue rescuers of Jews and rescued Jews. A Lithuanian bishop had to intervene with Lithuanian fighters to stop Lithuanians from targeting Lithuanians who had saved Jews.

Mykolas Šimelis paid with his life. After sheltering fourteen Jews beneath the floorboards of his home, he was murdered by Lithuanian nationalists on July 10, 1945, as recounted in this account of Mykolas Šimelis’s sacrifice. The identified leader was Jonas Neicelis-Šarūnas. He was not the only rescuer murdered by his own countrymen. Vladas Levulis was murdered after the war. Teofilis Žarnauskas was murdered after the war. Before rescuers became objects of ceremonial gratitude, they were witnesses against their own society — and Lithuanian society treated them accordingly.

Jonas Paulavičius rescued more than a dozen people: twelve Jews, two Russian POWs, two persecuted Lithuanians. He followed death marches, searching for escapees he could save. On May 1, 1952, an unknown perpetrator shot the sleeping Jonas Paulavičius through the open window of his home. Yad Vashem attributes the murder to his antisemitic neighbors. That date—1952—matters. Seven years after the war ended, a Lithuanian rescuer was assassinated in his bed for the crime of having saved Jewish lives.

Lithuania’s Biggest Commodity

Ona Šimaitė is the clearest example of the transformation from moral witness to national commodity. Today Lithuania treats her as a luminous emblem. It names a street for her in Vilnius. It marks her former home with a plaque. It commemorates her as a rescuer of the Vilnius ghetto. All of that is real. The falsity lies in presenting Šimaitė as evidence of national virtue while refusing to tell the fuller truth about the country to which she did not return.

Šimaitė survived the Gestapo, torture, a death sentence, deportation, and Dachau. After the war, she settled in France and never returned to Lithuania. A rescuer who had seen what Lithuanians did to Jews, and what some Lithuanians later did to rescuers, chose permanent exile. Lithuania will invoke her courage. It will not explain what kind of Lithuania made permanent exile a reasonable choice. Šimaitė is their most effective lie of omission. If the public knew that the most famous Lithuanian rescuer chose exile because she feared her own neighbors more than the concentration camps, Lithuania’s entire rescuer narrative would collapse. That is why they will never tell it.

The Silence Before the Sales Pitch

When Sofija Binkiėnė gathered material for Ir be ginklo kariai (Soldiers Without Weapons)—the first book documenting Lithuanian rescuers—contributors asked: what about the reaction? The fear was not only of Soviet authorities. It was of Lithuanian neighbors who remembered what rescuers had done and regarded it as betrayal. The book was not published until 1967, twenty-two years after the war. Rescuer testimonies collected in displaced persons camps in 1947–1948 were not published until 1991. A book based on 231 rescuer questionnaires compiled by Jonas Rimašauskas was not published until 2008. These delays are the record of a society that did not want these stories told.

The Pivot

Lithuania declared independence in 1990. Within two years, the state had identified the rescuers as diplomatically useful. The Life Saving Cross was established in 1992. The speed of that transformation is itself the indictment. Lithuania did not investigate the murders of Šimelis, Paulavičius, Levulis, or Žarnauskas. It did not hold accountable the guerrilla networks that terrorized rescuer families. It did not examine what drove Laurinavičienė from her country. Lithuania skipped accountability entirely and proceeded directly to exploitation.

Lithuania’s commemorative apparatus repeats “over 900 rescuers” because the number is rhetorically convenient, as seen in LRT’s “more than 900” language. It produces the impression of a nation of rescuers rather than a country in which rescue was exceptional and mass murder was nearly total. When a government teaches its people they were a nation of rescuers instead of a nation of murderers, it destroys the moral foundation of society. “Over 900” is a reputation-management formula. “0.04%” is a statistical rebuke. Even Lithuania knows the difference, which is why it never volunteers the percentage.

What Commodification Looks Like

In 2018, Lithuanian National Radio and Television produced a twelve-part documentary series celebrating the Righteous Among the Nations. In that same year, the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre published material that, according to the Lithuanian Jewish Community, defamed Saulius Sondeckis, the son of rescuer Jackus Sondeckis, without properly acknowledging the family’s rescue history. Production and defamation, simultaneously. That is not a contradiction. It is a system.

While rescuers are marketed, perpetrators remain protected. Jonas Noreika was responsible for up to 14,500 murdered Jews, as documented by Silvia Foti in Storm in the Land of Rain: A Mother’s Dying Wish Becomes Her Daughter’s Nightmare. Lithuania posthumously awarded him the Cross of Vytis in 1997 and has never revoked his honors. His plaque remained on the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences until it became too indefensible to keep, as reflected in LRT’s reporting on the removal controversy and the later report on supporters reinstalling the plaque. According to Lithuania, responsibility for the murder of 14,500 Jewish citizens is not disqualifying. That tells the truth more clearly than any rescuer ceremony does.

The inflation of rescue as a national characteristic is a documented propaganda technique. Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein have demonstrated in peer-reviewed scholarship how this operates at platform scale: the whitewashing of a society’s role in the Holocaust through systematic exaggeration of rescue and minimization of complicity. In January 2026, Lithuania approved a 157-measure Action Plan to Combat Antisemitism, while the historical apparatus that produces the distortion remains unreformed. The action plan signals virtue. The infrastructure enforces the lie.

The Record

Lithuania’s relationship to its rescuers has had two phases. In the first, rescuers were dangerous because they exposed what other Lithuanians were doing. That is why rescuers could be isolated, threatened, driven out, or murdered. In the second, rescuers became useful because they could be detached from that context and redeployed as national evidence. Lithuania did not change its judgment of rescuers. It changed their use.

The rescuers deserved honor, protection, and a country willing to say what they had stood against. Instead, they were first made to bear the hostility of a society that saw rescue as betrayal, and are now made to bear the burden of rescuing Lithuania’s reputation.

As Yom HaShoah begins, the world should not be deceived by Lithuania’s annual performance of moral seriousness. The rescuers are real. Their courage is real. What is false is the state’s use of them. The rescuer is made into the myth so that the perpetrator can be obscured as the fact. Lithuania’s rescuers deserve to be honored as moral witnesses. They do not deserve to be turned into commodities in the hands of a state still unwilling to tell the truth that made rescue necessary.