What Lithuania Did with the Signature

My grandfather signed orders connected to the ghettoization, expropriation, and liquidation of Jewish property in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. The Lithuanian state preserved those documents in its own archive. In 2019, IHRA experts warned Lithuania about the official effort to reinterpret that record through unsupported rescuer narratives and historical distortion. Yet the honors remained, the institutional alibi remained, and now a Jewish citizen faces criminal prosecution for challenging the state’s version of history. This article asks a simple question: after the warning, what did Lithuania do with the signature?

My grandfather signed the document. Lithuania preserved it. Its state historical institution had access to it. IHRA’s experts warned Lithuania in 2019 about that institution’s method. The question now is not whether the archive exists. It is what Lithuania did with the signature after it was warned.

20-year investigation

I have asked that question for years as a granddaughter, as a Lithuanian-American, as a Catholic, and as the author of Storm in the Land of Rain, first published as The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather Was a War Criminal. That book began as a promise to my dying mother to write a heroic biography of Jonas Noreika. It became the opposite: a twenty-year investigation into the evidence that my family, my community, and the Lithuanian state did not want to face.

I am writing this article now as part of a coordinated public record. Grant Gochin, Eugene Levin, Dillon Hosier and I are coordinating our articles because we are deeply concerned that Lithuania has placed Artur Fridman, a Lithuanian Jewish citizen, under criminal threat for historical speech. The possible punishment includes a prison sentence of up to three years. I am repulsed by the contrast: Lithuania never punished the Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrators whose signatures and offices helped destroy Jewish life, but it now seeks punishment for a Jew who challenges the state’s protected memory.

The signature is not a theory

In The Signature that Still Haunts Lithuania, I placed one document where it belongs: at the center of the case. My grandfather signed Šiauliai County Chief Order No. 3687 on October 15, 1941. The order is preserved in the Lithuanian Central State Archive, fund R-1099, list 1, file 2, folio 451. It directed local officials to sell items confiscated from Jews and deposit the proceeds into the District Commissariat’s account at the Reich Credit Bank in Šiauliai. He routed the order for execution to Col. Aloyzas Banys with one Lithuanian word: “Vykdyti.” Execute.

That document is not family gossip. It is not Soviet rumor. It is not an anti-Lithuanian smear. It is an archival record preserved by the Lithuanian state. My website now makes public the larger archival context, including orders signed by Jonas Noreika, records of ghettoization and expropriation, and the anti-Jewish 1933 pamphlet in which my grandfather urged Lithuanians to boycott Jews. Lithuania has the documents. The question is why the state still protects the honor built over them.

On my website’s biographical page for Jonas Noreika, I describe the contradiction directly. He is honored in Lithuania as General Storm. But he was also Šiauliai County Chief under Nazi occupation, and I have found his signature on records connected to the oppression of Jews. The page says he wrote about 1,000 orders as county chief, about 100 of them concerning Jews, including transfers, round-ups, and distribution of property. That is not a marginal footnote. It is the office record.

This did not begin with Fridman

The current crisis did not begin with Artur Fridman. It did not begin with IHRA. It did not begin with my last article. This has been ongoing for more than a decade. In May 2015, Grant Gochin wrote to Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius requesting removal of the plaque honoring Noreika. In 2018, I supported Grant’s challenge to the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre — LGGRTC — and my confirmation letter was included in the Noreika inquiry submitted to LGGRTC. In 2019, the litigation, the public dispute, and the international press made the issue impossible to call private.

My own appeals have also been public. I created a petition titled “Remove all honors awarded to my grandfather Jonas Noreika”. In it, I wrote that the facts had been clearly established and that the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre’s gymnastics to deny his culpability were an abuse of the memory and dignity of his victims. I asked the Government of Lithuania to tell the truth and remove all honors awarded to him. That appeal remains on my website.

The signature still follows Lithuania

The appeals went to government officials. The public record includes correspondence to the mayor, the president, the prime minister, the ombudsman, prosecutors, the Heritage Department, and other Lithuanian state bodies. In 2021, Grant wrote to President Gitanas Nausėda requesting the removal of state honors. The broader record is collected in the Lithuania litigation inventory. The pattern is not absence of notice. It is notice, refusal, repetition, and continued honor.

The media record is also long. My July 2018 Salon essay was followed by international coverage, including the Times of Israel article “War hero or Nazi collaborator? Family partners with victim’s kin to expose truth”, the New York Times opinion piece “No More Lies. My Grandfather Was a Nazi”, the publication of my book, and the Lithuanian translation Vėtra Lietaus Šalyje. My website’s media archive records years of interviews, articles, podcasts, and public argument. Lithuania cannot say this evidence arrived yesterday.

IHRA already warned Lithuania

In April 2019, the chairs and recent chairs of IHRA’s expert working groups and committees issued a statement of grave concern over LGGRTC’s treatment of Jonas Noreika. They wrote that documentary sources indicated Noreika had a key role in the ghettoization and expropriation of Jews in the Šiauliai district. They criticized LGGRTC’s unsupported rescuer narrative and tied the matter directly to IHRA’s Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion.

That warning matters because it did not come from Lithuania’s enemies. It came from the expert structure of the organization Lithuania invokes when it seeks international Holocaust-memory legitimacy. IHRA did not need to know my family story to see the method. The method was visible in the public record.

Lithuania’s own Presidential International Commission also rejected LGGRTC’s treatment of the Noreika accusations on April 11, 2019. The Commission identified Noreika’s orders concerning the transfer of Jews to the Žagarė ghetto and the handling of Jewish property. It rejected the idea that later anti-German sentiment or conversations with rescuers erased participation in the process that led to Jewish deaths.

Correction would not have required national humiliation. It required honesty. Withdraw the rescuer framing. Publish the due-diligence file. Remove the honors. Admit that signing orders for ghettoization, expropriation, and property liquidation is part of the Holocaust record. Separate my grandfather’s later anti-Soviet death from his Holocaust-era administrative conduct. Lithuania did none of those things.

Rescuers cannot erase perpetrators

Lithuania often elevates its rescuers as proof of national moral identity. Rescuers should be honored. I have never argued otherwise. But a rescuer record cannot be used as a structural alibi for the perpetrator record.

The signature forces the distinction. My grandfather may have known rescuers. He may have later resisted Soviet rule. He may have been loved by his family. None of that unsigned Order No. 3687. None of that returned the property. None of that restored the owners. None of that removed his office from the machinery of dispossession.

This is why the state’s response remains morally obscene. Lithuania protects the reputation of honored figures whose offices and signatures appear in the archive. It protects the institutional narratives that convert those figures into heroes. It protects the state historical institution that IHRA experts warned about. Then it turns criminal law toward a Jewish citizen who challenges that system.

Why we are coordinating now

We are coordinating because the Fridman prosecution changes the stakes. Grant has now published IHRA Was Warned in 2019. Lithuania Did Not Cure. Eugene Levin has prepared a companion argument about LGGRTC as the witness IHRA already warned about. Dillon Hosier has documented Lithuanian diplomatic refusal to answer the questions that matter. My point is the signature: a state cannot preserve the document and deny the meaning of the document.

Grant has also explained in Before Lithuania Prosecuted Fridman, It Warned Me how Lithuania’s memory law runs in one direction. The public criminal file in Case No. 02-2-00512-24 should be read beside Lithuania’s failure to punish Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrators. That is the contrast that repulses me. The state that did not punish the men who helped destroy Jewish communities now threatens a Jewish man with prison for historical speech.

I am not hiding the coordination. I am stating it. Descendants of perpetrators, descendants of victims, documentary filmmakers, civic advocates, and writers are coordinating because Lithuania has converted Holocaust memory from a field of truth into a field of state enforcement. We are not coordinating to invent evidence. We are coordinating because the evidence has been ignored for years.

What IHRA must ask

IHRA must ask Lithuania the question the signature demands: after the 2019 warning, what did the state do with the documents? Did it correct LGGRTC’s materials? Did it withdraw the rescuer theory? Did it publish the due-diligence file? Did it remove the honors? Did it tell the public what the signature means? Did it explain why the state archive preserves the order while the state memory institution preserves the alibi?

When Lithuania speaks at IHRA, the signature should follow. When Lithuania presents itself to Jewish organizations as a responsible Holocaust-memory state, the signature should follow. When Lithuania invokes LGGRTC in public memory, litigation, diplomacy, or criminal enforcement, the signature should follow.

This is not an attack on Lithuanians. Many Lithuanians have told the truth. Some rescued Jews. Some preserved records. Some scholars and institutions have challenged the official myth. The Lithuanian state should honor them by ending the lie, not by hiding behind them.

I am the granddaughter of the perpetrator. Grant Gochin is a descendant of the murdered. Our friendship proves that reconciliation is possible. But reconciliation cannot be built on state fraud. It begins where the archive begins: with the document, the office, the order, the victims, and the signature.

IHRA must ask Lithuania what it did with the signature.

If Lithuania answers honestly, there is a path toward repair. If it refuses, then IHRA must decide whether membership means compliance or immunity.

Wishing you truth and peace in the storms of your life,

Silvia Foti