Dovid Katz: The Crime of Surviving
Rachel Margolis may be the most tragic Holocaust survivor on the planet.
She has stiff competition, to be sure, but Margolis’s recent experiences are almost too surreal and painful to be believed. After the war—during which her parents and brother were murdered—Margolis decided to rebuild her life in her native city of Vilna, the capital of Lithuania. For more than 40 years, she taught biology at Vilnius University. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Lithuanian democracy permitted it, she helped found the city’s only Holocaust museum and became one of its stalwart presences, returning to Lithuania to lecture each summer even after relocating to Israel in the mid-1990s.
Now, at 88, Margolis is being defamed as a war criminal. Her crime? Surviving the Vilna ghetto to join the anti-Nazi resistance in the forests of Lithuania.
Margolis is one of a group of elderly survivors who have become pawns in a sinister game of Holocaust obfuscation by local authorities in the Baltic states—which, though they are among the smallest nations in Europe, had the highest rates of Holocaust genocide in Europe. A more complex phenomenon than Holocaust denial, obfuscation does not deny a single Jewish death at the hands of the Nazis. Instead, it uses as a starting point the idea that the Nazi genocide was not a unique event but rather a reaction to Soviet “genocide” (and antecedent to further Soviet genocide) in which the same elements of Lithuanian society that often sided with the Nazi invaders were persecuted and imprisoned by the Communist regime, whose officials included Jews.
The “double genocide” movement has gained the support of government and political parties in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, which have invested substantial treasure to persuade the entire European Union to accept the equality of the Nazi Holocaust and Soviet crimes. Their biggest success has been the Prague Declaration, issued from a conference on “European Conscience and Communism” in June 2008, which demands that Europe “recognize Communism and Nazism as a common legacy”; that Communism be assessed “the same way Nazi crimes were assessed by the Nuremberg Tribunal”; that a single “day of remembrance of the victims of both Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes” be declared, thus effectively eliminating Holocaust Remembrance Day; and that European history textbooks be “overhauled” so that “children could learn and be warned about Communism and its crimes in the same way as they have been taught to assess the Nazi crimes.”
Signs of the movement’s success are visible throughout Lithuania. The Museum of Genocide Victims on Vilnius’s central boulevard mentions the word Holocaust only sparingly and glosses over events at a place called Ponar in Yiddish (now known as Paneriai), where 100,000 unarmed civilians, some 70,000 of them Jews, were murdered, mostly by local Lithuanian militia. Instead, Lithuania’s Holocaust museum is devoted entirely to Soviet crimes. At a recent exhibition on the Ukrainian famine, a huge poster featured a woman telling visitors: “In Auschwitz we were given some spinach and a little bread. War is terrible, but famine is even worse.”
Two years ago, on Lithuania’s independence day, neo-Nazis marched down the capital’s central boulevard chanting “Juden raus,” or “Jews out,” and brandishing a specially modified Lithuanian swastika. (It is illegal in Lithuania to display Nazi or Soviet symbols.) Only after heavy pressure from local embassies—including those of the United States and other Western powers—did the country’s leaders condemn the march, a week after it occurred. This year, on March 11, “Juden raus” was replaced by the slogan “Lietuva Lietuviams,” or Lithuania for Lithuanians, and it is not a fringe movement. The permit for the march was issued to Kazimieras Uoka, a signatory on Lithuania’s March 11, 1990, declaration of independence and a member of parliament from the country’s ruling coalition, the right-wing Homeland Union Lithuanian Christian Democrat Political Group. Top officials said not a word until the Norwegian ambassador, Steinar Gil, protested on March 19, noting that 50 members of the country’s parliament had protested a gay-rights march but not one objected to the neo-Nazis. The country’s prime minister, Andrius Kubilius, replied on March 23, saying, “There are skinheads and neo-Nazis in every country, and they sometimes take a walk or chant something.”
Local authorities and government agencies have also instigated campaigns of slander and legal threats against elderly Jewish Holocaust survivors whose experiences fighting in the forests with Communist-backed partisans against the Nazis would appear to threaten the viability of the “double genocide” theory.
“The only good Jew for them,” said Berl Glazer, 85, believed to be the only elderly Orthodox Jew left in Lithuania, “is a dead Jew....