Žr. Kaip lietuviai skriaudė litvakus
Žydų klausimu lietuviai susiskaldę. Avraham Tory dienoraščio 1941 m. liepos mėn. 8 d. įrašo paaiškinimas. Valios tyrimo būdai.
Avraham Tory dienoraščio ištrauka
Šaltiniai: prisiminimai, dienoraščiai, bylos, protokolai, žiniaraščiai, saugumo bylos, spauda, atsišaukimai iš įvairių laikotarpių
Lentele išdėstyti įvairius lietuvių požiūrius į žydų likimą
Kas atvirai pasisako?
Atvirai pasisako, bet reikia nustatyti tapatybę
Atvirai pasisakė, bet reikia įrodyti jog taip tikrai tikėjo
Atvirai pasisakė, bet ar patys taip sugalvojo
Pastaba: datos maždaug sutampa, kaip Skvireckas išmąsto, jog žydai turėtų gyventi atskirai - galbūt taip ir kalbėjo Baliui Matulioniui - ir kaip žydams dėstė Jonas Matulionis - taip pat panašius įvykius išdėstė Skvireckas tame pačiame įraše. Išnagrinėti.
Paklausti, kas dar gelbėjo žydus 1941 m.? Gauti Lietuvos Holokausto Atlaso duomenis.
The Lithuanians are divided on the Jewish question. An explication of Avraham Tory's diary entry for July 8, 1941. Ways of deducing a person's will.
[Slide of Lithuanian viewpoints regarding the fate of our Jews]
Nazi Germany's invasion of Soviet-occupied Lithuania on June 22, 1941 was followed by the murder of Lithuania's Jews and the annihilation of their wonderful Litvak culture. I feel that I and other Lithuanians have yet to appreciate what we ourselves have thereby lost. We have yet to examine our role, as Lithuanians, in the demise of our Jews. Avraham Tory's diary entry for July 8, 1941, records, from a few days before, the brutally honest reply from Jonas Matulionis, the finance minister in Lithuania's self-declared Provisional Government to Jakobas Goldbergas, the chairman of the Union of Jewish Veterans Who Participated in the Recovery of Lithuania's Independence:
The Lithuanians are divided on the Jewish question. There are three main views: according to the most extreme view all the Jews in Lithuania must be exterminated; a more moderate view demands setting up a concentration camp where Jews will atone with blood and sweat for their crimes against the Lithuanian people. As for the third view? I am a practicing Roman Catholic; I - and other believers like me - believe that man cannot take the life of a human being like himself. Only God can do this. I have never been against anybody, but during the period of Soviet rule I and my friends realized that we did not have a common path with the Jews and never will. In our view, the Lithuanians and the Jews must be separated from each other and the sooner the better. For that purpose, the Ghetto is essential. There you will be separated and no longer able to harm us. This is a Christian position." When Goldberg asked Matulionis to try to prevail on his friends in the Lithuanian government to intervene to stop the killings, the minister answered: "The wrath of the people is so great that there is no way to stop these acts. When you leave the city for good and confine yourselves in the Ghetto, things will quiet down." The he added: "I am speaking frankly to you." The Lithuanian minister did not mention any pressure from the Germans. This means only one thing: assaults on the Jews express the will of the Lithuanian people.
[Slide of documents: memoirs, newspapers, criminal cases, proceedings, newsletters, diaries, Secret Police documents, press, leaflets]
Who were the Lithuanians who wished for the indiscriminate killing of Lithuania's Jews, including children, women and the elderly? I have reviewed hundreds of documents and photographed 22,000 pages. I have also brought a collection of source material for you to examine. I will focus my talk on illustrating a variety of methods for determining the will of various Lithuanians. These methods ground a moral inquiry.
[Slide that links Smetona's speech to documents confirming the consequences: Lozansky, Į Laisvę, Heydrich]
President Smetona openly spoke about the past when he addressed the Cleveland Jewish Center in 1943. In the 1930s, wealthy Jews were emigrating to Palestine and taking their wealth with them. The autocrat Smetona and leading Jews such as Lithuania's consuls to Palestine, Doctors Rosenbaum and Rachmilevitz, agreed to encourage the emigration of poorer Jews and retain in Lithuania the more successful type. We see this conspiracy confirmed by its consequences in Lozansky's memoir, where 20 young Gordonists emigrated from the poor shtetl Butrimonys to Palestine, one of whom died of sunstroke.
[Slide of what the letter reveals about the requestor and how it matches what is known about Germantas-Meškauskas]
The Nuremberg trial included a letter from Heydrich to Ribbentropp in June, 1939 discussing a request from the Voldemarininkai for 100,000 Litas and weapons to seize power and organize pogroms, presumably inspired by Kristallnacht. This request was declined by the Nazis so as to not interfere with the emigration that Smetona encouraged. Thus these unrelated documents support each other. But how can we know who made the request? I identify the initiator as linguist Dr. Pranas Germantas-Meškauskas of the Lithuanian Secret Police who was later known for his acquaintance with Heydrich and his unusual longstanding dream of creating a Lithuanian Nationalsocialist Party. The letter mentions such a party being formed in May 1939, whereas Lithuanian Secret Police documents indicate that it was instead the Lithuanian Nationalist Party which was then formed, and moreover there is a curious statement that there is no Lithuanian nationalsocialist party, suggesting that the request may have been leaked back to Lithuania. Germantas-Meškauskas's circle of comrades, as known from Yla's and Škirpa's memoirs, happens to match the people mentioned in Povilaitis's statements to his KGB interrogators, so that these documents confirm each other, and make evident that Smetona's adjutant Žukaitis was the conspirator which the letter mentions as being close to the President. We also know that when this letter was revealed, the real Voldemarininkai disavowed it and had no clue about its origin.
Is it possible that Germantas-Meškauskas, who worked for the Lithuanian Security Police, was acting as a double agent with Smetona's blessing? No, because Smetona's unpublished memoir from his months in Germany in 1940 reveal his naive view of Meškauskas and Žukaitis. Instead, it seems to me that Germantas-Meškauskas was a sociopath. He seems to have fulfilled his dream of writing a Lithuanian "Mein Kampf" by authoring three books: The Battle Against Communism, which notes the link between Jews and Communists; A Pivot in World Politics, which astutely analyzes how world peace was threatened by the replacement of multilateral treaties with German bilateral treaties; and Antanas Smetona's Great Thoughts, which showcases our Nation's Leader. Germantas-Meškauskas served as a sycophant the very leader he proposed to overthrow! He was able to rationally point out the Nazi threats to world peace even as he was proposing to serve them. In the press, in 1939, he picked a fight with the Jewish Veterans' newspaper Apzvalga, a paper which his boss Povilaitis kept proposing to have shut down, and which was countering the newspaper Verslas for Lithuanian businessmen, which was encouraging the boycott of Jewish goods. Overall, his proposals regarding Lithuania's Jews seemed to mimic whatever the Nazi German policy happened to be.
In the case of the newspaper Į Laisvę, we must deduce the authors of editorials, but also the degree of censorship. There were no Germans to censor the first issue, which Ambrazevicius and Ivinskis helped put together and must take credit for. The main editorial asks for mercy for the foolish Lithuanian communists but identifies Jews and Bolsheviks as one and the same who are understandably fleeing Lithuania. As regards independence, a single sentence is added at the end, and otherwise its content seems to have been written in Germany by a Lithuanian in favor of ethnic cleansing but opposed to any declaration of independence. We know from memoirs that Jesuit high school director Bauba wrote the subsequent editorials up until July 24 and that German censors removed offending passages but did not dictate the content. On July 3rd and 5th, 1941, as the Lithuanian battalion was executing Jews at Kaunas VII fort, Baubas's editorials included praise for Voldemaras, and condemnation of Jews, Russians, Poles and refugees as a fungus, which for the sake of Lithuania's demographic purity should be isolated in ghettos, collectively punished with hard labor, and ultimately deported to Manchuria or elsewhere.
There exists a mockup from August 1st of the first issue of Tautos Kelias, a newspaper which the Germans never let the Lithuanian nationalist party publish. It includes an essay by Vetusius, the pen name of Blynas, as we know from his diary, but is also clear from his style as the party's sole intellectual. "The earth starts to give bountiful fruit only when it is sprinkled with blood, the blood of its sons and daughters, and there is never too little blood for the earth, the earth of our parentland. It soaks up the blood of friend and enemy, those who love and those betray, who sacrifice and who shriek. The earth is always thirsty for moisture. The earth is always hungry for bodies that will rot." This glorious justification for the killing of Lithuania's Jews - even those who shriek, with little blood to offer - there is never too little blood - upon careful reading we see this as a truly original contribution by the General Secretary of the Lithuanian Nationalist Party, its administrator.
The inaugural issue of Vilnius's newspaper Naujoji Lietuva includes a transcript of Vilnius city committee chairman Žakevičius radio address of June 28th. He chastises those who committed violence based on sorting people into categories. As for the Jews, they will be deleted from free Lithuania's political, economic and cultural life, but this will be done by acts of law. In an adjacent article, the Lithuanian Activist Front in Vilnius states that there is no place for Jews in Lithuania. Blynas criticizes this article because it does not focus on the Jews, but also names the Poles as our nations's second misfortune. Also in that issue, Žakevičius cosigned with the German military commander for Vilnius an order to take 60 Jews hostage but, at Žakevičius's insistence, also 20 Poles. Blynas thought that since Lithuanians made up only 15% of the residents of Vilnius, we should focus on one enemy at a time. Such intervenings, disagreements and variations show that we Lithuanians were actively involved in our demographic politics, which is to say, we debated how to proceed with ethnic cleansing.
Atvirai pasisakė, bet reikia įrodyti jog taip tikrai tikėjo
Atvirai pasisakė, bet ar patys taip sugalvojo
Pastaba: datos maždaug sutampa, kaip Skvireckas išmąsto, jog žydai turėtų gyventi atskirai - galbūt taip ir kalbėjo Baliui Matulioniui - ir kaip žydams dėstė Jonas Matulionis - taip pat panašius įvykius išdėstė Skvireckas tame pačiame įraše. Išnagrinėti.
Paklausti, kas dar gelbėjo žydus 1941 m.? Gauti Lietuvos Holokausto Atlaso duomenis.