Op-ed: My grandfather’s role in the Nazi occupation is forcing a reckoning in Lithuania
A little bronze plaque hanging on a library wall in a city most Americans know nothing about is at the epicenter of a battle over the Holocaust.
In the last six years, this modest plaque in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, inspired 20 legal actions in five courts, vigilante action by a disgruntled citizen with a sledgehammer, a scandal for the city’s mayor and candlelit vigils by protesters seeking to resurrect it in a grander incarnation.
The power of this plaque comes from a question of whether its honoree is guilty of murdering thousands of Jews in Lithuania. Those who want the plaque up say its namesake is a brave patriot who fought against the Communists, took orders from Nazis and had no idea his signature would lead to murdered civilians. By extension, it’s about more than one person’s guilt or innocence — it’s about the guilt or innocence of Lithuania.
The plaque’s honoree is my grandfather Jonas Noreika, whom I first learned about from my mother and grandmother while growing up in Chicago’s Marquette Park. They told me reverential stories of how he fought against the Communists in 1941 and won; how, from 1943 to 1945, he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for saving Jews; how he fought against the Communists yet again in 1946 and lost; and how he was captured, tortured and executed by the KGB, killed by two bullets to the back of his skull.
As it so happens, the Genocide Resistance and Research Center, the country’s arbiter of history, used to be the KGB prison where my grandfather was executed in 1947 by the Soviets. His name is inscribed, along with many others’, on its gunmetal gray walls. A school, streets and monuments glorify his name.
Although I had never met him, I was so proud of my grandfather and wanted to be just like him. When my dying mother asked me to take over her project of writing a book about her famous father, I enthusiastically agreed. I had no idea it would lead to an identity crisis — not just for me, but the entire nation.
My mother asked to be buried in Lithuania. Government officials made sure my funeral visit in October 2000 coincided with the unveiling of the plaque honoring my grandfather on the Wroblewsky Library. The impressive building stands at a prominent corner of three streets. My grandfather worked there, masterminding the second rebellion against the Communists before the KGB caught him. We placed a wreath under the plaque, which stated, “In This Building from 1945-1946 Worked a Noteworthy Resistor Lithuania’s National Council and Lithuania’s Armed Forces Organizer and Leader Jonas Noreika General Storm Shot February 26, 1947.”
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Long after the burial, after I had spent years quietly researching and writing my memoir about my grandfather, I heard about the petition in 2015 signed by 17 prominent Lithuanians to remove the plaque. The petition to the library and the city of Vilnius pointed out that while Jonas Noreika bravely led two rebellions against the Soviets, he was also a genocidal architect during the Nazi occupation who wrote orders to create a ghetto, send Jews to other ghettos, round up Jews and half-Jews and distribute their property weeks before their murders. Noreika was responsible for the deaths of at least 8,000 Jews in three cities and several towns and villages, and this should disqualify him from being a national hero.
The library and city of Vilnius quickly ushered this petition to the Genocide Center — a government think tank created in 1992, shortly after the country’s independence from the Soviet Union. To ensure Lithuanians remember history correctly, the Genocide Center wanted to conduct historical research that would be free of 45 years of Soviet propaganda featuring a Red Army that suppressed or vilified patriotic movements. All complicated matters concerning Nazi and Soviet occupations are always steered to this center.
After great deliberation, the center responded with a doublespeak memorandum, stating that during the period of the German occupation, Jonas Noreika did not take part in mass destruction operations of Jews; however, Nazi authorities succeeded in involving him in the isolation of Jews. Based on the center’s defense, the petition was denied and the plaque remained.
To protect my grandfather’s legend, the center turned a blind eye to evidence in Lithuanian archives. Instead the center swore by the KGB archives of my grandfather’s interrogation, which focused on his revolt against the Soviets and never once mentioned killing Jews. It is an ironic twist that the center designed to rid itself of Moscow propaganda based its defense on KGB records.
Yet my grandfather’s signature is on a primary source document that resulted in the murder of more than 2,000 Jews in Zagare on Yom Kippur in 1941. This was the document that turned my world upside-down and impelled me to concentrate on my grandfather’s actions during the Nazi occupation. The Lithuanian archives contain all the documents my grandfather signed as district chief of Siauliai during the Nazi occupation, including about 70 concerning the Holocaust.
As details of my findings became more public, the Genocide Center doubled down and wrote a second memorandum, stating my grandfather organized a network for rescuing Jews. It was based on flimsy testimony given in 1986 by a friend of my grandfather’s that lacked any details on the alleged operation or names of saved Jews.
This memorandum caused a foundational crack in the center’s reputation among historians. In the past few weeks, it has been in the news for firing one of its own who spoke against the center’s methods of investigation.
In response, in mid-March, about a dozen historians outside the center from Vilnius University and the Vilnius City Museum mounted a protest named TruthCenter against the “propaganda” techniques employed by the Genocide Center. They stood outside the center’s doors, reading passages from George Orwell’s novel, “1984,″ about the Ministry of Truth, a fictional state organ which rewrites facts to fit a preferred narrative.
Needless to say, the history of Lithuania has been thrown into upheaval.
The problem is that the plaque attacks point to Holocaust distortion of Orwellian proportion. The Genocide Center has been using Communist tactics while claiming to free themselves from Soviet legacy. (A similar scandal is occurring in Poland where two historians are under fire for investigating and incriminating a Polish national in the Holocaust.) As a result, the ferociously held narrative of the innocence of Lithuanians — and other Eastern Europeans — during the Nazi occupation may be smashed to pieces.
Silvia Foti is a high school English teacher at Proviso Math and Science Academy in Forest Park, Illinois, and author of the recently published memoir, “The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather was a War Criminal.”
