The Impossibility of Ignorance – Lithuanian Jewish Community

by Grant Gochin, March 19, 2026

In 2018, while already a member of NATO and the European Union, Lithuania’s Parliament (Seimas) formally recognized Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas as the head of the Lithuanian state for the period 1954 to 1957. Lithuania’s defense ministry then placed him in the Heads of State Pantheon and described him as a role model for the country’s officers and soldiers. That is not routine commemoration. It is state canonization inside alliances that define themselves by democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

Once a state does that, the first question is not ceremonial. It is governmental. What public record did Lithuania produce before this elevation showing how Ramanauskas-Vanagas responded to the destruction of Jews in his environment in 1941? Where is the record that he protected Jews, objected to anti-Jewish violence, forbade participation, or punished those who took part? Lithuania’s own official biographies place him in Druskininkai in June 1941 as leader of a self-defense unit and then in Alytus as a teacher from 1941 to 1944. Lithuania has produced no public record of protective action by him toward Jews in that period.

That silence matters because Ramanauskas-Vanagas cannot be sealed off from a documented persecution zone. The Simon Wiesenthal Center warned the Seimas against honoring him. Evaldas Balčiūnas, drawing on archival material cited from the Lithuanian Special Archives and on the work of Arūnas Bubnys, pointed to a July 18, 1941 police report stating that 28 people had already been shot and to evidence that a 38-man partisan unit assisted in establishing the Druskininkai ghetto beginning on July 16. Even on the narrowest reading, this is not an evidentiary void. It is a documented zone of confinement, shooting, and anti-Jewish coercion. Lithuania elevated him anyway.

Nor does Ramanauskas-Vanagas stand in clean company. The pattern among comparable state-honored or state-defended figures is not exculpation but implication. Silvia Foti’s work shattered the official image of Jonas Noreika as a clean anti-Soviet hero. Lithuanian historian Mindaugas Pocius said there were no doubts among historians regarding Juozas Krikštaponis’s participation in the mass murder of Jews and other civilians. The long-repeated claim that Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis was “exonerated” by the United States has been publicly rebutted as baseless. Ramanauskas-Vanagas is not surrounded by exceptions. He is surrounded by precedent.

The mythology is broader than one man. Ramanauskas-Vanagas was born in New Britain, Connecticut. His daughter, Auksutė Ramanauskaitė-Skokauskienė, later served in the Seimas. This is political, institutional, and dynastic.

Now place that canonization beside the prosecution of Artur Fridman. Published accounts state that Lithuanian prosecutors filed criminal case No. 02-2-00512-24 over statements Fridman posted on Facebook on May 9, 2024; that the indictment was dated October 30, 2025 and signed by prosecutor Kristina Minko; and that Fridman is being prosecuted under two provisions of the Lithuanian Criminal Code: Article 170-2 §1 and Article 313 §2. Lithuania, the country in which approximately 96.4% of Jews were murdered, is prosecuting a Jewish citizen for disputing the record of a man it has elevated into its head-of-state canon.

This is not merely a speech case. It is selective enforcement. On February 26, 2026, a Vilnius court convicted Erika Švenčioniėnė under the same historical-speech framework for statements minimizing or denying Soviet crimes. Lithuania therefore plainly has both the machinery and the will to prosecute historical speech. What it does not have is symmetry. Speech that protects the state’s preferred narrative is defended. Speech that tests it is prosecuted.

The contradiction worsens when one looks at the prosecution’s own materials. Among the documents cited in the Fridman matter is LGGRTC letter No. 13R-645, which acknowledged that Ramanauskas was recruited by Soviet security services in January 1945 under the codename “Dzūkija.” Lithuania is therefore willing to rely on archival material when it helps prosecute Fridman, while having proceeded with canonization despite archived disputes and warnings grounded in Lithuanian records. That is not a standard of evidence. It is a standard of convenience.

The broader Holocaust record makes Lithuania’s position less defensible, not more. The Lithuanian Slaughter of its Jews contains first-hand accounts from 121 Jewish survivors recorded by Leyb Koniuchowsky in Displaced Persons’ camps from 1946 to 1948. Its foreword states that most perpetrators were Lithuanians, that many acted without German supervision, that self-described “partisans” often began terrorizing Jews before the Germans arrived, and that some of these perpetrators were later honored as anti-Soviet heroes. That is the bridge Lithuania cannot escape. These testimonies describe the historical environment in which the category “partisan” operated in 1941. They describe the methods of the very class of actor Lithuania now sanctifies as part of state succession.

The Telzh testimony shows what that meant in practice. Before the Germans came, armed Lithuanian bands were already calling themselves “partisans” and ruling the town. Later, commandant Platakys, guards including Jodeikys and the Indzhileviciai brothers, and local Lithuanian youths oversaw extortion, looting, beatings, and public humiliation. Jews were told their valuables would be stored at the Lithuanian state bank until things calmed down. Then the better items were taken away. High school and college youths took wallets, shoes, umbrellas, and even baby carriages, throwing Jewish children onto the ground. When the “Demon’s Dance” was staged, townspeople came to watch and applaud. This is not a digression. It is the documentary meaning of the partisan world Lithuania now elevates.

Lithuania’s institutional position requires the world to accept that a man it designated head of state did not know about the destruction of the Jewish population in his own environment. That position does not survive contact with arithmetic. Of the approximately 220,000 Jews living under Nazi occupation in Lithuania, about 212,000 were murdered. The destruction of a population on that scale, concentrated in a short period and carried out locally, was not an invisible event. It was a social rupture.

It is even less plausible in Alytus. Lithuania’s own official material says Ramanauskas-Vanagas moved there and worked as a teacher until 1944. Leyb Koniuchowsky, the man who recorded the 121 testimonies, was himself from Alytus. The dedication page of The Lithuanian Slaughter of its Jews states that Koniuchowsky’s own parents, Maushe-Joseph and Frume-Libe Koniuchowsky, were shot on September 10, 1941, together with the rest of the Jews of the Alytus ghetto, by Lithuanian murderers. Ramanauskas-Vanagas lived and worked in that same town at that same time.

Lithuania therefore has three possible positions. Either Ramanauskas knew what was happening and did nothing; or he operated in such proximity to the persecution that knowledge, acquiescence, participation, or facilitation required rigorous investigation before any state elevation; or he may himself have participated directly in anti-Jewish persecution or murder. The current documentary record does not permit categorical assertion of that third possibility, but neither does it permit its responsible exclusion. Given the consistency, scale, and local saturation of Lithuanian participation in the murder of Jews, direct involvement remains a plausible though unproven possibility. The first duty of any national leader is protection of the population. In 1941, the most vulnerable population in Lithuania was the Jewish population. On any of these three possibilities, Ramanauskas failed at the primary responsibility of leadership. That makes him not a model of statehood, but a failure of it. There is no defensible basis for placing such a figure in a national pantheon. If Lithuania has no one better to elevate, that is an indictment of the pantheon as much as of the man.

A man who did not protect the most vulnerable members of society has no claim to moral leadership over the nation–unless the state places no value on Jewish life, Jewish suffering, or Jewish truth, and Lithuania’s conduct proves exactly that.

Lithuania has never punished a single Lithuanian for participation in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust through its own courts. Not one. The state that built the legal machinery to prosecute Fridman for historical speech has never activated that machinery against a perpetrator of the crime Fridman discussed. Lithuania’s annual Holocaust commemorations cannot clean this up. The same institutional framework that lays wreaths for murdered Jews also designates a man with unresolved 1941 questions as head of state, maintains a memory apparatus built around official narrative control, and prosecutes a Jewish citizen for discussing Holocaust history. A state that places wreaths for murdered Jews in September and prosecutes a living Jew for discussing their murder in October is not remembering. It is managing perception.

Fridman should now be Lithuania’s Jedwabne moment. In Poland, Jedwabne triggered investigation by the Institute of National Remembrance and a presidential apology at the site. In Lithuania, Fridman has triggered prosecution, while the disputed figure remains in the state pantheon. The fuller comparison deserves its own treatment. The point here is simpler: Poland investigated a protected myth. Lithuania is prosecuting the person who tests it.

The pattern was visible before Fridman. In 2018, the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania publicly asserted that my research on Jonas Noreika was “possibly in violation of the Lithuanian constitution and the Lithuanian criminal code.” Contradiction is not answered on the merits. It is pushed toward intimidation.

I am a citizen of Lithuania. This article says more, and says it more directly, than the Facebook post for which Artur Fridman now faces criminal charges. Lithuania should therefore make a choice: either charge me under the same criminal theory, openly and without pretense, or admit that the Fridman case is selective enforcement against a lone Jewish citizen without institutional backing, international platform, or organizational support, chosen because the state calculated that he would be easier to isolate and pressure. I do not expect Lithuania to apply the same theory to me. If it does, I will welcome it as an opportunity to place this government and Lithuania’s historical record under public examination. States that act in this manner rarely move first against the most visible critic. They test their coercive power on the most vulnerable target. President Nausėda should therefore issue a formal public apology to Fridman, compensate him for the reputational damage caused by this prosecution, demand immediate dismissal of the charges, and dismiss those who misused the criminal code against a private Jewish citizen for speaking about documented Holocaust history.

After more than eighty years, and after this much exposure, the refusal of truth condemns Lithuania for another generation.

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Background material on the Fridman prosecution is available at:

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/truth-is-a-crime-in-lithuania/

https://grantgochin.substack.com/p/prosecuting-a-facebook-post

https://grantgochin.substack.com/p/the-state-that-manufactures-history

https://grantgochin.substack.com/p/lithuania-has-placed-itself-on-trial

https://www.jns.org/opinion/grant-gochin/the-indictment-that-put-lithuania-on-trial

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/lithuanias-self-inflicted-national-security-problem/

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/lithuania-in-the-dock-article-4/

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-lithuania-lies/

https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/03/ICAN-Fridman-letter.pdf