The Jews murdered August 15 and 16, 1941, in Rokishok were commemorated on August 16, 2026, in this small northern Lithuanian town and former shtetl. The Rokiškis Regional History Museum invited the public to attend a “Road of Memory” procession from the ghetto next to the Rokiškis manor house (where the museum is now housed) to the Velniaduobė forest about 4 kilometers outside town where the Jewish population was slaughtered.

Rokiškis Regional History Museum staff spoke at the beginning, midway and end of the procession. Participants places inscribed with the names of victims at the memorial stele marking the mass murder site where around 3,200 Jews, 6 Lithuanians and 1 Pole were killed.

Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman was in attendance and said no Jewish family was untouched by the Holocaust. Rokiškis regional municipality council member Vytautas Saulis spoke about the Soviet trials of Lithuanians who murdered Jews held in 1965, and said the main question hadn’t been addressed: why?

According to Lithuania’s International Commission to Asses the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupations in Lithuania, which is behind the Road of Memory initiatives throughout Lithuania, around 75% of the town’s population was Jewish before they were murdered.

by Grant Gochin

A Lithuanian state institution took an American administrative record, hardened it into an exoneration and published the result as a verdict of the United States. It has defended that claim since 2018. On August 19, 2026, ninety-nine days after Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry told US Congress the wording had been corrected, the claim was still online in Lithuanian.

Everything that matters is in documents Lithuania itself has supplied.

What America Actually Decided

In 1974 the Immigration and Naturalization Service examined allegations concerning Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, acting head of Lithuania’s 1941 Provisional Government, and interior minister Jonas Šlepetys. Commissioner Leonard Chapman reported that no information of an evidentiary nature had been elicited from the sources contacted; the names were removed from the active list and the investigations deactivated. He also said new meaningful information would reactivate the investigation.

by Grant Gochin

A Lithuanian university published the contradictory wartime record in 2005. The Centre was told, and kept publishing.

Vilnius University Press published the wartime record in 2005. Thomas Remeikis assembled the American Legation dispatches from Stockholm and the Lithuanian material carried inside them; the Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University appears on the imprint, and the introduction is signed Chicago-Vilnius, 2004. 1 Twenty-one years later the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania cannot describe the Lithuanian material in those documents as Soviet, inaccessible, or newly discovered in a foreign archive. That matters now, because the Centre is the state body expected to supply historical authority in the prosecution of Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Vilnius charged over a Facebook post. Its disclosure conduct in that case is set out in Show the File.

Publication establishes availability. It does not prove that a particular official at the Centre read this volume. The correspondence set out below establishes something different and harder: the Centre received direct documentary challenges to the historical claims it went on publishing, and answered them.

July 15 was the 82nd anniversary of the liquidation of the Shavl ghetto. In July of 1941 two ghettos were set up in the northern Lithuanian city to imprison around 6,000 Jews from there and surrounding locations. Thousands were tortured and murdered there. By Himmler’s order the ghetto was renamed a concentration camp in 1943. From July 15 to 19, 1944, the 3,000 or so survivors were sent to Dachau and Stutthof concentration camps where the majority were murdered and the Shavl ghettos were closed.

Members of the Šiauliai Regional Jewish Community gathered at the stone stele marking the entrance to the ghetto to remember both anniversaries on July 15 with a minute of silence, flowers, stones and candles to remember the victims.

This was followed by a film at the Povilas Višinskis Public Library. Professor Hektoras Vitkus from Klaipėda University spoke about the prevailing circumstance when the Nazis set up the two ghettos in the Lithuanian documentary. He said the city had a population of about 14,000 Jews on June 26, 1941.

The testimony of late Holocaust survivor and author Markas Petuchauskas was then presented. His testimony is well known in Lithuanian Holocaust historiography and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Vilna Gaon Jewish History Museum in Lithuania both conserve recordings of his testimony.