by Dovid Katz
Special to WJW
Not many Americans are aware of a frighteningly successful campaign to write the Holocaust out of European history.
Make no mistake, this is not Holocaust denial. In the European mainstream, denial was dealt a mortal blow in London's High Court back in April 2000 when Emory professor Deborah Lipstadt won her famous victory against denier David Irving's libel action.
In the meantime, a new menace, which I call Holocaust obfuscation, has raised its cunning head. Powerfully supported by governments of Eastern European countries, particularly the Baltic states, the obfuscation movement seeks to confuse the issue to the point of total intellectual mush without denying a single documented death.
Here are some of the highlights: redefinition of the word "genocide" to include just about any crimes of the Soviet Union (for example: deportation, imprisonment, loss of employment); from this follows an "equal evaluation of totalitarian regimes." And from that follows "double genocide," meaning here in Eastern Europe that the Soviets with their Jewish partners (yes, the notion of communism being a Jewish plot is built right in to the whole shebang) first committed "genocide" against the Baltic peoples in 1940-1941, and then came the "retaliation" -- the genocide of the Jews committed by the Nazis and their Baltic partners starting in 1941.
Why would newly admitted democratic European Union and NATO states be committing a fortune to such distortions of history? Ultranationalism. The far-right wants to remove from its region's history the stain of the Holocaust.
The reason is not that hard to fathom. Percentage-wise, more Jews died in the Baltic States than elsewhere in Europe. After independence from the Soviet Union, bold individuals in these states began to investigate their nation's Holocaust history. But the ultranationalists in government shut them down and set up state-funded commissions that would take over Holocaust studies. These state commissions have been campaigning in the European parliament for a new model of "double genocide" ("equal" Soviet and Nazi crimes) to become the standard history in Europe.
Most notoriously, in June 2008, the Prague Declaration was proclaimed, demanding that European textbooks be overhauled to treat Nazism and communism in the exact same way. Another demand is for there to be a new Europe-wide mixed day of commemoration for Nazism and communism (the unstated motive is to replace Holocaust Remembrance Day).
Here in Lithuania, things went further. State prosecutors working closely with the same "genocide research" crowd started to accuse Holocaust survivors, who are alive because they escaped the ghettos to join the anti-Nazi resistance, of "war crimes."
The low point of modern Lithuanian history came on May 5, 2008, when police came looking for Fania Brantsovsky, 87, librarian of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, and retired biologist Rachel Margolis, 88. A Holocaust historian, Margolis is hated by the "genocide research" establishment for her discovery and publication of Kazimierz Sakowicz's lost diary. A Christian Pole, Sakowicz had witnessed tens of thousands of murders at Ponar (Paneriai) outside Vilna (now Vilnius), recording accurately that the killers were enthusiastic locals.
Since publishing the diary, Margolis, who lives in Israel, has been unable to return to her beloved hometown.
The poison is spreading rapidly. In July, all the Western members of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), including the U.S. Canada and Britain, voted for a resolution into which the local anti-Semitic genocide industry had inserted "just" two lines. One says that the "two major totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Stalinist, which brought about genocide É ," and the other calls for a Europe-wide mix-'n'-match "Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism É ."
It's getting kind of lonely out here in Lithuania. Please write to your elected officials demanding that the United States vigorously and clearly oppose the Holocaust obfuscation movement, and all of its shoddy trappings, starting with the Prague Declaration and the persecution of Holocaust survivors recognized as resistance heroes by all the free world. Time to fight back.
Dovid Katz is a Judaic studies professor at Vilnius University and research director at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, which he founded.