Jews to be tried for war crimes against Nazis
This is just too bizarre to not be true (The Jewish Chronicles link);
Elderly Jews say they are outraged that Lithuania is pursuing them over their wartime role as anti-Nazi partisans
Fania Branstovsky was just 20 when she joined the Jewish partisan movement fighting the Nazis in her home country of Lithuania. In the Vilnius ghetto, she and her fellow partisans carried out attacks against the occupying German forces. By the end of the war, almost her entire family — more than 50 people –— had perished at the hands of the Nazis. Yet now, over 60 years later, she is the one being branded unpatriotic, and is reportedly under investigation by Lithuanian authorities for alleged war crimes.
National and local newspapers and television stations are referring to the 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, who now works as a librarian at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, as a murderer and a terrorist. Earlier this year, the Vilnius-based newspaper Lietuvos Aidas called for her to be put on trial. The allegation levelled against her is that during her time as a partisan, she committed crimes against Lithuanians. But she strongly denies that she and her partisan colleagues ever targeted groups of local people.
More of that Leftist moral relativism – when they muddy the debate between terrorism and freedom fighters, when they rewrite their history to equate fighting a real occupation army to any foreign force on sovereign soil.
H/t LGF’s Link Viewer.
Category: Foreign Policy, Politics
Both my maternal and paternal Grandparents came here from Lithuania. It’s disturbing hearing about what’s happening to Fania Branstovsky. Some nasty things happened in Lithuania during the Nazi occupation. The Jews were hunted down and slaughtered, just as what happened in other countries that the Nazi’s occupied. Why Lietuvos Aidas called for her to be put on trial is beyond me. She had a right to defend her self and her people.
BTW, before we come down too hard on the Lithuanians, they led the way in breaking from the Soviet Union. They lost over 700,000 of their people either to the gulags or simply fleeing the country, during the Iron Curtain days of the Cold War.
Holy crap. They have GOT to be joking. While they’re catching up on war crimes, why don’t they go after the people who worked for the paper as Soviet toadies?
I suggest a bit of caution here, at least until we learn more. I see a number of warning flags already. Fania Brantovsky was a Holocaust survivor and a partisan? As I understand it, the term holocaust survivor generally refers to those who went to the camps but survived. Since she was with the partisans, she probably never went to a camp; as captured partisans were killed on the spot. In Fania’s extended sense, Jewish-born, Vice Premier Molotov could well claim to have been a Holocaust survivor. Next, her partisan service. This suggests that she was likely a CP member, perhaps a political officer with her partisan unit. Lithuania and the other Baltic countries were occupied by the Red Army in spring 1940, and in each of these countries, the NKVD immediately sent about 10% of the population to the gulag; local communists and sympathizers played an important role in identifying the political and class enemies to be eliminated. As a result, ethnic Lithuanians (and Latvians and Estonians) initially welcomed the Germans. Some chose to support the Germans as the lesser of the two evils, while others tried to keep low and avoid taking sides, and some fought against both Brown and Red. Then in late 1944 and 1945 when the Red Army returned, there was another round-up and deportation of all who had supported the Germans, and of most others who had not been actively pro-Soviet. And resistance of the local peoples stiffened, continuing into the early 1950s. Particularly in the Baltic countries, Jews tended to be CP members, and that may have included Fania. While cooperating in suppressing the Lithuanian anti-communists during and after the war, she might well have committed the atrocities with which she hi charged. As another aspect, as a CP member, Fania would have considered herself to be a nominal Jew at most, and might even have shunned the label at that time. I do not know how much of the preceding applies specifically to Fania, but it was a common reality of that time and place. More recently, it is also a fact… Read more »
Rurik,
Thanks for filling us in on the history of what was going on in Lithuania during WWII and the political climate when the Soviets re-occupied it at the end of the war.
My Grandparent were in the first wave of Lithuanian immigrants that arrived in the early part of the 20th century. The second wave were actually considered “displaced persons” from WWII.
Rurik surprises me. Fania escaped from the Vilna Ghetto the day it was destroyed. She wanted to fight aqainst the Nazis who with their Lithuanian helpers killed 200,000 Jews, more than 90% of the Jews in Lithuania. She joined the Soviet partisans because they were more likely to accept Jews. Other groups not only wouldn’t accept Jews, but often would kill them. Such happened to those who escaped during the revolt at Treblinka. Should Fania have let herself be killed, as was her entire family, or accepted the one group which would allow her to fight the Nazi?
When’s the A.N.S.W.E.R. march for this?
Rurik,
Do you feel that the Lithuanian government should issue an official apology for the actions of its government vis a vis their Jewish community during WWII? (Poland and Lithuania, to my knowledge, are the only remaining central-eastern European countries not to have done so.)
Thank you,
Cantor