The Holocaust

Homework # 5 - The Holocaust

Reading - The Holocaust - click here

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Class Discussion Points - The Holocaust

Homework # 6 - The Holocaust Remembered Today in Eastern Europe

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Class Discussion - The Holocaust Remembered Today in Eastern Europe

Source # 2 - Excerpt from the article "Nazi Collaborator or national Hero? A test for Lithuania" from the New York Times - click here for article

SUKIONIAI, Lithuania — For the tiny village of Sukioniai in western Lithuania, the exploits of General Storm, a local anti-Communist hero executed by the Soviet secret police in 1947, have long been a source of pride. The village school is named after him, and his struggles against the Soviet Union are also honored with a memorial carved from stone next to the farm where he was born.

All along, though, there have been persistent whispers that General Storm, whose real name was Jonas Noreika, also helped the Nazis kill Jews. But these were largely discounted as the work of ill-willed outsiders serving a well-orchestrated campaign by Moscow to tar its foes as fascists.

Blaming Russian propaganda, however, has suddenly become a lot more difficult thanks to Mr. Noreika’s own granddaughter, Silvia Foti, a Lithuanian-American from Chicago who has spent years researching a biography of her revered relative and went public in July with her shocking conclusion: Her grandfather was a fierce anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator...

“It was terribly shocking,” Ms. Foti said in a telephone interview of her finding that her grandfather was a killer, not a hero. “I had never heard about any of this Nazi stuff.”

It was also shocking for Jolanda Tamosiuniene, a teacher and librarian at the J. Noreika Basic School in Sukioniai, where Mr. Noreika was born at the end of the hamlet’s only street in 1910.

What shocked her, however, was not Ms. Foti’s discovery that her grandfather was complicit in the Holocaust — that was not really news to locals — but that a member of a patriotic émigré family had gone public and turned a private family matter into a public national shame.

“We have all heard things about what Noreika did during the war,” Ms. Tamosiuniene said. “He obviously took the wrong path. But his granddaughter should have kept quiet. Every family has its ugly things, but they don’t talk about them. It is better to stay silent.”

Keeping things in the family might be a natural self-defense mechanism in a small, traumatized country that, since it first gained independence from Russia in 1918, has been occupied once by Nazi Germany and twice by the Soviet Union.

But the silence has only played into Russian claims of a cover-up and cast a long and sometimes unfairly dark shadow on a country justifiably proud of its success in building a tolerant, democratic nation on the ruins left by the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.

Virtually nobody in Lithuania is denying the Holocaust or the role in it of local people. Its horrors are taught in schools and denounced by officials. And lately there have been growing calls, at least from a younger generation less scarred than its elders by memories of Soviet oppression, for an honest accounting of the role played by some national heroes like Mr. Noreika...

Today the country is dotted with Holocaust grave sites and memorials. One of the biggest stands in a forest outside the western town of Plunge, where Mr. Noreika served as commander of the Lithuanian Activist Front, an openly anti-Semitic group that was fiercely hostile to an initial Soviet occupation in 1940 and cheered the Nazis as liberators the following year.

Plunge’s entire Jewish population of more than 1,800 was murdered within days of the invasion, mostly by local people.

BBC Article on Poland Law and Remembering Holocaust - click here