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The Holocaust in Lithuania: One Man's Crusade to Bring Justice

(CNN) Paul Frysh - Efraim Zuroff's great-uncle was kidnapped in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 13, 1941, by a gang of Lithuanians "roaming the streets of the city looking for Jews with beards to arrest." "He was murdered shortly thereafter," says Zuroff. So were his wife and two boys. Now the Israel director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Zuroff has also worked for the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which is in charge of Nazi war crimes prosecutions. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, more names of alleged Holocaust criminals have turned up from Lithuania than from anywhere else in Eastern Europe, says Zuroff. But since its independence in 1991, Lithuania has failed to punish a single one of its own Holocaust war criminals. "Nowhere in the world," he says, "has a government gone to such lengths to obscure their role in the Holocaust....Their mission is to change the history of the Holocaust to make themselves blameless." By the end of the war, the percentage of Jews killed in Lithuania - 90-96% - was as high or higher than anywhere else in Europe. "One of the main reasons so many Jews were killed here is because of the help of the local population - of the Lithuanians."
2010-06-11 09:20:47
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