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Unearthing the Unvarnished Truth about Lithuania's Holocaust
(Jerusalem Post) Neville Teller - Ruta Vanagaite describes herself as "a typical, average Lithuanian." She is a journalist and best-selling author who sought out the secret case file on her grandfather, and discovered that during the German occupation he compiled lists of Jews, while a neighbor transported them to an execution site and received in compensation a Jewish house and 11 acres of land. She met Efraim Zuroff, director of the Jerusalem branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, whose grandparents were born in Lithuania and who is named after a great-uncle murdered in Vilnius. Together they visited 13 locations where Jews had been massacred. Their book, Our People: Discovering Lithuania's Hidden Holocaust, became a best-seller in Lithuania, but has now been removed from its bookstores. Of the 212,000 Lithuanian Jewish victims, only 5,000 were deported to death camps in Poland. Most were marched out to a local forest or beauty spot, brutally shot, and buried in mass graves. In most cases the massacres were carried out by Lithuanians. Sometimes no Germans were present. One Lithuanian soldier described his wartime experience in an interview in 1998: "The local police went through apartments and collected Jews, then herded them onto the square." The Germans kept back anyone likely to be useful to them, and the rest were marched by the Lithuanian unit, in a column four people wide, to pits already dug beyond the city limits. "They were herded into the pit, laid on the ground, and then we shot them." They forced the next group to lie down on top of the corpses before firing on them, then the next. "The small children were carried, the others were led. We murdered them all....The Germans shot rarely; mostly they used to shoot photographs."