condition. that they were victims, you know, above all else. that is point one. and point two isjonas noreika was eventually put into a concentration camp by the nazis and his defenders say there s your evidence that he was no nazi. well, point number one, there was a provisional government of lithuania. and there was this lithuanian activist front that was kind of this militia, and they were extremely anti semitic, they re the ones who lead this uprising against the soviets and won. the part that has been hidden to lithuanians is how deeply they worked with the germans to have this uprising. and the other part that was put in for me, at least, was that, uh and much of this was probably nazi propaganda to begin with, but i think the lithuanians just ate it up,
and that is that every single jew, from the tiniest baby to the eldest grandmother is a communist spy. and so theyjust gave lithuanians license to kill everyone. and, you know, if it werejust the military aged men who werejewish, that would be one thing, but if it was everybody, everybody with just a drop ofjewish blood in them, that is a completely different story. that is beyond, you know, war. mm. this is genocide. and address my point, too, that actuallyjonas noreika ended up in a concentration camp, which suggests that the nazis did not regard him as an entirely sympathetic figure. yeah. this tripped me up for a long time, too. because i kept asking myself, how could a jew killer end up in a nazi concentration camp? that makes no sense to me.
not at all, they all told me it was communist propaganda and like a a good lithuanian, that s what i believed initially, too. they i don t know if they knew about this brochure, my mother must have known because it was in her archive, my grandmother must ve known it, but they never talked about it with me. i don t know that my father knew about it, her certainly never brought it up then. and, really, everybody believed it was just communist propaganda and lithuanians where the victims of two regimes the nazis and the communists and that lithuanians were just innocent of killing dues, all the jews were killed by the nazis. that s all.. so right. ..they knew. now we re getting to the nub of this very dark story. because once you had read some of the stuff that you ve described to me, and once you d begun to realise that to make good on your promise to write your grandfather s story, you would have to dig and dig into dark places.
i would write about, and you know all of these three bookshelves behind me is information my mother left me to write the story. and i spent ten years going through all that. i came across, however, a document that started to change my mind and he had written something in 1933, called raise your head, lithuanian! he was only 22 when he wrote it. and when i opened it up, um, you know, i ve got it right here next to me, when i opened it up, i thought i was going to read another patriotic little brochure about how wonderful it is to be lithuanian and it was really not like that. it was all about why lithuanians should not buy anything from jews, why lithuanians should start boycotting everything from jews, why for lithuanians thejews are considered foreigners, and it was like this for 32 pages.
so, i think i was one of the first lithuanians that he met that was willing to look into the holocaust of lithuania, and really, you know, believe that lithuanians, unfortunately, played a large role in that and it wasn tjust the german nazis. and ijoined he started a whole lawsuit against the genocide side of of lithuania. and here i think i need tojust flag up something quite remarkable. that you and he were fighting against the so called genocide and resistance research centre in lithuania and the museum of genocide victims, in vilnius, lithuania. these institutions which you would think would be in the lead, telling the truth about lithuania s troubled history and connections to the holocaust where in fact, it seems, in your view, covering everything up? yeah. i mean, to me,