Reply to the article of Mr. Plasseraud published in VilNews in October 2011
Lithuania and the memory of the Holocaust

By Didier Bertin,
President of the Society for the Promotion of the European Human Rights Model (France) – 14 October 2011

We love Lithuania and its wonderful and precious language and fine people! The sole acute problem of Lithuania might be its government.

There is still a lot to do in this country for Human Rights Organizations like fighting Racism, antisemitism, Homophobia and promoting education and free information as the corner stone of democracy for a member-State of the European Union.

Mr. Plasseraud reminded important criticisms which could be made in Lithuania and that he does not share  despite they are true in our opinion: The obliteration of the participation of Lithuanian militias in Pogroms  and  Holocaust, the “current” authorization of Nazi Parades and the creation of a new concept which put in equivalence of the Holocaust and the suffering of people under communist dictatorship whose consequence is the arbitrary second ranking of the Holocaust. This concept is named double Genocide and made a mathematical  equality between events, which has no sense in History. In fact this concept aims to obliterate or reduce one of the two components of the equation, which is clearly the Holocaust as this can be seen in Lithuania.

As a matter of fact the Vilnius Genocide Museum displays only facts on the Soviet oppression and we were personally told by a member of the Staff that for “the Jewish things” we have to go to the green

hut named “Green House”, which is a very poor small a museum in a wooden hut and which at last refers to the Holocaust. This so called museum is as difficult to find as the Holocaust in the Lithuanian History. However and on top of these negative facts many others were forgotten were forgotten by Mr. Plasseraud.

We were also shocked by similar substantial obliterations in the museum of the 9th Fort in Kaunas. We had also the opportunity to check the content of a History school book of a 15 years old Lithuanian schoolboy and we noticed that it was far from the richness of our French school  books. The  History school  book  we  saw  was  very slim  and  presented  an  over- simplified version of events.

To read more go to Sections 5 and Section 12.