Donatas Januta:
Reply to Olga Zabludoff
re Holocaust in Lithuania
Why can’t the Lithuanians simply grieve their own tragedy, and the Jews grieve theirs?

Donatas Januta:

Dear Olga:

Of the numbers of Lithuanian Jews that were killed in 1941-1944 I have seen several numbers, all of which were around 90% or more. If you feel more comfortable with 95-96%, I won’t quarrel with you. The fact is that any such number is an enormous number, and it was and is a great tragedy. If there was anything that I could do to undo it, I would.

But you don’t seem to dispute the Israeli historian Dina Porat that 99.5% of the Lithuanian population was neither directly nor indirectly involved.

As for your claim that the Jews contributed “enormously” to Lithuania’s economy and culture, you quote that wealthy Jews lent money to the “Lithuanian authorities” when they got into financial trouble. But that was in centuries past, and those Lithuanian authorities were either individual warlords, or the Polish kings of the joint commonwealth, who got into personal financial trouble due to their extravagant lifestyles. And all those Jewish loans then went into their own private pockets. And, of course, the Jewish lenders did not act solely out of a sense of charity; they received more than a quid pro quo. The Lithuanian nation, i.e., the people of Lithuania, however, did not benefit at all from letting those same “Lithuanian authorities” continue living their extravagant lifestyles, at, ultimately, the people’s expense. That's why those Jewish "contributions" to the Lithuanian nation's economy were, as I said, either ziltch, or perhaps less than ziltch.

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