Donatas Januta: Reply to Olga Zabludoff re Holocaust in Lithuania

To say that there were other genocides does not diminish the Holocaust

Donatas Januta

Dear Olga,
 
Apparently, we agree that Jews and Lithuanians both suffered greatly during World War II.   And we both agree that Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands is an excellent book.   But, there are still a few things that we don’t agree on.   And I hope that we can disagree without necessarily imputing bad motives to each other.
 
I do not dispute Dov Levin’s claim that Jews were an integral part of Lithuania’s economy.   But the Jewish lending of money to the Polish kings and other nobles that you brought up, which enabled them to continue their extravagant lifestyles at the people’s expense, had both a short-term and a long-term negative impact on the country and the lives of Lithuanians. Yes, the Jews were also mainly merchants, traders, shopkeepers and craftsmen. But to evaluate their contribution to the country’s economy in those fields is a little hard, because Jews had a monopoly in Lithuania in those fields, and it is acknowledged that all monopolies, with their price-fixing, stifling of competition, and other evils, generally have a negative impact on a country’s economy. That’s why in the US we have anti-trust laws, anti-price-fixing laws, etc. Lithuanians did not have any of those protections.
 
One result was that, after 600 years of Lithuanians and Jews living side by side, on the eve of World War I, Lithuania was an economically depressed and backward country.  If I had to voice an opinion on whether the Jewish contribution to the country’s economy was positive or negative, I would say that at best it was a wash.   I.e., the Jews kept their part of the machinery of the economy – such as it was - running during that time, but there were no noticeable gains or improvements, especially if one compares to the adjacent countries to the immediate West. But I am willing to simply say that Lithuanians and Jews lived peacefully side by side, but separate, for 600 years, that they interacted almost exclusively only in the marketplace, and leave it at that.
 
You say there was only one genocide, and to say something different is to distort the history of World War II.   Yet, for someone to state that the Holocaust was the most terrible genocide in European history, but that there were other genocides as well, does not at all distort or diminish the significance of the Holocaust. Historian Norman M. Naimark, in his book Stalin’s Genocides, is not the only historian and social scientist who agrees that the generally accepted definition of genocide is wider than the narrow UN definition of the crime of genocide.
 
But let’s go back to the limited 1948 UN definition which states that the crime of genocide under the UN charter consists of acts which are committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Moscow’s intent, in which it succeeded, with respect to Lithuania, was to decapitate the nation.   In the executions and mass deportations to the gulag of 1941, 1944-45, 1948-49, and 1951, the country lost perhaps 90% of its political leaders, army officers, clergymen, administrators, teachers, and other professionals.  That was the Soviet intent, to destroy the leadership of Lithuania, so that they could easier eradicate Lithuania’s culture and history from the remaining population.   As Molotov, or one of his henchmen, said “There will be a Lithuania, there just won’t be any Lithuanians.”
 
As I said, I hope that we can disagree on some things without imputing bad motives. For example, Dovid Katz’s article in the November 2, 2011, Jerusalem Post, does nothing other than perpetuate further disagreements and enmity between Lithuanians and Jews. It is exactly the kind of gratuitous demonization of Lithuanians that Yves Plasseraud deplored in his article which started this whole discussion of ours.
 
Lithuania voted against full Palestinian membership in UNESCO, i.e., voted in support of Israel’s position, so Dovid Katz states that that vote is merely an example of Lithuania’s “duplicity”, and uses that as an opportunity to trot out his full arsenal of attacks against Lithuania.  If, of course, Lithuania had voted the other way, against Israel’s position, Katz would then have said that the vote showed Lithuania’s “antisemitism”, and then written the same article against Lithuania.   We can never win, can we?  I expect the next time that Katz reads about the price of fish in Lithuania, he will say “What duplicity, the Lithuanians are talking about fish just to divert attention from the suffering of Jews”, and will again write the same article.
 
As in all societies, there have been good people and bad people on both sides, but I believe that the majority of Jews and of Lithuanians have always been good people.   And though, Lithuanians and Jews lived side by side but separately, there were times when significant numbers of each consciously helped one another for the common good.   One of those times was at the beginning of the Lithuanian Republic in 1918-1925, when Lithuanian Jews helped Lithuania attain independence, and Jews received a large amount of autonomy within the country.    But that’s another story (see, e.g., Šarūnas Liekis, A State within a State?).
 
We both agree that Jews and Lithuanians suffered greatly during World War II. We both agree that the Holocaust was the most terrible genocide in European history.   So, I hope that even though we disagree about some of the terminology, i.e., the term genocide, or some of the other sub-issues, that we can view our disagreements as simply differences of opinion.