Jucinskas is among 1,800 Lithuanians-some dead, some still alive-who have been pardoned during the past year by Lithuania’s newly independent government. Coming so soon after independence, the news had the power to sicken, particularly for Jews, who have cheered the fall of communism but fretted that rising nationalism throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has been tinged with traditional anti-Semitism. In Poland’s presidential campaign last year, for example, Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki was defeated in a campaign dominated by false charges that he was of Jewish descent.
As it happens, the certificates of exoneration, issued by the chief prosecutor of Lithuania, went mostly to innocent victims of Soviet repression after Moscow reclaimed the Baltics. Some of them, facing an excruciating choice between Soviets and Germans, had sided with the latter. Others simply resisted any authority. Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis, whose family helped hide Jews during the war, told NEWSWEEK that The New York Times (which broke the story) erred in suggesting that the pardoned Lithuanians were convicted in Soviet courts. Most of those rehabilitated had either been summarily deported to remote parts of the Soviet Union or were victims of extralegal KGB tribunals. According to Landsbergis, these Stalinist bodies frequently charged people not with war crimes, but with the political crime of “betrayal of the [Soviet] fatherland.”
After the World Jewish Congress and others objected to the pardons, Landsbergis replied that the prosecutor is investigating every case brought by the KGB. When the evidence is found to be insufficient, the sentences are declared void. “To act otherwise, to leave standing a Stalinist sentence, without having it backed up by reliable accusatory material, would be completely unjustified,” he said.
But in many cases, there is indeed such reliable material. Some witnesses have already told their stories in “black books” compiled by Jews over the years in order to document atrocities. One Lithuanian Jew, Riva Bogomalnaya, told the Times that Lithuanian officials have shown little interest in her account of relatives allegedly slaughtered by Juozas Krasinskas, one of those recently rehabilitated. The Wiesenthal Center has reviewed more than 1,000 of the recent rehabilitations and concluded that as many as 125 of those pardoned may have committed war crimes-including at least four the center has identified as veterans of the notorious 11th and 12th Battalions. Their pardons thus seem to violate a law, passed by the Lithuanian Parliament in May 1990, that condemns the genocide committed against Lithuanian Jews and bars those guilty of war crimes from being rehabilitated. “We have no objection to these pardons in principle,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center. “The problem is that they are blanket exonerations. The Lithuanian government claims that the evidence was ‘coerced,’ that the courts were ‘illegitimate.’ Maybe so, but the fact is that Nazi executioners are being excused of the most heinous crimes.”
The hasty pardons are taking place amid not only the chaos of political revolution, but also amid an avalanche of other petitions for political rehabilitation coming from tens of thousands of Lithuanians whose relatives may have been illegally imprisoned or executed by the Soviets. Another motive is cash. In negotiating the terms of Lithuania’s independence, Moscow almost certainly will demand substantial payments for Soviet property and insist that Lithuania absorb a chunk of the Soviet Union’s $64 billion foreign debt. Lithuania’s only chance to whittle down those claims is to lodge a counterclaim, namely for the damage done to the country and its people by Moscow’s illegal annexation. The more damages and claims for compensation Vilnius can muster, the less its potential debt to Moscow.
Today, Lithuania’s 5,000 remaining Jews face less prejudice than in other parts of the Soviet empire. “On a state level, with very few exceptions, there is no anti-Semitism of any kind,” said Gregory Kanovicius, director of the Lithuanian Jewish Cultural Society. But he said, “All kinds of weeds keep growing. It’s hard to root them out.” One of the weeds is a kind of moral indifference that could easily spread to other republics. By muddying the distinction between heroic resisters of Stalin and accomplices to genocide, the Lithuanians risk staining their new independent democracy with the blood of the Jews.
