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Vorkuta - a labor-camp-cum-city -- was built from nothing on an icebound wasteland by political prisoners from 1931 to 1957.

VORKUTA, Russia -- Anna Krikun can barely read the yellowing papers that show she was sentenced as a young woman to hard labor in one of Stalin's cruelest Gulag camps.

At 90, her eyesight is fading. But she remembers everything as if it happened yesterday. She recalls the name of the investigator who tortured her with a sleep-deprivation technique known as the "conveyor" until she confessed to betraying the motherland and agitating against the Soviet Union.

It was 1946, the throes of the Stalinist terror, and Krikun was sent to Vorkuta - a labor camp-cum-city built from nothing on an icebound wasteland by political prisoners from 1931 to 1957.

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Vorkuta - a labor-camp-cum-city -- was built from nothing on an icebound wasteland by political prisoners from 1931 to 1957. VORKUTA, Russia -- Anna Krikun can barely read the yellowing papers that show she was sentenced as a young woman to hard labor in one of Stalin's cruelest Gulag camps.

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She fled the Nazis. Escaped a Siberian prison camp. Survived hunger and homelessness in Central Asia. Battled malaria, dysentery and lice on deportation trains and overloaded ships. Landed, finally, in Middle East exile.

Tasini recently learned from a lawyer that her nearly quarter-century quest to recover her family's multimillion-dollar property in their native city of Krakow is being dropped from the Polish claims registry.

Tasini was 3 when she last saw her grandfather, Jacob Finder, in the early days of their flight from Krakow under German air bombardment. Her only memory is of the gnarled hand he kept wrapped around the silver handle of his cane, a hand she was expected to kiss in respectful greeting as soon as she learned to walk.

More than 75 years later, she is still waiting for her homeland - the only Eastern European state that has failed to adopt a national restitution program - to make amends to the heirs of millions of Polish Jews who were stripped of their property, dignity and, in many cases, their lives.

According to the tales recounted by older relatives for decades, 3-year-old Miriam's parents, Rena and Markus, watched from their bedroom window as planes marked with swastikas swooped down and unloaded their bombs on a refinery across the river from their own property on the nearer bank.

Most of the family, including Miriam, her baby sister Lisa, her mother and grandfather Jacob, left to take refuge at her aunt's home in the Carpathian Mountains. But the car ran out of gas a mere 30 miles out of Krakow, amid the throng of thousands fleeing the invasion. Rena was forced to negotiate with local peasants to take her family by horse cart to the city of Lvov (now Lviv, Ukraine), where she had a distant relative.

As the chaos and dislocation dragged on in Poland and Jews were targeted for deportation or internment, mother, daughters and grandfather holed up in a tiny Lvov apartment rented with Rena's dwindling cash and jewelry. They were soon joined by Markus and other relatives.

But eight months later, Soviet agents arrested the Finders as "undesirables" and banished them to a Siberian labor camp. (All Poles were considered Soviet enemies during the initial war years.)

Grandfather Jacob, who hid behind a bed when the secret police arrived, was spared deportation then but met a worse fate the following year when the Nazis invaded Ukraine.

The rest of the family was packed into a cattle car and taken on a weeklong rail journey without heat, toilet or much to eat. Seven members of the family arrived at Gulag 45, where they were given three sacks of potatoes and told to plant them, not eat them, as they were all the food they would have for the next winter.

"I remember having just one pita and I had to share it with my sister and cousin," she said.

It would take another year of grueling travel and constant fear, from the filth of a Caspian Sea voyage to Iran to a storm-tossed passage around the Arabian Peninsula, before the family reached refuge in Tel Aviv, then in the British mandate of Palestine.

Tasini eventually earned a doctorate in psychiatry and psychoanalysis from New York's Yeshiva University and moved to Los Angeles in 1977 with her second husband and three children. She practiced and taught at UCLA, and when Poland threw off communist rule in 1989, she embarked on her quest to recover what had been taken from her family.

In 1991, on her first visit to Krakow in more than half a century, she learned that the hilltop home no longer existed.

"I don't know if the Germans tore it down or the communists destroyed it," she said. "By the time I got there, it was gone."

The only property she managed to recover for surviving family members was her maternal grandparents' four-story home and ground-floor tavern that, though still standing in 1991, was so run-down that "the only living things inside were rats," Tasini recalled.

The family sold the house to developers in 1993 for $250,000, which provided her widowed mother with enough to support her for the last six years of her life.

It turned out to be one of only a few hundred property challenges that have been resolved since Poland elected a democratic Parliament in 1991 after decades under Soviet-installed leaders, who nationalized what private property had survived.

A few of the early 20th century brick buildings in the Finders' flour mill complex sold recently for $17 million. Tasini is challenging the developers and Polish government over rights to the property from an office in her Bel-Air home piled with Polish documents, letters, affidavits and emails.

"In some ways I can say I don't need the money," Tasini said. "But my parents needed the money. My sister and I supported them when they were older because they had little money. There are still some people like that in Poland and around the world - barely living on subsistence."

Polish politicians say the war destroyed most evidence of who owned what when the war began 76 years ago.

Alexander Pociej, a senator with the governing Civic Platform coalition, has spent two decades navigating legal channels in an attempt to recover his family's country villa and nearly 10,000 acres. He says he has come to the conclusion that most Poles, including non-Jewish property owners dispossessed by the communists, will never get back the land or receive compensation.

Studies by the Polish Treasury Ministry, the World Jewish Restitution Organization and the Israeli government's Diaspora Affairs Ministry have estimated the value of property seized from Polish Jews during and after World War II at $30 billion to $40 billion, compensation that would plunge Poland into a deep debt crisis, according to lawmakers.

In 2008, then-Prime Minister Donald Tusk promised to resolve the restitution standoff by the end of the following year. But the worldwide recession united Poland's fractious political forces, which argued that paying out such huge sums would bankrupt the country.

"I strongly believe that some sort of compensation should be paid to everyone who lost property, but it can't be 100% of the budget," Pociej said.

Sikorski told The Times in a March interview that the 55-year-old agreement resolved the restitution issue for U.S. claimants. "It's not my position, it's in the text," he said. "It said that after Poland makes this indemnity payment to the United States that the United States will never again raise the issue."

Although the agreement doesn't preclude Tasini from pursuing her case, she acknowledges her battle appears to have been lost.

"I think the Polish government wants the last of us claimants to die off," Tasini said.

Bolstered by a lifelong capacity for resilience, she says she won't stop fighting until that happens.

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After fleeing the Nazis and a Siberian camp as a child, L.A. woman fights for family's legacy

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She fled the Nazis. Escaped a Siberian prison camp. Survived hunger and homelessness in Central Asia. Battled malaria, dysentery and lice on deportation trains and overloaded ships. Landed, finally, in Middle East exile. Tasini recently learned from a lawyer that her nearly quarter-century quest to recover her family's multimillion-dollar property in their native city of Krakow is being dropped from the Polish claims registry.

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Joseph Stalin: National hero or cold-blooded murderer?

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A timeline of Stalin’s life, the man that oversaw the war machine that helped defeat Nazism and who was the supreme ruler of the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century.

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In the 1920's, the Soviet ideology and social policy was quite different from the rest of the world. Communism was strongly enforced throughout Joseph Stalin's rule, but such totalitarian ideas did nothing to accelerate the industrialization of the USSR. As well, many natural resources found in the country's barely habitable northern regions were going to waste and the political leaders of the era felt it was time to make a change. As a result of communist policies, political and religious dissidents frequently caused problems for the Soviet government. This provided an opportunity to maintain the Soviet state by keeping citizens in a state of terror that began with the formation of Russian Gulags. Officially established on April 25th, 1930, a Gulag was an all union institution and main administration with the Soviet secret police. Gulag is actually a Russian acronym for Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps which was first developed by Vladimir Lenin. The gulags were a vast network of detention centres and forced labour prisons located within the former Soviet Union. Rather than admitting the severity of such camps, the USSR and other communist countries called such facilities "corrective" and "re-educational". Article 58 of The Criminal Code of the Union Republics defined punishment for various forms of "counterrevolutionary activities", and these secret concentration camp-type centres were often used to punish both political prisoners and common criminals. Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested and given long term prison sentences on the grounds of that notorious article. This great penal network functioned throughout Russia and ultimately included around 476 camp complexes located in the wastes of Siberia and the Soviet Far East that lasted well into the 1950's.

The gulags served many purposes ranging from punitive and suppressive functions to economic and financial ones. From the start they were repositories for political enemies of the new communist regime used as a means of political coercion and punishment for anyone who held or expressed views opposing that of the government. For this reason the gulags became an infamous symbol of repression within the Soviet totalitarian state and its new attitude towards religion and tradition. A lot of the communist leaders in Russia gained their power through the elimination of the opposition (whether actual or merely perceived) using methods such as mass arrests of individuals who were then assigned to forced labour. Gulags were similar to prisons in the respect that criminals were often forced to serve their time in "corrective" camps rather than penitentiaries or jail. Both the government enemies and criminals were used as slave labourers who were of significant economic importance to the USSR. The prisoners of the gulags became enormous work forces who were assigned specific economic tasks to be completed across the state. They were vital for planning and implementing the communist plans for economic development, and so were forced to work in areas where manpower was in short supply. This often meant prisoners were forced to work in remote parts of the country where others refused to work. The Soviet economy was extremely poor during the early 1900's and supplying wages for labourers was basically out of the question. Gulags became simple ways to accomplish massive economic tasks because the government did not have to pay the workers or provide acceptable living conditions in which to perform the labour, making them an obvious choice for economic development. Stalin believed that communist Russia was falling behind in comparison to the industrialized and capitalist Western nations, and began a Soviet industrialization campaign that coincided with the growth of the gulag camps. The prisoners were forced to work on major construction projects that would create an infrastructure nationwide, such as the development of railroads, canals, and highways. They were also made to exploit Russia's natural resources in the far reaches of the country where inhospitable conditions deterred any one from attempting to access such resources. Stalin instructed that work should be fast and inexpensive, and the massive number of people being forced to work without pay became a central part of Soviet ideology and policy. If inmates died during the labour there were always more political dissenters that could be found and force to work, and as the communist leaders came to realize the value of forced labour, populations inside the gulags increased, thus increasing the amount of economic development that could be done. By the end of the 1930's labour camps were situated in all twelve of the Soviet Union's time zones, and after the World Wars the gulags continued to increase in size and numbers as more labour was needed and the amount of individuals continuing "anti-Soviet activity" rose. The gulags reached their height only in the early 1950's. Some projects accomplished by the prisoners' labour, such as the Baltic Sea Canal, have really served no economic or strategic purpose. This questions whether gulags were truly meant to industrialize Russia or merely punish and suppress those who disagreed with the communist regime. Then again, the use of gulag inmates was not purely political or economic; they also served as a means to colonize sparsely populated remote areas. For this reason the idea of "free settlement" was implemented into the camps. Since prisoners often served only a sentence and were not always confined to the gulag for life, prisoners who had good behaviour and had served most of their term could be released and made to settle in the general vicinity of the camp. They might have been given land with which to build a home and make a living off of.

It is important to note that Russian gulags differed from Nazi concentration camps in many respects. The purpose of the gulags was mainly economic and political, rather that striving for the elimination of supposedly inferior races like the concentration camps tried to achieve. Gulags imprisoned individuals who were against the new communist rule or committed crimes worthy of punishment (though perhaps not quite so severe), but Nazi's trapped all types of people who they deemed to be worthless or unacceptable. This included women, children, Jews, gay individuals, Gypsies, communists, and anyone who might have been considered an opponent to Hitler. An important difference between gulags and concentration camps was that there was a slight possibility of being released from the gulag after serving your sentence. Prisoners of the Holocaust had no chance of return and the only way out was to attempt to escape and risk your life in the process. That is not to say that the Russian gulags were in any way more humane or less torturous than concentration camps - both resulted in the deaths of millions and shocked people across the globe, generating a major influence on human rights and views held worldwide.

Many people have often wondered why such a horrifying event in Russian history was never openly recognized or greatly publicized. The Soviet Union and other communist countries refused to acknowledge the existence of forced labour camps, and instead promoted the "new penitential policy of the Soviet State" using posters and banners in the gulags. They reinforced labour as a heroic and honourable contribution to the country; many of the gulag gates displayed the slogan, "Labour in the USSR is a matter of honour, glory, courage, and heroism". Russian political leaders essentially ignored the reality of the forced labour camps, and because citizens were in a state or terror they made no attempts to publicize the atrocities for fear of it happening to them. Information about the gulags was available long before Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago was published in 1974. Multiple eyewitness accounts, literature, memoirs, movies, songs, photos, and TV shows were published prior to World War II, yet hardly any post-Communism trials have taken place. One source explained the reason fir this, stating, "The gulag had already killed tens of thousands of its own most ardent killers. Again and again, yesterday's judges were declared today's criminals, so that Soviet society never had to own up to its millions of state-backed murders."

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What Was The Purpose Of Russian Gulags History Essay

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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A detailed history of People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD)

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Joseph Stalin, who died 60 years ago in Moscow, was a small man -- no more than 5-foot-4. The abused son of a poor, alcoholic Georgian cobbler, Josef Vissarionovich Djughashvili (the future Stalin) also had a withered arm, a clubbed foot and a face scarred by small pox, but he stood very tall as one of history's most prolific killers.

Stalin's extremely brutal 30-year rule as absolute ruler of the Soviet Union featured so many atrocities, including purges, expulsions, forced displacements, imprisonment in labor camps, manufactured famines, torture and good old-fashioned acts of mass murder and massacres (not to mention World War II) that the complete toll of bloodshed will likely never be known.

An amoral psychopath and paranoid with a gangster's mentality, Stalin eliminated anyone and everyone who was a threat to his power - including (and especially) former allies. He had absolutely no regard for the sanctity of human life.

But how many people is he responsible for killing?

In February 1989, two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, a research paper by Georgian historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev published in the weekly tabloid Argumenti i Fakti estimated that the death toll directly attributable to Stalin's rule amounted to some 20 million lives (on top of the estimated 20 million Soviet troops and civilians who perished in the Second World War), for a total tally of 40 million.

''It's important that they published it, although the numbers themselves are horrible,'' Medvedev told the New York Times at the time.

''Those numbers include my father.''

Medevedev's grim bookkeeping included the following tragic episodes: 1 million imprisoned or exiled between 1927 to 1929; 9 to 11 million peasants forced off their lands and another 2 to 3 million peasants arrested or exiled in the mass collectivization program; 6 to 7 million killed by an artificial famine in 1932-1934; 1 million exiled from Moscow and Leningrad in 1935; 1 million executed during the ''Great Terror'' of 1937-1938; 4 to 6 million dispatched to forced labor camps; 10 to 12 million people forcibly relocated during World War II; and at least 1 million arrested for various "political crimes" from 1946 to 1953.

Although not everyone who was swept up in the aforementioned events died from unnatural causes, Medvedev's 20 million non-combatant deaths estimate is likely a conservative guess.

Indeed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the literary giant who wrote harrowingly about the Soviet gulag system, claimed the true number of Stalin's victims might have been as high as 60 million.

Most other estimates from reputed scholars and historians tend to range from between 20 and 60 million.

In his book, "Unnatural Deaths in the U.S.S.R.: 1928-1954," I.G. Dyadkin estimated that the USSR suffered 56 to 62 million "unnatural deaths" during that period, with 34 to 49 million directly linked to Stalin.

In "Europe A History," British historian Norman Davies counted 50 million killed between 1924-53, excluding wartime casualties.

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, a Soviet politician and historian, estimated 35 million deaths.

Even some who have put out estimates based on research admit their calculations may be inadequate.

In his acclaimed book "The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties," Anglo-American historian Robert Conquest said: "We get a figure of 20 million dead [under Stalin], which is almost certainly too low and might require an increase of 50 percent or so."

Quotes attributed to Stalin reflected his utter disregard for human life. Among other bons mots, he allegedly declared: "Death is the solution to all problems. No man -- no problem," and "One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic."

Part of the problem with counting the total loss of life lies with the incompleteness and unreliability of Soviet records. A more troubling dilemma has to do with the fact that many some deaths - like starvation from famines - may or may not have been directly connected to Stalin's policies.

In any case, if the figure of 60 million dead is accurate that would mean that an average of 2 million were killed during each year of Stalin's horrific reign - or 40,000 every week (even during "peacetime").

If the lower estimate of 20 million is the true number, that still translates into 1,830 deaths every single day.

Thus, Stalin's regime represented a machinery of killing that history - excluding, perhaps, China under Chairman Mao Tse-Tung -- has never witnessed.

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Joseph Stalin, who died 60 years ago in Moscow, was a small man -- no more than 5-foot-4. The abused son of a poor, alcoholic Georgian cobbler, Josef Vissarionovich Djughashvili (the future Stalin) also had a withered arm, a clubbed foot and a face scarred by small pox, but he stood very tall as one of history's most prolific killers.

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by Rūta Vanagaitė

The following article by Rūta Vanagaitė, in the authorized English translation by Geoff Vasil, was first published in Lithuanian in Delfi. lt. The article emerged from the conference on Holocaust education organized by the author, held at Vilnius City Hall on 17 April 2015. Conference program. Conference's final press release. Project website.

V ilijampolė - a part of Kaunas - wintertime. The project is "Being a Jew." A group of thirty teachers led by a Jewish guide is standing in the former Kaunas ghetto. Houses, garages, storage spaces, wood piles where during the war thousands of Jews, herded here like animals by the Nazis, milled about, yards where Jewish children played, and were later taken to the square or to one of the Kaunas forts and shot. The houses and storage buildings have been rebuilt, renovated, replaced, and there are Kaunas residents living in them now who don't know where they live and what happened here before they were here. And how could they know? There is no written notice, nothing preserved, only a stone next to the entrance. And a building is being renovated which was the store whose display window once featured the head cut off of the rabbi who lived here.

An Audi stops next to us. A man with a shaved head rolls down the window and shouts: "Well, Jews, what do you want? What are you doing here? What are you looking for?" After our guide gives him a polite response, almost apologizing for our presence here, the man drives off down one of the small streets of the ghetto, but several minutes later turns around and drives back towards us at full speed. The brakes screech and the car comes to a stop right before plowing into our group. I thought things would go badly and I went up to the man in the vehicle to try to alleviate the situation. There was an open, unfinished bottle of beer on the car seat. I said to the man: "Don't be angry. We are not Jews, this is just a tour. This was the ghetto, after all, didn't you know that?" I saw that this was news to him and he didn't know what ghetto meant. "Maybe you shouldn't drive," I told the man with the shaved head, "since you've had a few. You don't want the police to catch you." "I am a policeman," he said. Finally he drove away, not having done anything to us.

Last week for the closing of the "Being a Jew" project we held an international conference on the Holocaust. Celebrated historian Saulius Sužiedėlis spoke there about something the majority of Lithuanian people really don't know, and probably don't want to know: it wasn't the dregs or rejects of society who shot the Jews. Thousands of us, of our own, of Lithuanians shot the Jews, as Sužiedėlis called them, "average guys." Not out of sadism, either. It was simply that when the Germans came, after the Soviets, in the summer of 1941, these "average guys" resurrected all of the administrative structures of independent Lithuania, including the police, self-defense units, and so on. Average Lithuanians who loved their country went back to work or began work in these structures or became members of these battalions. And then they got their first order: to kill the others, people who were different. The "average guys" carried out their assignment well, so all that was left for the Nazis was to observe and report their satisfaction back to Berlin. "Obedience to the bureaucratic mechanism and loyalty to their comrades were the main consideration in turning 'average guys' into murderers," Saulius Sužiedėlis said. Greed, alcohol and good old-fashioned Lithuanian antisemitism also helped those men carry out their assignments.

Slander? Lies? I read the case-files on my relatives who were sentenced. All files on political prisoners and deportees are accessible to everyone, all you have to do is go to the Special Archive across the street from Lukiškės Square [in Vilnius]. I read the files on my grandfather and of others arrested along with him - one person was imprisoned with him for convoying group of Jews to a killing site. He was rewarded with a house and 4.5 hectares of property belonging to a Jewish man. My grandfather didn't kill, didn't receive Jewish property, he only participated in drawing up lists. Could he have refused to do that? I don't know. Were many of our relatives those same "average guys" who loved Lithuania and became murderers against their own wills? Could they have refused to do what they did? I don't know.

I know that we in Lithuania haven't spoken about this, are not speaking about it and will not speak about it in the near future. Jews from Israel and the United States attack us, although we heroically repel and resist all their fantastic inventions. It doesn't seem to matter that our historians know the facts. Historians investigate and keep quiet. The facts are no good to us, they are even dangerous. For even if we say openly and publicly that Lithuanians were not heroes, and that some things did happen, that would be very useful to Putin. He will exploit that and turn us into Nazis and fascists, and then he will surely attack our country. As I was escorting Tomas Venclova after the conference, I asked him about that. The poet answered simply: "The truth cannot be useful for Putin, nor for any other of our enemies. The truth can't hurt Lithuania. The lie, or suppression, can, and it is exactly that suppression which serves Putin's policies."

The idea has been put forward in Lithuania of an official history policy. The parliament wants to legitimize the idea with legislation. We do not need this law since there already is an official sanctioned history policy. "Our history is commemorative, it aspires to commemorate the heroic acts of the nation, to recall the losses the nation has experienced and to honor the dead," Saulius Sužiedėlis said. "The ethnic Lithuanian can only be an innocent victim or a heroic fighter, and often both the one and the other simultaneously," Tomas Venclova said.

Everything beyond the limits of "commemorative history" is not our history, and is therefore unimportant. It doesn't matter that Vilnius was a Polish and a Jewish city, or that if you live in an apartment in the Old Town, there was probably a Jewish family who lived there before they were murdered. No one is going to place a memorial plaque on the giant Jewish hospital in Vilnius which still has its old doors, wood floors and windows, where apartments for Vilnius residents have been set up in what were the operating room, childbirth section and X-ray facility there. Our tour group didn't go there, because some "average guy" would likely emerge from one of the apartments and say something like: "Well what do you want now, Jews?"

School children from Vilnius do not travel the short distance to Paneriai [Ponár], located just next to Vilnius, where 70,000 Jewish people were murdered [of a total of 100,000 victims], and not exclusively at the hands of the Nazis. Where in order to save bullets men banged the skulls of living infants against trees. The trees are still standing there. But those who were murdered at Paneriai were not "our" people, they were "theirs." At the culmination of the "Being a Jew" project we brought 700 students from Vilnius to Paneriai, stood by the killing pits and asked if anyone has been there before. Around thirty students raised their hands. All students, of course, over their twelve years of school visit all of the important Lithuanian museums, including the Horse Museum and the Chocolate Museum.

The Genocide Research Center a few years ago published on their website the names of a thousand Lithuanian people who were involved in the murder of other people from 1941 to 1944. After a couple of days that list disappeared; apparently history policy had come into play, which is implemented in Lithuania easily, through a single telephone call.

Why am I writing about all of this? For whom and for what purpose are these tours, conferences and commemorative events? Why delve into the past, why not let bygones be bygones? "After all, all peoples suffered," an acquaintance of mine told me. "They were that kind of times," another said.

Now of course times have changed. On April 16, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, when our project participants, 700 children, mounted the train from Vilnius to Paneriai, some of the boys saw some Jewish kids standing nearby. "Well, let's load the Jews on the train cars," they said, and laughed. The Jewish kids began crying. The history policy implemented by the Lithuanian government has truly been effective.

Update of 4 May 2015: This article appeared also in En.Delfi.lt / The Lithuania Tribune.

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Why We Have Not, Do Not and Will Not Talk About the Holocaust in Lithuania

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O P I N I O N by Rūta Vanagaitė The following article by Rūta Vanagaitė, in the authorized English translation by Geoff Vasil, was first published in Lithuanian in Delfi. lt.

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A judicial inquiry into the wartime activities of Jewish anti-Nazi resistance fighters in Lithuania has led to accusations that the small Baltic state is trying to distort the history of World War II.

The row follows investigations by the country's prosecutor into whether the former partisans - Holocaust survivors now in their 80s - themselves committed war crimes.

Israel has denounced the inquiry as scandalous and refused to allow one of the main potential witnesses to be questioned. Britain's foremost World War II historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, told the BBC he was "deeply shocked" by the investigation, which he called "perverse".
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which works to track down Nazi war criminals, claims it is part of an attempt to establish a "false symmetry" between atrocities committed against Jews and atrocities allegedly committed by them.

And the dispute has now led to a tense meeting between the Lithuanian prime minister Gediminas Kirkilas and American Jewish leaders.

'Punitive action'

At least four former fighters have now been questioned or are being sought for questioning. All deny any wrongdoing, and so far the main evidence appears to be memoirs written by former partisans themselves.

The row began to develop last September when the Lithuanian prosecutor for war-crimes and crimes against humanity asked to talk to Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad about his experiences as a 16-year-old boy, after he had escaped from a Nazi-run ghetto in Lithuania and joined the Soviet-led resistance force in the forest.

Dr Arad, 81, is former head of Israel's Holocaust Memorial Authority, Yad Vashem.
He was not informed what provoked the inquiry, but the prosecutor, Rimvydas Valentukevicius, told the BBC he was investigating the killing of at least one civilian in a raid by partisans on Girdenai, a village in eastern Lithuania in 1944.

In his book, The Partisan, first published in English in 1979, Dr Arad described how his brigade was ordered to mount a "punitive action" against villagers who, he wrote, were armed by the Germans and had shot partisans attempting to requisition food.

Dr Arad described how houses were burned. But he denies involvement in the killing of any civilians.

He has said he is willing to be interviewed by Lithuanian journalists, but not by the police. "I don't trust them," he said. "The case has no basis. It is trying to falsify events. And I don't want to be part of this play."

Rewriting history?

Dr Arad, like other former partisans, insists that joining the Soviet-led resistance force was effectively his only means of staying alive in Nazi-occupied Lithuania.

Historians say that about 95% of the country's Jews - 200,000 people - were killed by the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators. This is probably the highest proportion in Europe.
Under Lithuanian law, any citizen can initiate an inquiry into wartime crimes, and Dr Arad believes the inquiry into his record is revenge for expert evidence he gave at the trial in the United States of a former Lithuanian Nazi collaborator accused of involvement in the killing of Jews.

"I think they use my case as a general intention to rewrite history," he said, "to show that Jews are not the only victims."

Lithuania's deputy foreign minister Jaroslavas Neverovicas told the BBC that Dr Arad was wanted as a witness, not a suspect.

But the case has undone painstaking work by the government a few years ago to establish an international commission of historians tasked with examining the crimes of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in Lithuania, and attempting to draw up a definitive version of highly controversial events.

One aim was to reconcile differing assessments, inside and outside Lithuania, of the extent of Lithuanian involvement in the Holocaust.

Sabotage

Dr Arad, seen as a key Israeli scholar, was originally persuaded to join the Commission only after the personal intervention of Lithuania's president. But he has now withdrawn, at least until the case is dropped, as has Britain's representative, Sir Martin Gilbert.

"The Commission was one of the best things that happened in post-Soviet Lithuania," the deputy foreign minister, Mr Neverovicas, said. "It's unfortunate that such an episode appeared. But when the accusation happened, our prosecutor's office could not sit still, it had to investigate."

The government-appointed head of the commission, however, believes that its work has been deliberately sabotaged by nationalist forces who want to lead Lithuania away from the European mainstream.
Conservative member of parliament Emmanuelis Zingeris, Lithuania's leading Jewish politician, who was one of those at the forefront of the country's campaign to break away from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, said:

"Someone has tried to dismantle this carefully-built bridge between Lithuania, Israel, America and world historical opinion. And it's a real tragedy.. a highly counter-productive move against Lithuanian liberal values, against all our shared values with NATO and EU countries."

For the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the world's main Nazi-hunting organisation, the investigation of Jewish partisans is part of a wider attempt by Lithuania to improve its international image by rewriting the history of World War II.

"The participation of so many Lithuanian volunteers in the mass murder of Jews is a very sensitive subject," says Efraim Zuroff of the centre's Jerusalem office. "However if it emerges that there were Jews who committed crimes against Lithuanians, that would blunt the shame that Lithuanians feel in response to their World War II crimes."

"The Holocaust obfuscation, distortion and deflection going on in Lithuania should be a very serious cause of concern in the EU and Nato," he added.

"I think what is happening in Lithuania and elsewhere throughout Eastern Europe is far more serious than the phenomenon of Holocaust denial which has never penetrated mainstream European society."

Dr Zuroff describes independent Lithuania's record in prosecuting Nazi war criminals as a "miserable failure". Since 1991, it has prosecuted three Nazi collaborators - and 24 people accused of crimes against humanity or genocide under the Soviet regime.

Totalitarian

The country has its own judicial definition of the word "genocide", wider than that used by the United Nations.

It includes attempts to wipe out particular social as well as ethnic groups, and can therefore potentially be used to prosecute Soviet crimes as well as Nazi ones.

Many non-Jewish Lithuanians argue they were subject to a form of genocide because the Soviet Union attempted to destroy the nation's intellectual elite through mass deportations to Siberia, the fight against anti-Soviet guerrillas, and other forms of persecution.
As for Nazi collaborators, the government says most were prosecuted in Soviet times, whereas the task of finding Soviet collaborators could only begin after independence.

Deputy foreign minister Neverovicas says Lithuania is being even-handed in investigating both totalitarian regimes and is right to be spearheading efforts in the European Parliament to make Western Europeans more aware of Soviet crimes.

But his government is clearly embarrassed by the still-widening investigation of the partisans.

This spring prosecutors questioned 86-year-old Fania Brantsovskaya, who still lives in Lithuania, about the role her partisan brigade played in an alleged massacre of 38 civilians in the village of Kaniukai in south-eastern Lithuania in January 1944.

Mrs Brantsovskaya insists she was not present during the raid and has now also been told that she is not a suspect.

Nevertheless the prime minister Mr Kirkilas was so concerned about the possible impact of the case on Lithuania's relations with America's influential Jewish community that he invited her to tea before his trip to New York.

Lithuania insists, however, that the judiciary works independently of the government, and the inquiry continues.

Crossing Continents: The battle for memory was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday, 17 July at 1102 BST.

We asked for your comments, a selection of which you can read below.

I find the Zionist propensity to ignore the deaths of five million non-Jews during the Holocaust to be reprehensible. I am also appalled at the undermining of Lithuania's attempts to investigate the crimes committed by the Soviets during Stalin's reign. Few Westerners are even aware that during the "Sitzkrieg" following the German invasion of Poland, while French and British armies did nothing, Soviet armies conquered Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and eastern Poland, and began purging millions of people. Are those lives of no value because they were Gentiles and not Jews? Does their blood not cry out for justice?

I am not entirely surprised by this development. Lithuania is a country in serious denial about their tainted WW2 past. During a visit to Vilnius in 2003, I was amazed to find that the city's famed "Museum of Genocide Victims" was almost entirely focused on the 75,000 (non-Jewish) victims of the Soviet occupation. The only item in the whole "genocide" museum that mentioned the murder of 200,000 Jewish Lithuanians was a small placard in a hallway that estimated that the Nazis had killed 240,000 Lithuanians in a three year period "including about 200,000 Jews".

The bus tour of the city offered more of the same: after hearing mind-numbing architectural details about every church and monument, the tape-recorded narration offered just a terse comment when it passed the site of the Jewish ghetto, pointing out that this was where tens of thousands of Jews had been killed.

Surely the important thing here is that ALL war crimes are investigated. The Holocaust was a terrible thing, but if Jews participated in war crimes then they should be brought to justice just as the Nazis and their supporters are.

"Israel has denounced the inquiry as scandalous and refused to allow one of the main potential witnesses to be questioned. Britain's foremost World War II historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, told the BBC he was "deeply shocked" by the investigation, which he called "perverse"."

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A judicial inquiry into the wartime activities of Jewish anti-Nazi resistance fighters in Lithuania has led to accusations that the small Baltic state is trying to distort the history of World War II. The row follows investigations by the country's prosecutor into whether the former partisans - Holocaust survivors now in their 80s - themselves committed war crimes.

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Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom

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the victims return: survivors of the gulag after stalin

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europe - russia & the former soviet union

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history / europe / russia & the former soviet union

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history / russia & the former soviet union

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The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin

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Stalin's Reign of terror in the Soviet Union has been called "the other holocaust." During the Stalin years, it is thought that more innocent men, women, and children perished than in Hitler's destruction of the European Jews. Many millions died in Stalin's Gulag of ...

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Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom

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Although the bookkeeping of Stalin's terror is an inexact and contentious science, Mr. Medvedev's estimates are generally in line with Western calculations that have long been disparaged by more official Soviet historians.

''It's important that they published it, although the numbers themselves are horrible,'' Mr. Medvedev said in an interview tonight. ''Those numbers include my father.''

Mr. Medvedev, a dissident Marxist who has recently been rescued from official obscurity and honored as a leading authority on dark corners of Soviet history, said the weekly newspaper solicited the article and presumably showed the contents to officials before publishing it.

Mr. Medvedev said he had no special access to official archives, but relied on his own compilations of material over the years and recent publications in the Soviet press.

Under a headline proclaiming ''The Number of Victims of Stalinism Is About 40 Million People,'' in a terse, question-and answer format, Mr. Medvedev cited the human cost of Stalin's leadership year by year, leaving it to the reader to complete the arithmetic.

Mr. Medevedev's accounting included these victims:

* One million imprisoned or exiled from 1927 to 1929, falsely accused of being saboteurs or members of opposition parties.

* Nine million to 11 million of the more prosperous peasants driven from their lands and another two million to three million arrested or exiled in the early 1930's campaign of forced farm collectivization. Many of these were believed to have been killed.

* Six million to seven million killed in the punitive famine inflicted on peasants in 1932 and 1933.

* One million exiled from Moscow and Leningrad in 1935 for belonging to families of former nobility, merchants, capitalists and officials.

* About one million executed in the ''great terror'' of 1937-38, and another four million to six million sent to forced labor camps from which most, including Mr. Medvedev's father, did not return.

* Two million to three million sent to camps for violating absurdly strict labor laws imposed in 1940.

* At least 10 million to 12 million ''repressed'' in World War II, including millions of Soviet-Germans and other ethnic minorities forcibly relocated.

* More than one million arrested on political grounds from 1946 to Stalin's death in 1953.

The Soviet press has left little unsaid about Stalin's shortcomings, probing into sacred myths like his conduct of World War II, likening him to Hitler, dissecting his cruelties period by period. But official historians have shied away from putting a number to it all..

Mr. Medvedev acknowledged in Argumenti i Fakti, and repeated tonight, that many periods of repression will never be fully measured because records have been lost or never existed.

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union of soviet socialist republics (ussr)

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Bill Keller and Special To the New York Times

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Major Soviet Paper Says 20 Million Died As Victims of Stalin

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Although the bookkeeping of Stalin's terror is an inexact and contentious science, Mr. Medvedev's estimates are generally in line with Western calculations that have long been disparaged by more official Soviet historians. ''It's important that they published it, although the numbers themselves are horrible,'' Mr. Medvedev said in an interview tonight.

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Lithuania's Startling Campaign to Erase Its Ugly History of Nazi Collaboration

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I met Yitzhak Arad in the cafeteria of his upscale retirement home outside Tel Aviv. To his enemies, this short man, softened by age and bundled in lon ...

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Chasia Lancman was too late. The passport office closed at 3 pm and it was 3:01. As she cried to the German soldiers, Chasia did not realize that one minute would ultimately save her family.

In 1940, Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin deported approximately 200,000 Polish Jews without passports from Russian-occupied Eastern Poland to labor camps in deep Russia and Siberia. Those with passports remained in Poland-and fell victim to the Nazis as they swept across the nation a year later.

The Lancmans and others like them spent the war years in camps out of the Germans' reach. They became known as Stalin's Jews. The Lancmans immigrated to the United States in 1948, eventually settling in New Jersey, but they had not completely escaped tragedy. At one point in Siberia, while moving from camp to camp, Chasia's son Chaim went looking for food at a train stop. When Chaim hadn't returned as the train was leaving, his sister Frima went to find him. The children were never heard from again.

That is, until now.

Growing up in Short Hills, Robert Stevens, 31, had heard the story of his missing aunt and uncle many times from his mother, Marlene Stevens (formerly Malka Lancman). For years, the family searched fruitlessly for Chaim and Frima. As Marlene, now 71, grew older, Robert continued the mission and reached out to the Red Cross and even a Russian TV program that reunites families and friends.

"I was very close to giving up hope, but I held on," says Robert. "Because that is what I learned from my parents from their own experience as survivors-to never give up."

In January, Robert's determination paid off. A 50-year-old woman had also contacted the Russian TV program looking for her mother's siblings. Gulnora, Frima's daughter, is alive and living worlds away as a Muslim in Uzbekistan. Although details from their stories differ slightly, pictures make the connection undeniable. The discovery was beyond Marlene's wildest dreams. Frima had survived the war, married, and had children. (Unfortunately, Chaim was never found, though the Lancmans are continuing their search.)

With the help of a translator, Gulnora, Marlene, and Robert talk weekly, and Robert is trying to bring his newfound cousin to New Jersey for a visit this summer. For Marlene, the reunion will be bittersweet. Both of her parents and three of her sisters died without knowing that Frima survived the Holocaust. Frima herself passed away in 1985. "I only wish more people were here to enjoy it with me," Marlene says.

Robert plans to launch Iamalink.com, a nonprofit social networking site dedicated to preserving the legacy of the Holocaust. The site will allow for genealogical searches of living survivors and their descendants.

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Click to enlarge images

Marlene is holding a paddle under the flag of Israel in Germany's Föhrenwald Displaced Persons camp, where the Lancmans spent three years after the war. "It's almost as if she's looking up [at the man from the Red Cross] and saying 'It's over. The war is over now,'" says her son Robert.

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Holocaust Survivors, Exiled Deep in Russia and Siberia During WWII, Reunite After Years of Separation-www.njmonthly.com

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Chasia Lancman was too late. The passport office closed at 3 pm and it was 3:01. As she cried to the German soldiers, Chasia did not realize that one minute would ultimately save her family. In 1940, Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin deported approximately 200,000 Polish Jews without passports from Russian-occupied Eastern Poland to labor camps in deep Russia and Siberia.