The Lithuanian parliament Seimas has proposed posthumously awarding military ranks and decorations to participants of ghettos’ anti-Nazi resistance.
On Tuesday, MPs adopted a resolution to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto with 111 votes in favour, no votes against, and no abstentions.
Introducing the draft resolution, MP Emanuelis Zingeris stressed that any conversation about the Holocaust should also include anti-Nazi resistance.
“Lithuanians and Poles living in Vilnius brought one cartridge, two cartridges, three cartridges into the ghetto so that the Gestapo and the Nazi squad entering the ghetto would be met with one or another shot. This is the crucial moment, this is resistance to the Nazis,” he said.
Further reading
The resolution proposes amending the Law on Memorable Days to designate September 23 not only as the National Memorial Day for the Genocide of Lithuanian Jews but also as a day of remembrance of their resistance to the Nazis.
The Seimas pointed out that a unique determination for armed anti-Nazi resistance was demonstrated by the joint underground of the Vilnius Ghetto partisan organisation during World War Two.
The document recommends to the president to award military ranks and posthumous decorations to the participants of the anti-Nazi resistance in the Lithuanian ghettos; to name schools, streets, and squares in towns and cities after them, as well as Jewish rescuers; to update information signs directing to old Jewish cemeteries and sites of mass killings and to properly maintain such sites.
The resolution also calls on Germany to start searching for and returning to Lithuania the Jewish cultural treasures taken from Lithuania by the Nazi occupying force. It also calls on Russia to return the Jewish property of Lithuanian citizens and the financial assets of the Jewish People’s Bank expropriated by the Soviet occupants.
Moreover, the resolution condemned “statements made by politicians that have any racist and anti-Semitic connotations”.
The country’s law enforcement institutions are asked to follow the definition of the Holocaust adopted by the international organisation IHRA.
The IHRA uses the term Holocaust to refer to the state-sponsored systematic persecution and murder of Jews by the Nazi government and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945.
The 80th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto was marked in Lithuania last week.
The Jewish ghetto in the Old Town of Vilnius was established on September 6, 1941, and almost 40,000 people were imprisoned there during its existence. The ghetto was liquidated on September 23, 1943, and victims of the genocide of Lithuanian Jews are remembered in Lithuania on this day.
According to the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, about 200,000 of the approximately 220,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania before the war were killed during the Holocaust.
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