Baltic ghosts: Lithuania is investigating Jewish Holocaust survivors as war criminals - and using their own memoirs as evidence against them
ENIn a strange twist, this whole affair began with a good-faith effort to heal those deep, lingering ethnic divisions. In 1998, President Valdas Adamkus credated a high-level commission to try to establish the "historical truth" Lithuania's horrific occupations during the 20th century: first by the Soviets from 1940-41, then by the Nazis 1941-44, followed again by the Soviets from 1944-90. The commission attracted a prestigious collection of international scholars, including Arad, who had gone on to become a brigadier general in the Israel Defense Forces and director of Yad Vashem, Israel's holocaust remembrance center. However, as the commission began excavating the layered narratives of guilt and suffering from this period, ethnic tensions flared.
