Madam, - Daniel McLaughlin's report from Lithuania (World News, April 13th) aptly conveys that country's failure to confront its anti-Semitic past.
When the Nazis marched into Kaunas, Lithuania's second city, in late June 1941, they found a massacre of Jews already in progress. While locals looked on, some holding up their children for a better view, their compatriots clubbed scores of Jewish fellow-citizens to death. Later, many Lithuanians were enthusiastic accomplices of the Nazis in the mass shootings of Jews at the Ninth Fort outside Kaunas and at the forest pits of Paneriai outside Vilnius.
Not only have attempts to prosecute participants in the murder of Jews in the 1941-45 period been half-hearted; Mr McLaughlin might have added that the few surviving Jews must now endure the added insult of having their community's tragedy officially diminished by comparison with that of the sufferings of Lithuanian nationalists.
Grotesquely, the so-called "Museum of Genocide Victims", housed in the massive former KGB headquarters in central Vilnius, commemorates the members of the various nationalist partisan groups who were imprisoned, killed or deported by the Soviet occupiers in 1940-41 and after 1945.
While the Soviet repression must be condemned, it fell far short of any attempt to eliminate the entire Lithuanian population, and to misappropriate the term "genocide" in this way is grievously to injure truth.
Among the victims of the Soviets were some of those partisans who had taken a leading role in the massacres of Jews. Meanwhile, the victims of the real genocide, which left less than 3 per cent of the Jewish community alive, are commemorated in a small wooden house in an obscure back-street. The unapologetic tone of much current comment in the country on these events is disturbing, to say the least.
There is a faint Irish resonance in all this. It was from Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire, that the forebears of most of Ireland's Jewish community came as they fled the pogroms of the 1880s and afterwards. The Ireland which was then part of the United Kingdom gave them a warmer welcome than the nationalist Ireland of the 1930s would later give those of their compatriots who sought escape from annihilation. - Yours etc.,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.