Fridman is now the poster child for the Jew victimized by Lithuania’s campaign to govern Jewish memory.
Lithuania has turned a Jew’s May 9 remembrance into a criminal file. Artur Fridman did not create Lithuania’s crisis. He exposed it. A Jew honored a Jewish soldier who fought Nazi Germany, and Lithuania answered with pre-trial investigation materials, statutory accusation, and the machinery of intimidation.
That is Lithuania’s Memory War. It is not a dispute about dates. It is a state strategy for controlling which crimes may be remembered, which victims may speak, which perpetrators remain protected, and which Jewish memories may be punished. The calendar becomes the weapon. May 9 becomes the trap.
The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. They may both be my enemies. Lithuania the nation is not in that sentence. The 1941 killers are. The Soviet regime that replaced them is. The Memory War the state runs is. Russia wants May 9 treated as sacred victory. Lithuania wants it treated only as Soviet occupation. Neither owns my memory. I am entitled to view any date through the lens of my own life, and my life lens is Lithuanian Jewish annihilation.
I do not celebrate Stalin. I do not celebrate Soviet occupation, deportation, prison, censorship, antisemitism, imperial lies, or the destruction of Lithuanian sovereignty. Soviet rule was criminal and brutal for Lithuanians, for Jews, and for Jews who survived the Holocaust only to find themselves trapped under another dictatorship. None of that is in dispute.
But Lithuania is not asking Jews to remember Soviet crimes honestly. Lithuania is asking Jews to let Soviet crimes erase Lithuanian crimes. That is the fraud. Lithuania’s Memory War permits Soviet crimes to be named with specificity, Nazi crimes to be condemned in abstraction, and Lithuanian crimes to disappear inside both.
Jews were not only victims in Lithuania. Jews were victims of Lithuania: of Lithuanian institutions, Lithuanian formations, Lithuanian neighbors, Lithuanian shooters, Lithuanian guards, Lithuanian informers, Lithuanian thieves, and Lithuanian memory-makers who later converted the crime into national innocence. That sentence is the beginning of honesty. It is also the sentence Lithuania’s Memory War exists to suppress.
The architecture of Lithuanian guilt
The Lithuanian Activist Front understood murder of Jews as proof of national loyalty. One infamous formulation declared: “Traitors will be forgiven only if they truly prove that they have liquidated at least one Jew.” That sentence is not marginal to this argument. It is the architecture of the argument. It converted Jewish death into Lithuanian redemption. It made killing Jews a certificate of belonging.
Some historians have argued the sentence was an NKVD interpolation, surviving in only one of two recorded versions of the LAF call. The dispute does not rescue the LAF program. Lithuanian conduct from June through December 1941 documents the operating logic regardless of which surviving variant is taken as authoritative.
If “kill a Jew to prove your patriotism” was the operating logic of Lithuanian nationalism in 1941, then every later narrative that treats Holocaust collaboration as foreign-imposed, exceptional, or marginal is a lie. The collaborator was not an accident outside Lithuanian patriotism. He was one expression of it. The movement told him how to prove himself. The proof was a Jewish corpse.
Had Lithuanians stopped murdering Jews when the Germans left, the argument would be different. They did not. Jewish returnees and survivors remained vulnerable to Lithuanian violence after the Nazi phase collapsed. The end of German occupation did not produce Lithuanian repentance. It did not produce Lithuanian justice. It did not produce Lithuanian protection for Jews returning to homes, families, graves, property, and towns destroyed with Lithuanian assistance.
Lithuanian murder of Jews did not end because Lithuania recovered its conscience. It ended because power changed hands. That power was Soviet, and Soviet power was criminal. That is the horror. Jewish history in Lithuania does not offer clean saviors. It offers competing enemies, competing violences, competing occupations, and then a modern state demanding that Jews remember only the parts that flatter Lithuania.
No Jew has to choose a favored rapist. Soviet soldiers raped. Lithuanians raped. German occupiers raped. Opportunists raped. Men who found Jewish women defenseless raped. The fact that the Red Army defeated Nazi Germany does not absolve Soviet violence. The fact that the Soviet Union was criminal does not absolve Lithuanian violence. I will not sanitize Soviet soldiers because they defeated Hitler. I will not sanitize Lithuanian perpetrators because they hated Stalin.
When Lithuania demands that Jews treat May 9 only as Soviet occupation, Lithuania is asking Jews to mourn the interruption of the LAF logic. It is asking us to treat the end of Lithuanian opportunity to keep murdering Jews as a national wound. That demand is obscene.
Article 170-2 as a weapon in the Memory War
Article 170-2 §1 of the Lithuanian Criminal Code reads like a pledge of memory protection. In practice, Lithuania uses memory law as a selective sorting machine. When the accused party is Lithuanian and the injured memory is Jewish, prosecutors find caution, procedure, discretion, and silence. When a Jew disrupts Lithuania’s anti-Soviet hero narrative, criminal law becomes available.
Years before Fridman was indicted, I asked Vilnius prosecutors to apply Article 170-2 §1 to state-sponsored Holocaust distortion by the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania. I submitted the application. The prosecutors refused. They refused again. Lithuania’s memory statute went silent when the accused institution was Lithuanian and the injury was to Jewish memory.
Then Fridman used May 9 to challenge Lithuania’s anti-Soviet mythology. Lithuania produced a 220-page criminal file. That is not memory protection. It is Lithuania’s Memory War in statutory form. Article 170-2 §1 becomes a weapon not against Holocaust distortion, but against Jews who refuse Lithuania’s hierarchy of memory.
This is the asymmetry. Lithuania has not punished any Lithuanian for the murder of Jews. But it finds prosecutorial energy for a Jew who commemorates a Jewish soldier who fought Nazi Germany. The state that preserves fabricated rehabilitations, promotes rescuer inflation, and markets the Genocide Center as research can still indict a Jew for the wrong kind of memory.
The deeper offense beneath the asymmetry is architectural. Lithuania has chosen to absorb Lithuanian Holocaust perpetration into “the Nazi occupier” or, in newer formulations, into “Soviet provocateurs” who allegedly engineered Lithuanian massacres. The argument is that responsibility flows upward, to a foreign regime, and that Lithuanians were instruments rather than authors. If that argument succeeds, Lithuania has destroyed its own ability to protect Soviet-era memory. The same logic that absorbs Lithuanian Holocaust perpetration into German or Soviet command can absorb Soviet-era Lithuanian victimhood into other categories. If Lithuanian agency can be deleted from 1941 because the Wehrmacht was present, Lithuanian agency can be deleted from 1949 because Soviet troops were present. Memory cannot be detached from local actors only when those actors were perpetrators and reattached to them only when they were victims. For Lithuanian truth to stand, Lithuanian truth must be whole.
The prosecution also runs under Article 313 §2 of the Lithuanian Criminal Code, false statements about a deceased person. The deceased person is Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. The state alleges that Fridman’s Facebook post falsely characterized Ramanauskas-Vanagas as a KGB collaborator. On September 2, 2025, the LGGRTC issued letter No. 13R-645, on the prosecution’s own case file, acknowledging that Ramanauskas-Vanagas was the subject of a Soviet security services recruitment contact in January 1945, codename “Džkūkija.” The state’s own historical institution has documented the recruitment that the prosecution treats as criminal to mention.
The facts Lithuania cannot prosecute away
Fridman does not need permission to honor a Jewish soldier who fought the Wehrmacht. Lithuania needs an explanation for why Jewish memory became a criminal case. The facts are not on trial. Lithuania’s Memory War is.
The historical fact is direct. The defeat of Nazi Germany was marked on May 8 in much of Europe and May 9 in the Soviet and post-Soviet calendar. Both dates arise from the same surrender. Marking May 9 is not denial of Nazi crimes. It is commemoration of Nazi defeat.
The Israeli record is also direct. In 2017, Israel adopted a law designating May 9 as a day to commemorate the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, with emphasis on Jewish fighters. The Library of Congress summary records the law. In 2018, the Knesset passed the Day of Salvation and Liberation Law anchoring May 9 (26 Iyar) in the Hebrew calendar with the formal endorsement of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, the Conference of European Rabbis, and former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi and Yad Vashem chairman Yisrael Meir Lau. A Jew who marks May 9 in Vilnius is doing what Israeli law tells the Jewish state to do in Jerusalem, anchored in both secular and religious authority.
The Jewish military record is overwhelming. Yad Vashem records that approximately 500,000 Jews served in the Red Army; about 120,000 fell in combat; about 80,000 were murdered by the Germans as prisoners of war; and more than 160,000 received military citations. Yad Vashem’s published estimates of Jewish recipients of the title Hero of the Soviet Union range from more than 100 to more than 150. This is not Soviet propaganda. It is established Holocaust history.
The Litvak record is specific. Yad Vashem’s project on Jews in the Red Army documents Soviet Jewish military service, and Yad Vashem reporting on its own exhibition records that the Lithuanian and Latvian rifle divisions were up to 23 percent Jewish, with Yiddish common in those units. A Litvak descendant who marks May 9 is honoring documented Lithuanian Jewish military history, not performing loyalty to Moscow. The same logic extends to the partisan record. The Vilna ghetto fighters of the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye, including Abba Kovner, escaped to the forests and operated under Soviet partisan command because no other command structure existed. To criminalize a Litvak descendant for marking the day on which that resistance prevailed is to criminalize Lithuanian Jewish armed self-defense itself.
The liberation record is undeniable. The Red Army liberated Majdanek and Auschwitz. January 27, the date of Auschwitz liberation, is now International Holocaust Remembrance Day under United Nations General Assembly Resolution 60/7. If the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz can anchor the international calendar of Holocaust remembrance, Lithuania cannot honestly turn broader commemoration of the Wehrmacht’s defeat into criminal suspicion.
The European law record is also direct. Lithuania is bound by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects political and historical speech even when it offends, shocks, or disturbs. The Strasbourg Court in Perinçek v. Switzerland set the standard for criminal punishment imposed on historical speech. Memorial speech at a relative’s grave is not within any recognized category of unprotected expression. The prosecution must distinguish Perinçek; the indictment does not.
The Rakutis comparison completes the indictment. On International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2021, Lithuanian MP Valdas Rakutis published language that shifted Holocaust blame toward Jews. He was not made the target of Article 170-2 §1. Fridman, a Jew, spoke on May 9 at the grave of a Jewish soldier. He became the target of the same memory statute. The Rakutis-Fridman asymmetry is not incidental. It is the operating method of Lithuania’s Memory War.
The forbidden Jewish sentence
Lithuania’s Memory War prefers a child’s version of history: one villain at a time, one victim at a time, one permitted grief at a time. Agency is removed from Lithuanians when Lithuanians were perpetrators and restored when Lithuanians were victims. Jews are expected to enter the script as ornaments. We may mourn Soviet crimes. We may participate in Holocaust ceremonies. We may praise rescuers. We may thank officials for dialogue. We may not say that Lithuanian society helped murder us and that May 9 ended the armed world in which that murder could continue.
That is the forbidden sentence. Fridman’s prosecution proves it.
The point of indicting a Jew over May 9 is not only to punish him. It is to warn others. It tells Jews that Lithuanian memory law has boundaries. Soviet crimes may be named. Nazi crimes may be generalized. Lithuanian crimes must be contained. Lithuanian heroes must be guarded. Jewish memory must be licensed.
I refuse licensing.
May 9 is not my salute to Moscow. It is my refusal to let Vilnius dictate how a Litvak descendant remembers the defeat of Nazi Germany. Lithuania cannot convert Soviet occupation into Lithuanian innocence by demanding Jewish silence on May 9. The day Lithuanian perpetrators lost the armed framework for killing Jews will not be remembered only as a Lithuanian wound.
A Lithuanian commemoration that requires Jewish silence is not commemoration. It is occupation by other means.
The Jewish dead do not vanish because Lithuania suffered later. Soviet rape did not erase Lithuanian rape. Renewed Soviet occupation did not resurrect Jewish returnees murdered after they came home. The evil of Moscow did not convert Lithuanian perpetrators into patriots. The defeat of one enemy may still be the end of a murder system. That is what May 9 means to me.
Lithuania’s Memory War is not a debate over the past. It is an attempt to govern Jewish speech in the present.
The architecture of Lithuanian patriotism in 1941 was Jewish death. The architecture of Lithuanian patriotism in 2026 is Jewish silence. Both are architectures I reject.