{"id":79477,"date":"2026-05-11T06:27:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T06:27:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/79477\/"},"modified":"2026-05-11T06:27:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T06:27:09","slug":"the-blogs-the-riga-witness-the-vilnius-defendant-eugene-j-levin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/79477\/","title":{"rendered":"The Blogs: The Riga Witness, the Vilnius Defendant | Eugene J. Levin"},"content":{"rendered":"

For five years, I researched and documented the history and legacy of the Baltic Holocaust while producing my documentary Baltic Truth<\/a>, now available on Amazon Prime Video. The 220-page indictment against Artur Fridman is not an isolated event\u2014it is a predictable continuation of the historical record I spent years researching and filming.\n<\/p>\n

I was born in Riga. I grew up under Soviet rule. I left in 1989. For thirty-five years I believed I would not have to watch a European government recover the methods of the regime my parents took me out of. Then Lithuania filed Case No. 02-2-00512-24<\/a> against Artur Fridman.\n<\/p>\n

I have stood in the killing fields of both Latvia and Lithuania. I have read survivor testimony in four languages. I have interviewed the witnesses Lithuania prefers to dismiss. The 220-page indictment against a Jewish citizen for a single Facebook post is not an aberration in the record I have filmed. It is the predictable terminus of the pattern that record describes.\n<\/p>\n

I am not Lithuanian. I am not party to the litigation Grant Gochin has filed against Lithuania since 2015<\/a>. I have no immediate family in Vilnius. The witness who speaks here did not pick this fight. The fight came for him because the state Lithuania has constructed eventually comes for everyone who keeps the record.\n<\/p>\n

What Lithuania Chose to Build\n<\/p>\n

Lithuania has the institutions on paper. Lithuania has a presidentially-established International Commission whose Sub-commission, in April 2019, publicly declared the Genocide Centre\u2019s exoneration of Jonas Noreika \u201cutterly unacceptable\u201d and \u201coffensive to the memory of the victims.\u201d<\/a> The Genocide Centre kept the exoneration. It is still official Lithuanian state position. Lithuania does not lack the institutions. Lithuania declines to use them.\n<\/p>\n

Lithuania still defends, in monuments, plaques, school names, military rank, posthumous decorations, and ceremonies, men whose 1941 conduct helped organize the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. A state in regret would not, by 2026, sustain that hero canon. The reader is entitled to draw, from the documented conduct, the inference the conduct supports. Lithuania\u2019s institutional posture toward 1941 is not mourning. It reads, on the record of honors maintained and corrections refused, as closer to satisfaction with the outcome than to grief over it. Lithuania achieved a proportional destruction of its Jews that no other European state matched. Lithuania continues to defend, decorate, and celebrate men who delivered that result.\n<\/p>\n

Over thirty-five years and through every government since independence, the Genocide Centre was built, staffed, funded, and defended. Its findings were authored. Its silences were maintained. Its own commission\u2019s April 2019 repudiation of the Noreika exoneration was filed and ignored, not absorbed and corrected, because absorption was never the plan. The Noreika certificate, the Brazaitis fabrication, the \u0160kirpa cascade, and now the Fridman indictment are not the failures of an institution drifting toward truth. They are the outputs of an institution functioning exactly as intended. The choice was made at the founding. It has been remade every year since. The choice is the testimony.\n<\/p>\n

What Vilnius Produced\n<\/p>\n

On May 9, 2024, Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Lithuania, posted on Facebook from his grandfather Aron Fridman\u2019s grave. Aron Fridman volunteered for the Red Army to fight Nazi Germany. Artur thanked him. Artur described the Lithuanian forest partisans of 1944\u20131953 as mi\u0161ko banditai, forest bandits. He called Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, Lithuania\u2019s national hero, a pseudoherojus who collaborated with Soviet security services.\n<\/p>\n

On October 30, 2025, the Vilnius District Prosecutor\u2019s Office filed a 220-page criminal indictment. Two statutes. Article 170-2 \u00a71 and Article 313 \u00a72. The charged conduct is the Facebook post.\n<\/p>\n

Seven years before the Fridman indictment, Grant Gochin asked the same Vilnius prosecutor\u2019s office to apply the same Article 170-2 \u00a71 statute against the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre and its named director for documented Holocaust distortion. The first petition was filed July 24, 2018. The prosecutor refused. The petition was renewed and expanded September 26, 2018. The prosecutor refused. It was filed a third time on November 15, 2019. The prosecutor refused. The full chain is documented in Seven Years Before Fridman<\/a>. Same statute. Same office. Seven years apart. Opposite directions. The asymmetry is not procedural. It is the policy.\n<\/p>\n

Grant has documented forty-nine formal submissions to Lithuanian state bodies since 2015<\/a>, exhaustively cataloged, every refusal received and on file. Eight lawsuits and international filings. Eleven Genocide Centre submissions. Five criminal complaints to the prosecutor. Eleven institutional complaints. Two journalist ethics complaints. Twelve letters to political officeholders. The state refused them all and then assembled 220 pages against one Jew for one Facebook post.\n<\/p>\n

That is not a state defending its memory laws. That is a state demonstrating who its memory laws are for.\n<\/p>\n

I covered this asymmetry in Lithuania Needs Only One Jew<\/a>. The Lithuanian state functions as a one-way membrane: state Holocaust narrative passes outward unchallenged; correction does not pass inward. State historian Dr. Ar\u016bnas Bubnys publishes detailed Lithuanian-perpetrator material under the state museum\u2019s imprimatur. No prosecution. The Jewish citizen Fridman quotes the state\u2019s own letter on Facebook and lands in the dock.\n<\/p>\n

I covered the construction of the lie in I Have Seen This Before, Part 1<\/a> and Part 2<\/a> \u2014 Birut\u0117 Burauskait\u0117 dismissing Lithuanian guard service at Majdanek as \u201ctales and stretching the facts,\u201d and three successive Genocide Centre directors across eleven years failing to correct her. I covered the marketing layer in Lithuania\u2019s Antisemitism Resolution Is Orwellian Fraud<\/a> \u2014 the 157-point plan that assigns Holocaust memory to the very institution that spent decades laundering perpetrator histories.\n<\/p>\n

The Pattern\u2019s Logical Endpoint\n<\/p>\n

A 220-page indictment is not a procedural mishap. It is institutional commitment. The Vilnius prosecutor\u2019s office did not stumble onto the Fridman case. The state assembled the indictment. The state allocated the prosecutorial resources. The state imposed the travel restriction. The state has held Artur Fridman under a written travel pledge since January 8, 2025. The state\u2019s January 2026 157-point Action Plan to Combat Antisemitism was adopted while the Fridman prosecution was active. The plan does not mention Fridman. The plan does not withdraw the indictment. The plan exists alongside it.\n<\/p>\n

The state knows what it is doing. The state is not failing at memory. The state is succeeding at the project it set itself.\n<\/p>\n

The independent-prosecutor defense fails on the record. The same office refused Gochin\u2019s Article 170-2 \u00a71 petitions three times against the state\u2019s own Holocaust-research institution, then produced 220 pages against Fridman. Same statute. Opposite directions.\n<\/p>\n

The independent-judiciary defense fails on the record. The Vilnius civil court closed Gochin\u2019s tort claim by writing that the litigation was \u201cuseless.\u201d The Supreme Court refused cassation review on the ground that no \u201cnew applicable jurisprudence\u201d existed \u2014 meaning no Lithuanian court will hear an unprecedented Holocaust accountability case until another Lithuanian court has already decided one. The architecture forecloses by design. I made the same point in Lithuania confessed from the floor of Parliament<\/a>: when a Seimas member boasted that the Genocide Centre defeated Gochin in court, the rule-of-law defense stopped being a defense and became an admission.\n<\/p>\n

The free-speech-and-academic-freedom defense fails on the record. The state historian publishes Lithuanian-perpetrator detail under the state museum\u2019s imprimatur and is not charged. The Jewish citizen quotes the state\u2019s own letter on Facebook and is charged. The freedom protects the speech the state approves of. Grant has now named the larger doctrine in Verdict First, Reasoning Later<\/a>: protection upward, exposure downward, prosecution when the target is reachable.\n<\/p>\n

The IHRA-membership defense fails on the record. IHRA is a self-credentialing body. Lithuania\u2019s membership is the credential the state shows abroad while indicting Fridman at home. Membership without compliance is laundering. The Action Plan is the laundering apparatus.\n<\/p>\n

The EU-and-NATO-membership defense fails on the record. The Vilnius prosecutor\u2019s office, sitting inside both alliances, uses EU rule-of-law procedure to indict a Jewish citizen for a Facebook post about a state-honored Holocaust-era figure. NATO and Brussels do not stop it. Their silence is the cover. Their certifications are the laundering currency.\n<\/p>\n

I direct documentaries. Before a single word of narration is written, the frame has already told the audience how to feel. The shot is an instruction. So is a 220-page indictment. So is the choice to prosecute the grandson of a Red Army anti-Nazi volunteer for posting at his grandfather\u2019s grave on May 9, Victory Day in the Soviet and post-Soviet calendar. So is the choice not to prosecute Member of Parliament Valdas Rakutis for his January 27, 2021 article \u2014 published on International Holocaust Remembrance Day \u2014 accusing Jews of participating in the Holocaust as perpetrators. The American Embassy in Vilnius called the Rakutis article \u201cshocking.\u201d Paul Packer of the United States Commission for the Preservation of America\u2019s Heritage Abroad wrote directly to Rakutis. The Lithuanian state did not charge Rakutis. The Lithuanian state has indicted Fridman. Grant has already framed that calendar trap in May 9 and Lithuania\u2019s Memory War<\/a>: neither Russia nor Lithuania owns Jewish memory.\n<\/p>\n

The grandson of a Jewish Red Army veteran who fought Nazi Germany is not protected by Article 170-2 \u00a71. The parliamentarian who used International Holocaust Remembrance Day to invert the Holocaust is. The statute does not change. The direction does. That is who the statute is for.\n<\/p>\n

The Witness\u2019s Verdict\n<\/p>\n

I have been asked occasionally why I keep filming this material. The footage exists. Baltic Truth exists. Michael Kretzmer\u2019s J\u2019Accuse!<\/a> exists, the documentary that places Lithuania\u2019s institutional treatment of the Holocaust on screen, town by town. Silvia Foti\u2019s Storm in the Land of Rain: A Mother\u2019s Dying Wish Becomes Her Daughter\u2019s Nightmare<\/a> \u2014 the granddaughter of Jonas Noreika herself documenting the murder her grandfather organized \u2014 exists. Grant Gochin\u2019s Substack<\/a> and Times of Israel page<\/a> are open. The forty-nine submissions are catalogued. The Genocide Centre\u2019s letter No. 13R-645<\/a> on Ramanauskas-Vanagas, acknowledging the Soviet recruitment Artur Fridman noted in his Facebook post, is in the Fridman indictment itself. Lithuania\u2019s own document partially answers Lithuania\u2019s own indictment.\n<\/p>\n

The record is built. Grant has made the personal consequence clear in Standing Up for My Murdered Family<\/a>. The record is not the question. The Jewish institutional response is. The American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, B\u2019nai B\u2019rith International, the World Jewish Congress \u2014 I have found no public statement from any of them on the Fridman prosecution. I have written about that silence in I Have Seen This Before, Part 2<\/a> and in Lithuania at AJC: A Warning<\/a>. Grant extended the record in AJC and Lithuania<\/a>, including the unretracted state vocabulary of \u201cAgents of the East, Jews, and stupid people,\u201d and in On What Grounds Should I Not Be Adversarial?<\/a>, which records what the May 1 hosting actually transmitted. A state that murdered 96.4 percent of its Jews, has not punished any Lithuanian for the murder, indicts a Jewish citizen for Facebook speech about a state-honored Holocaust-era figure, and watches Delfi place a kippah on the head of a non-Jewish Lithuanian critic of state Holocaust conduct to mark him to readers as the enemy, has made the Jewish institutional response a test of whether Jewish institutional power exists for any purpose other than ceremony.\n<\/p>\n

I am the Riga witness. Lithuania chose with full institutional knowledge of what it was constructing. Decade after decade, generation after generation, Lithuania built a state apparatus engineered to protect the perpetrators of 1941, prosecute their grandchildren\u2019s contemporaries, and deliver the operation to Jewish and Western audiences as Holocaust remembrance. The deception was not incidental to the project. The deception was the project. Lithuania chose to build the indictment my film predicted. Lithuania chose, in 2026, to call all of this rule of law.\n<\/p>\n

The Vilnius defendant is the proof. The state did not need to convict Artur Fridman. The 220 pages is the punishment. The travel restriction is the punishment. The published indictment in his name is the punishment. The conviction would be redundant. The state has already told every other Lithuanian Jew what speech costs.\n<\/p>\n

I have seen it before. I know what it is. I am writing it down because the Jewish institutions that claim to speak for us are letting Lithuania perform this deception under our names. Lithuania is what Lithuania has chosen to be. The remaining question, and the one that belongs to us, is whether the institutions that represent the Jewish community will keep falling for it.\n<\/p>\n

This is why Grant Gochin and I write and publish in public. Lithuania ensured that no Lithuanian who murdered a Jew was punished by Lithuania. Lithuania now works, in 2026, to ensure that no Lithuanian institution carries the weight of national culpability either. The state selects its dialogue partners according to that objective. It chooses the partners who will help it preserve the position. The descendants of the murdered choose otherwise. We insist that the record be told. We insist that accountability will exist on the record for Lithuania, and for the institutions that collaborate with Lithuania in distorting it.\n\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For five years, I researched and documented the history and legacy of the Baltic Holocaust while producing my…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79478,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[9930,42309,171,35924,170,10892],"class_list":{"0":"post-79477","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-vilnius","8":"tag-antisemitism","9":"tag-holocaust-revisionism","10":"tag-lithuania","11":"tag-the-holocaust","12":"tag-vilnius","13":"tag-world-war-ii"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116554527341865222","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}