Jonas Noreika: Nazi Collaborator or National Hero? A Test for Lithuania

Today the country is dotted with Holocaust grave sites and memorials. One of the biggest stands in a forest outside the western town of Plunge, where Mr. Noreika served as commander of the Lithuanian Activist Front, an openly anti-Semitic group that was fiercely hostile to an initial Soviet occupation in 1940 and cheered the Nazis as liberators the following year.

Plunge’s entire Jewish population of more than 1,800 was murdered within days of the invasion, mostly by local people.

Eugenijus Bunka, the son of a prewar Jewish resident who survived because he fled to the Soviet Union, said Mr. Noreika probably didn’t kill Jews himself but still bore responsibility as an administrator who signed orders seizing their property and ordering their “isolation.”

“I hear all these people shouting about defending our patriots, but the people who have another view are all silent,” he said, pointing to one of the pits where Plunge’s Jewish residents were buried after being shot or beaten to death by their neighbors.

When Ms. Foti started researching her book on her grandfather 18 years ago, she expected to produce a glowing tribute.

“My grandfather was going to be the white knight in shining armor, a pure hero from beginning to end,” she said. “I had always heard how he had done so much for Lithuania and had died at the early age of 36 at the hands of the K.G.B.”

Instead, after digging up wartime documents with her grandfather’s signature relating to the treatment of Jews and talking to relatives and others during research trips to Lithuania, she realized that he had been an accomplice in mass murder. Mr. Noreika, she said, did not pull the trigger himself but was a “desk killer.”

She said he oversaw the slaughter in Plunge, where his family moved into a handsome home seized from its Jewish owners, and also in the nearby town of Siauliai, where he served as county chief under the Nazis starting in late 1941 — and where the main government building now has a plaque in his honor.

“Lithuanians have been raped three times — by the Communists twice and by the Nazis once,” Ms. Foti said. “All they know is that they were raped, that they are the victims. They have no more room in their psyche for any other victims.”