For decades, Lithuania has pointed to my grandfather Jonas Noreika’s imprisonment at the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof as proof that he was an anti-Nazi hero. The story is emotionally powerful: the Nazis arrested him, deported him and imprisoned him. But the historical record tells a more complicated story. Noreika’s imprisonment in 1943 cannot answer for what he did two years earlier, when, as governor of Šiauliai County, he participated in the persecution of Jews and the administration of their stolen property.
The question is not whether Jonas Noreika suffered under the Nazis. He did. The question is whether that later suffering can be used to erase, excuse or overshadow the evidence of his actions in 1941.
It cannot.
Stutthof tells us what Nazi Germany did to Jonas Noreika in 1943. It does not tell us what Jonas Noreika did to the Jews in 1941.