Curating the dead
A state can keep a Holocaust museum and defend a man whose signature sits on a 1941 order concentrating Jewish people into a ghetto, and Lithuania does both without apparent strain. The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum in Vilnius runs a permanent exhibition on the murder of the country’s Jewish people. In the same years, an official research centre has defended the wartime record of Jonas Noreika, an anti-Soviet partisan hero named in the paperwork of the Siauliai district in the summer of 1941. Acknowledgement in general, exculpation in particular: the two are held together, and held calmly. ...