4.19.2004
Students Call For Extradition of Alleged Nazi Criminal
"About 200 students and faculty of a Jewish school in New York rallied yesterday outside the Lithuanian consulate in Manhattan, calling on the Baltic state to extradite an 89-year-old retired factory worker from Millbury accused of Nazi war crimes.I can tell you right now it'll be useless if he is extradited. Once in Lithuania, there's a good chance that there'll be lots of foot-dragging in his trial, enough so that he'll die before he's convicted or vindicated, like the last guy, who lived in Norwood, MA.
Vladas Zajanckauskas, who received a grant of immunity from federal prosecutors in 1981 for testifying against an Illinois man accused of being a guard at a Nazi concentration camp, has lived in the United States since 1950...
This is not, I think, something that Lithuania wants to come to terms with. Whether that's because of old anti-Semitism or something else, I don't know.
My grandfather was a freedom fighter in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, where he was captured and drafted into the Luftwaffe (where, the family story goes, on several occasions he worked to sabotage their operations), and then was there when the Russians marched into Berlin.
He died of lung cancer before I was old enough to remember him.
Whenever I read these stories, I wonder how he'd react, what stories he could tell.
MORE: Found through a quick Google search: "In contrast to the legal delays and the evident unwillingness of the Lithuanian public to re-examine cases of World War II criminals, the official position of the government is firmly in favor of trying Lithuanian Nazi war criminals and of combating any evidence of current anti-Semitism. This was the position taken by President Valdas Adamkas on 23 September 1999, when he marked the memorial day to those killed in the Vilnius ghetto, and again, on 20 April 2000, in a speech to the Lithuanian parliament..."
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