"Post Holocaust Antisemitism" Presented by Dr. Shimon Samuels, Simon Wiesenthal Center Director for InternationalRelations at the Riga International Conference on "The Holocaust: Remembrance and Lessons"
"There can be no pecking order of atrocity to offset the unique character of the Holocaust. Baltic historians who focus onSoviet atrocities in order to attenuate collaboration with the Nazis in extermination of the Jews are revisionists. They reinforce the camp of Holocaust denial by blaming the Jews for their ownvictimology. Such moral equivalency is a reflex mechanism for collaboration...
The articleof 3 July in the Latvian daily, NEATKARIGA, preparatory to the conference, singles out my organization, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, as "creating the idea that Latvia is the only country in whicha segment of the population took part in the Holocaust."
The imperative to transparency in the post-Communist opening of archives has resulted in traumatic challenges to collectivememory in every World War II collaborator and neutral country - especially in the Baltic.
Photo: Dr. Shimon Samuels, SWC Director for International Relations, and President of Latvia, Vaira Vike Freiberga.
My Centre's mission is to ensure that justice is seen to be done, not just in Latvia, but in some two dozen countries wherecases of local collaboration in mass murder have been exposed by my colleague, Dr Efraim Zuroff.
Our message is pedagogical: 'the iconization of a Nazi collaborator, even as a national anti-Bolshevik hero, is a nod to youththat endorses the forces of darkness - hate, violence, terror. Like every detective of integrity, with unresolved cases in his archives, we wish today's youth to understand: 'Even 60 years later,you cannot get away with it!'"
