Q: Can you tell me
more about The Litvak Connection?
A: During the Shoah, more than 275,000
Latvian and Lithuanian Jews, 95% of those countries Jewish
population were murdered together with tens of thousands of Jews
from other countries transported to those countries. The role that
Nazi collaborators played in the liquidation of these Jews, known as
Litvaks and the connection to present day war crimes issues are
depicted. Most of these Jews were murdered in the
forests, shot in large pits, nearby where they lived, in the five
month period before the U.S. formally entered the war in December of
1941 and before the use of the gas chambers in Poland and
Germany.Many of these war criminals, immigrated to the U.S and other
nations, as displaced persons following the war, lied on their visa
forms that they were not complicit in war crimes, were admitted and
eventually became citizens of these countries. For more than 30
years, little was done to investigate these collaborators, until the
establishment of the OSI, the Office of Special Investigations, in
the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The
fact that the acts were not committed on U.S. soil and did not
involve U.S. citizens meant that the U.S. criminal code had not been
violated. These war criminals can only be held accountable for lying
on their visa application and deported back from where they came.
However, many countries not only refuse to investigate the war
crimes of their citizens but also to take back these denaturalized
citizens. Eli Rosenbaum, the Director of OSI explains the unique
role of the OSI in the investigation and prosecution of those war
criminals living in the U.S. and the problem of getting European
countries to take in their former citizens, now that they have been
denaturalized by the U.S. government and authorized to be deported.
Aryeh Rubin, the founder of Operation Last Chance, discusses the
worldwide efforts and the race against time by this joint venture of
the Targum Shlishi Foundation and the Simon Wiesenthal Center which
offers financial rewards for information leading to the arrest and
conviction of Nazi war criminals with the hope of bringing justice
for the victims and the problems encountered with European nations
and especially Lithuania and Latvia where anti-Semitism is both open
and on the rise. Also featured are Holocaust Survivor interviews,
archival photographs from USHMM, Yad Vashem and other sources.
Q: Some of the music is very emotional.
Who are the Artists?
A: ECLIPSE Composed and Performed by ADI SAPPIR http://adisappir.com.au
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"Light of the River"(Or Hanachal") "LCHA DODI"
SHAI PERELMAN - Guitars, Percussion
OMER HOROWITZ - Clarinet
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"NARROW BRIDGE"
AMIR PERELMAN - Bouzouki