MONTREAL — Only one month before departing Montreal recently after a six-year stint as Russia’s consul general, Igor Golubovski seemed in both a grateful and fretful mood.

Holocaust Memorial Centre director Alice Herscovitch, right, and, from left, survivors Paula Bultz and Musia Schwartz [Vladimir Vandalovsky photo]

On this particular occasion – a luncheon hosted by the consulate at a downtown hotel to honour three Soviet-Jewish veterans of the famous Kursk battle of 1943 – Golubovski expressed appreciation to the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (MHMC) for accepting a newly published volume chronicling the tragedy  of Lithuanian collaboration with the Nazis after 1941.

The centre received one of only 500 published copies of The Tragedy of Lithuanian Collaboration.

It was that collaboration that has now in a sense returned to trouble Golubovski – and Russia – deeply, as a revisionist trend by some to “rehabilitate” the image of Nazi collaborators unfolds in now-independent former Soviet Union countries such as Lithuanian, Estonia, Latvia and parts of Ukraine. Collaborators, he said, are now being portrayed as “partisans” who merely sought to “liberate” their people from the oppressive hand of Joseph Stalin.

Nothing could be further from the truth, Golubovski said.

He pointed to the fact that in November, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution that “calls for the fight against neo-Nazis” and “the revision of history” now taking place in countries of the former Soviet Union.

The vote was 122 in favour, 54 abstentions and one vote against, by the United States. Golubovski speculated that the Americans voted against it as a reaction to Russia’s recent incursion into Georgia over its claim that Georgia was committing genocide in South Ossetia.

Golubovski stressed that there are many in countries of the former Soviet Union who “feel ashamed” by the revisionist views of some of their compatriots.

But the effort to rehabilitate Nazi collaborators is “not just an unfortunate development – it’s unacceptable to normal people, and it must be unacceptable to the present generation,” Golubovski said.

 “We must fight all those unfortunate developments. We, together with the UN, must continue this task, to bring to the younger generation the truth about World War II, the real historic facts.”

Golubovski included in his remarks the need to fight efforts by “democratically-elected leaders” in Georgia “to annihilate or eliminate smaller nations such as South Ossetia,” a highly contentious issue for countries like the United States, which considers the Russian incursion into Georgia illegal.

“At least that’s the way Russia understands the situation,” Golubovski said. “Not everybody agrees with us. We know that, but we think that history is history, and it must be told in the right manner – the way it was.

“You know, Germans themselves agree that the previous war generation of Germans committed murders. Why are there those in other small nations saying that nothing of the kind happened, that the Holocaust didn’t exist, that the collaborators of the Nazi regime who killed their own people, were not traitors and collaborators?

“They are now being called heroes.”

Golubovski considered the book donated to MHMC to have important value, especially as it chronicles, with statistics and other documentation, the mass killings of Jews by Lithuanian collaborators.

It will help, he said, to track down “all those people who still feel free and comfortable in democratic countries, who hide their names and think they escaped.

“They must not escape, even if they are very old. They must be held responsible for the mass murders they committed during the war, whatever they may say now, like they were fighting against the Stalin regime or Soviet occupation or whatever.

“They collaborated with the Nazis.”

Golubovski spoke about a 16-part series recently broadcast on Russia’s Channel One, based on late Russian novelist Anatoly Rybakov’s epic novel Heavy Sand, about four generations in the life of a Jewish family living in a ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine and under communist rule.

“It was very important for the young generation to see what happened under Nazi occupation,” Golubovski said. “Some scenes in this movie were even stronger than Schindler’s List, very emotional for the people who saw it. My wife said all of Moscow was crying.”

Alice Herscovitch, executive director of MHMC, said the book will help fill in the blanks of a history “hidden for so many years.

“Our organization tries to understand the past, learn from the past, so we can educate.

“Changing the future comes from understanding what the past was like… and how in our own society this kind of racism, bigotry, anti-Semitism and hate happened,” she said.

“Our goal is to use educational material such as this very rare documentation, which will serve many, many people.”