The Charlotte Jewish News -May 2004 - Page 31
The Prize at the Seventh Fort
By Jeremy Schaap and Willie
Weinbaum, ESPN.com
Kaunas, Lithuania — The
United States is the birthplace of
basketball. James Naismith, a
Canadian, invented the sport.
Germany, Nigeria, the
Netherlands, Zaire, China,
Croatia and Serbia have all
produced NBA all-stars. But
there is only one nation in
the world where basketball is
the national pastime —
Lithuania, the Baltic nation
that achieved independence
from the Soviet Union in
1991.
' Fewer than four million
people live in Lithuania, but
only the U.S. has a richer tra
dition in the sport. Lithuania
is the reigning European
League champion, a title it first
won in 1937. In both 1972 and ‘88,
the only times U.S. teams lost in
the Olympics, Lithuanians were
key contributors on the Soviet
teams that defeated the Americans.
Kaunas, also known as Kovno,
is the country’s second-largest city
and, quite possibly, the most bas
ketball-obsessed place on the plan
et. Arvydas Sabonis, Sarunas
Marciulionis and Zydrunas
Ilgauskas — the most prominent
Lithuanians who’ve played in the
NBA in the last decade — all grew
up there. The city is also home to
one of Europe’s top club teams and
a basketball academy, founded by
Sabonis, that is churning out the
next generation of stars. And it was
in Kaunas, just before the World
War II, that basketball took hold as
the national pastime.
Valdas Adamkus was bom in
Kaunas in 1926 and grew up play
ing basketball. Like thousands of
Lithuanians, he emigrated to the
U.S. after the war. But after it
regained independence, he
returned to Lithuania and served as
its president from 1998 to 2003.
He marvels at his countrymen’s
passion for the game.
“Basketball is the second reli
gion in Lithuania,” Adamkus says.
“The first is Roman Catholic. The
second is basketball.”
In 1939, Lithuania won its sec
ond consecutive European cham
pionship at a brand-new arena in
Kaunas. Vytautus Norkus is one of
two living members of that team.
Bom in Kaunas in 1921, he is now
83 and has lived in Connecticut
since 1949.
“After we won the champi
onships, we got three hundred lita,
that’s about 20, 30 dollars each,”
Norkus says. “And the president of
Lithuania gave us wrist watches.”
“They are like Michael Jordan
and other NBA basketball players
for American youth and American
people,” Adamkus says. “You
don’t have to be Just the younger
generation. I believe those are still
the heroes in Lithuanian people’s
eyes.” The 1939 team featured
several Americans of Lithuanian
descent, including the team’s star,
center Pranas Lubinas. Three years
earlier, as Frank Lubin, he’d cap
tained the U.S. team that won the
first Olympic basketball gold
medal in the Berlin Games.
But even as Lithuania was cele
brating another European title, the
continent was on the brink of war.
On September 1. 1939, Germany
invaded Poland, Lithuania’s neigh
bor to the south. Nine months later,
Lithuania was swallowed up by
the Soviet Union. The Soviets car
ried out a brutal purge, exiling and
murdering thousands.
Lithuania was a basketball powerhouse, cap
turing the European Championships titles in
1937 and ‘39.
“We were afraid,” Norkus says.
“The deportations, and Siberia,
and your friends and family were
taken out. It was no freedom, no
freedom.”
The Soviet occupation, howev
er, was brief. On June 22, 1941,
forces of the Third Reich attacked
the Soviet Union across a thou
sand-mile front. Within days,
Germany had penetrated hundreds
of miles into the Soviet Union. In
Lithuania, which fell in just a few
days, the German conquerors were
welcomed as saviors.
“They greeted them as libera
tors from the Russian occupation
and from being eliminated,
destroyed,” says Adamkus, who at
the time was a teenager.
But for Lithuania’s 220,000
Jews, the German invasion spelled
doom. Four years later, fewer than
10,000 of them would still be
alive.
Even before the Germans
entered Kaunas, in fact as soon as
the Soviets beat their hasty retreat,
the local citizenry began torturing.
A monument at the Seventh Fort stands as a
reminder of the thousands of Jews who were
murdered there during the Holocaust.
raping and killing their Jewish
neighbors. After the Germans
seized the city, thousands of Jews
were rounded up and brought to
the Seventh Fort,-a citadel on
Kaunas’ outskirts.
Karl Jager, an SS officer, was
the commander of
Einsatzkommando 3, the German
unit that systematically carried out
the extermination of the Jews of
Kaunas. In an official report dated
December 1, 1941, he wrote:
“On my instructions and orders,
the following executions were
conducted by Lithuanian partisans:
“On July 4, 1941, 463 Jews
were killed at the Seventh Fort.
“On July 6. 1941, 2,514 Jews
were killed at the Seventh Fort.”
“Thousands of Jews were
killed, hundreds every day,” says
Arie Segalson, a Holocaust sur
vivor who was in Kaunas in 1941.
“Murdered, not killed, but mur
dered by Lithuanians. And I
emphasize, by the Lithuanians.”
But even as the city’s Jews were
butchered, basketball continued in
Kaunas. In mid-July, there was a
newspaper report of a game
between teams of Lithuanian “par
tisan detachments,” featuring
prominent players, including some
members of the 1939 European
championship team.
A well-known Jewish soccer
player, Nacham Blatt, was one of
the few prisoners to escape the
Seventh Fort. He was killed just a
few weeks later, but not before,
Arie Segalson says, Blatt told
Segalson what he had witnessed in
the Fort.
“He told us this story about 30
Jews who were killed by the
Lithuanian team,” says Segalson,
now a retired judge in Israel. “I
remember it like my personal
name. He told and I heard it from
him, that the players were from the
basketball team named Perkunas.”
Perkunas was a top club team,
active during World War II.
Segalson says Blatt also told him
that Perkunas had played an exhi
bition game against a team of
Germans just before the July 6
massacre at the fort, and that, for
winning the game, the Lithuanians
were given a grisly prize.
“For good play against the
German team, they rewarded them
to kill 30 Jews,” Segalson says.
That story is echoed in a 1948
book, published only in Yiddish,
by Holocaust survivor Josef Gar,
titled “The Destruction of Jewish
Kaunas,” which includes this pas
sage:
“A basketball game took place
in Kaunas between a German mil
itary team and a Lithuanian team.
Since the Lithuanians excelled in
this sport and they emerged the
victors of the match, as a
prize, each member of the
Lithuanian team was given
the right to shoot tens of the
Jews.”
Also in 1948, in a journal
that included survivor testi
mony, Isaac Nemenshik, who
escaped the Seventh Fort,
wrote about the alleged par
ticipation of basketball play
ers in the massacre there:
“The Lithuanian basketball
team, renowned throughout
the Baltics, came into the fort.
They were armed with rifles
and in the darkness of the night,
we noticed that they took 30 men
to the hill. After a while, we heard
the familiar sound of muffled rifle
fire and then they left the fort
singing.”
There is also, stored in
Lithuania’s KGB archives, the
records of a 1945 trial of two
Lithuanian basketball players
accused of collaborating with the
Germans. One of them, Vytautas
Lescinskas, was a member of the
Perkunas club team. According to
the KGB files, four people testified
during the trial that they had heard
that prominent basketball players
participated in the murders at the
Seventh Fort.
“They were armed and they
joined in on murdering the Jews,”
says Alex Faitelson, a Holocaust
survivor from Kaunas.
Faitelson, now living in Israel,
has spent years researching the
slaughter of Lithuania’s Jews. He
contends that a game between
Germans and Lithuanians did take
place, on July 6, 1941. That was
the day, according to Jager’s
report, that more than 2,500 Jews
were killed at the Seventh Fort.
“This was the subject I began to
research and at first I didn’t have
much material,” Faitelson says.
“What I found were bits and pieces
about the murder of the Jews by
the athletes at the Seventh Fort.”
Faitelson presented his findings
to Efraim Zuroff, known to some
as the “Last Nazi Hunter.” The
director of the Jerusalem office of
the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
Zuroff investigates crimes of the
Holocaust and urges governments
to prosecute perpetrators.
Faitelson supplied evidence to
Zuroff that two men who might
have taken part in the reported
game and the purported massacre
were living in the United States.
On March 10, Zuroff formally
requested that Rimvydas
Valentukevicius, Lithuania’s spe
cial prosecutor for Nazi-era
crimes, investigate the two men —
Algirdas and Vytautus Norkus.
“We have some materials from
our institutions and from Dr.
Zuroff, but not enough to make a
decision yet” on whether to launch
an investigation, special prosecu
tor Valentukevicius said. “This
can’t be speculative and the only
information we have is from sur
vivors who have died. (We are try
ing) to figure out how this can be
proved by objective means. We
must prove that the basketball
match is a fact.”
The Norkus brothers — twins
who were 20 years old at the time
of the German invasion — were
prominent basketball players from
Kaunas. Vytautus played for
Lithuania’s 1939 European cham
pionship team and both he and
Algirdas were playing basketball
in Kaunas in July of 1941, accord
ing to the newspaper report of a
mid-July game between teams of
so-called partisan detachments.
Since 1949, both Norkus broth
ers, now 83, have been living in
Connecticut. Vytautas Norkus says
that he did play one game against a
German team. “I think it was
police, police officers, you know.”
He added that the game was in the
sports hall in Kaunas.
“It was a regular game, nothing
to brag about,” Norkus says. “Easy
game.”
Algirdas Norkus denies that there was
any involvement by Perkunas’players
in the murders at the Seventh Fort.
According to a Lithuanian
encyclopedia, Vytautas Norkus
played for the Perkunas club team
in 1941. Perkunas is the team that
Nacham Blatt — the soccer player
who escaped from the Seventh
Fort — is said to have linked with
both the massacre and the game
against the Germans. Was this the
game that Norkus recalled playing
against German police officers?
Norkus says he can’t remember
the date of the game he played
against the Germans.
He also denies that Lithuanian
basketball players killed Jews at
the Seventh Fort after playing a
game against the Germans.
“Nonsense,” Norkus says. “No,
never. Never, never. Never, never.”
In a separate interview, Algirdas
Norkus, Vytautus’s brother, said
that no basketball players partici
pated in the massacre at the
Seventh Fort, and that neither he
nor his brother played a game
against Germans in July in
Kaunas.
Alfonsas Eidintas, Lithuania’s
ambassador to Israel and author of
“Jews, Lithuanians and the
Holocaust,” says, “We cannot find
anything that Lithuanians played
Germans at that time.”
Algimantas Bertasius, a
Lithuanian basketball historian,
agrees. He says that Vytautas
Norkus did play against a German
team in Kaunas, but in 1939,
before the war. He, too, says that
there was no game between
Germans and Lithuanians on July
6, 1941 in Kaunas.
“I would have heard someone
mention it or heard a rumor,” says
Bertasius, who grew up and still
lives in Kaunas. “I closely interact
ed with the players of the time.
Nobody spoke about it. There was
nothing in the press about the
game at all.’’
But Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff
discounts Bertasius’claim.
“Knowing the Nazi mentality,
the mentality of Lithuanian Nazi
collaborators and the conditions
for Jews in Kaunas during those
days,” Zuroff says, “I think it’s
totally obvious that this game did
take place. And, of course, the fact
that this is recounted in survivor
testimony is very important and
convincing evidence.”
But no direct evidence links
either Norkus brother to any such
game against Germans or to the
massacre at the Seventh Fort. And
more than 60 years later, with only
second-hand testimony and pub
lished reports that can no longer be
verified, it may be impossible to
prove whether basketball players
were among the killers at the
Seventh Fort.
“Even today,” Eidintas says,
“after having a lot of time and a lot
of possibilities, we just cannot
prove that, indeed, it was and we
cannot prove that it wasn’t.”
“To me, it’s unimaginable,”
says Adamkus, who knew many of
the stars of the early 1940s. “I still
cannot believe, it’s impossible,
that those people can commit any
crime. But in the world everything
happens and you are surprised. So
I’m not denying this.”
Why, Vytautus Norkus was
asked, would anyone make up this
story?
“They want to belittle us,” he
says. “Because that’s not true.”
Shaking his head, he says,
“That’s a lie. That's a bad, bad
lie.” ^
Jeremy Schaap is a reporter and
Willie Weinbaum a producer for
ESPN. Copyright 2004 ESPN
Internet Ventures. Reprinted cour
tesy ofESPN.com.