BLOT ON THE LANDSCAPE

Notorious anti-Semite Vytautas Sustauskas brings shame on Lithuania. He is a betrayer of his country's aspirations to enter NATO and the European Union.

His sickening comments this week will, unfortunately, be a further blot on Lithuania's patchy record of apology for the small part the country's own Nazi collaborators played in the Holocaust. Like his previous comments, they will be recorded and remembered abroad.

The relationship between Lithuanians and Jews has a checkered history.

"What is not acknowledged cannot be healed," begins "And Kovno Wept," a horrifying account of the Kaunas wartime ghetto by Waldemar Ginsberg, one of the few to survive it.

Many Lithuanians like to describe how between the 14th and 19th centuries their land was an oasis of tolerance in an uncertain world for persecuted peoples like the Jews. As the centuries passed, Vilnius became a thriving religious and cultural center for Yiddish-speaking Jews.

Perhaps this is why, in 1918, thousands of them risked their lives by volunteering for the fight for Lithuanian independence.

In the Lithuanian Republic between the wars, Jewish cultural life flourished, and many Jews took part in the political life of the reborn state.

But when the right-wing National Party took power in a military coup in 1926, laws were introduced curtailing the rights of the Jewish minority. Despite the moderate stance of the president, the hysteria of the period created an atmosphere of paranoia and xenophobia.

The Catholic clergy, who played a far more crucial role in Lithuanian life between the wars than they do today, saw Judaism as the traditional enemy. They played down the Jewish origins of Christianity and emphasized the collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion.

Throughout Eastern Europe, the peasantry regarded, and often mocked, Jews as being reclusive aliens.

The Russian Bolsheviks, meanwhile, tended to see Jewish national culture as an enemy together with capitalists and the bourgeoisie. Stalin himself was an anti-Semite.

The Lithuanians and the Jews were well aware of the Nazi atrocities by 1939, particularly after the fall of Poland. But no pogroms had ever been perpetrated on Lithuanian soil - until June 1941, when militia stormed the Jewish quarter in Kaunas and massacred 1,000 men, women and children.

Events like this need investigation, but investigation is slow in coming. People like Sustauskas prefer to live in denial. But denial won't wash in the EU's squeaky clean environment of postwar tolerance and reconciliation.