Vygaudas Ušackas. Photo by Johannes Jansson.

On Monday The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel Office released a statement in which its director, Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff, calls for an apology from the European Union’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Vygaudas Ušackas, for insensitive and misleading remarks on the Lithuanian Holocaust in a Wall Street Journal article, published on December 6th 2011.

In the piece entitled “My Long, Strange Journey to Afghanistan,” Ušackas categorized the Nazi occupation of Lithuania during which over 96% of the country’s Jewish community was murdered, in many cases by Lithuanian Nazi collaborators, as “a respite from the Communists while the Nazis were in control.” A letter of protest by Jack Zwanziger of Chicago appeared in the WSJ on December 14th 2011.

A link to the press release from the Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office is on their website.

Ušackas was previously criticized when he was Lithuania’s ambassador to London, after he attempted to deflect the 2008 scandal over Lithuanian police having come to look for two elderly women Holocaust survivors in the absence of any specific charges or suspicions. The Economist referred to the incident as a state effort to ‘blame the victims’.

Later, as Lithuania’s foreign minister, he was invited to give a speech at the Global Forum on Antisemitism in Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Post subsequently reported, that at the forum,  he failed to deal with any of the outstanding issues of Lithuanian antisemitism.

Ušackas did not respond to the Algemeiner’s request for comment.