Editing Koniuchy massacre (section)

== Investigation and controversy ==
The Polish Institute of National Remembrance initiated a formal investigation into the incident on 3 March 2001, at the request of the Canadian Polish Congress.<sup>[28]</sup>
<nowiki> </nowiki>The institute examined a number of archival documents including police 
reports, encoded messages, military records and personnel files of the 
Soviet partisans. Requests for legal assistance were then sent to state 
prosecutors in Belarus, Lithuania, the Russian Federation and Israel.
<nowiki> </nowiki>The IPN investigation was closed in February 2018. The official reason 
for the closure was that the investigators were not able to establish 
"beyond a reasonable doubt" that any perpetrators of the massacre were 
still alive, and as a result concluded that there was no one who could 
be charged with a crime.<sup>[29]</sup>

According to Polonsky, ethno-nationalists in both Lithuania and 
Poland have portrayed Koniuchy as a "Jewish action". While the exact 
determination of the ethnicity of the Soviet partisans is not possible, 
it is clear that Jews were a minority in these formations. While discussing anti-Semitic stereotypes and historical exaggerations 
of Jews' role in Soviet atrocities, Polonsky stated that time has come for Jews to accept that [some of] their compatriots also carried out atrocities, and partisans involved in Koniuchy and Naliboki massacres committed "very evil things". 

The Lithuanian prosecutor general subsequently opened its own investigation into the massacre in 2004.<sup>[1]</sup> As part of its investigation, Lithuanian prosecutors sought out Jewish veterans of the partisan movement. One of these was Yitzhak Arad, an expert on the Holocaust in Lithuania and former chairman of Yad Vashem.
<nowiki> </nowiki>Arad had also served as a member of a commission appointed by 
Lithuania's president in 2005 to examine past war crimes. In response to
<nowiki> </nowiki>the investigation, Yad Vashem issued a protest saying it focused on "victims of Nazi oppression" and suspended Israeli participation in the 
commission which Arad was part of. The failure of the Lithuanian judiciary to investigate pro-Nazi collaborators
<nowiki> </nowiki>while choosing to prosecute Jewish partisans led to charges of 
hypocrisy concerning the Lithuanian motivation. The work of an 
international commission to investigate war crimes in Lithuanian was 
derailed by the Lithuanian investigation. Further attempts to 
investigate elderly Jewish survivors was perceived as an attempt of 
victim blaming. Following wide international criticism (and some domestic criticism) the Lithuanian investigation was closed in September 2008.<sup>[35]</sup>
 
Piotr Gontarczyk said the events of Koniuchy distort the black and white, heroic image of Jewish partistans in East Kresy,
<nowiki> </nowiki>whose history is one of founding myths of Israel, and attempts to 
reconstruct complicated historic events, or interview figures like Arad 
are seen as antisemitism. Both Polish and Lithuanian perception of Soviet partisans differs from the Jewish one

According to Dovid Katz,
<nowiki> </nowiki>in Lithuania a politicized prosecution service together state-funded 
memory and history institutions have used Kaniūkai (portrayed as a 
Lithuanian village, not Polish) in order to obfuscate the Holocaust by shifting blame to Soviet partisans from unpunished local war criminals. 
According to Katz, this is an abuse of the tragedy in the village in order to create an "equivalence" with the Nazi-led Holocaust in Lithuania<nowiki> </nowiki>in which 200,000 Jews were murdered, which was carried out "with great 
fervor" by local Lithuanian volunteers, resulting in the highest percentage (95%) of murder in any nation during the Holocaust.<nowiki> </nowiki>According to Katz, outside of Lithuania Kaniukai has come to represent 
the revision of history, funded by state resources, towards the direction of far-right nationalists in post-communist Europe.<sup>[37]</sup>

Memorial cross erected in 2004