Hunting the Last Nazis; Seeking justice for the Holocaust while there's still a little time.

Byline: Frank Brown

He is a dignified man with wavy white hair, upset at the course of a conversation. What happened 63 years ago in a Lithuanian forest? "It's a lie," he says. He never fired a shot. Besides, he claims there were no Jews in the area that summer in 1941, when a wave of killing began that didn't end until 93 percent of the country's 250,000 Jews were dead.

His name is Alfonsas Zaldokas, and at 82 he has already beaten the average Lithuanian male's life expectancy by 16 years. Now, suddenly, he complains that he can't eat or sleep--not because he is elderly, or because his heart condition has worsened. No, it's the accusation against him. Last month he was questioned by government investigators, acting on a tip that Zaldokas might long ago have been a member of a Nazi death squad. "I don't understand what is happening," he says, after years of quiet existence in his hometown of Kaunas.

The answer is Operation Last Chance, a program launched two years ago by the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. As the name implies, it seeks to flush out the last surviving Eastern Europeans who participated in murdering Jews during World War II. Given their advancing age, time is of the essence. To encourage people to come forward, Operation Last Chance offers an incentive: the promise of a $10,000 bounty, put up by a wealthy Miami businessman, for information leading to a criminal conviction.

So far, no one has collected any reward money. Still, the program's newspaper advertisements and telephone hot lines have yielded 271 tips resulting in dozens of ongoing investigations. Nearly as important, says the sponsor, Aryeh Rubin, is the fact that more than "a billion people are being exposed to the Holocaust in places where they never knew about it." Soviet-era history glossed over Jewish suffering in favor of the Nazi killing of communists. And once communism fell, newly independent countries focused on their own victimhood at the hands of the Russians. Witness Lithuania's Museum of Genocide Victims, or Latvia's Museum of the Occupation, where Jewish activists say exhibits sidestep Latvians' complicity in the Holocaust.