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bringing the dark past to light
Bringing the Dark Past to Light
The Reception of the Holocaust
in Postcommunist Europe
Conclusion | 663
omer bartov
Contributors | 695
Index | 705
Illustrations
ix
between the West and Europe’s postcommunist countries. In the lat-
ter, memories of the Gulag and reluctance to come to terms with the
dark wartime past, particularly as it relates to local Jewish communi-
ties, play a significant role in the ways the Holocaust is remembered.
This book aims to capture the reception and interpretation of the
Holocaust in all the postcommunist countries. It examines the various
stages, motivations, and nature of this dynamic process. Even as this
book was being completed, the postcommunist region witnessed new
developments in the memorialization of the Holocaust. For example,
in Skopje, Macedonia, the Balkan Holocaust Museum opened, and
in Poland a new debate erupted over Jan Tomasz Gross’s latest book,
Golden Harvest. This volume records all the important developments
through the two decades since the collapse of communism and, we
hope, it delineates the key aspects, commonalities, and divergences of
the memory of the Holocaust in the region.
We would like to express our appreciation to a number of institu-
tions and individuals that enabled us to work on this project. John-
Paul Himka would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada and the Center for Advanced Holocaust
Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Joanna
Beata Michlic is particularly grateful to Prof. Shulamit Reinharz of
the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, Brandeis University, for her sup-
port and to Prof. Yehuda Bauer for his beneficial comments. We are
also deeply indebted to Mr. Sigmund Rolat, the Conference Claims
Commission, and the Holocaust Educational Trust for their generos-
ity. We would like to thank all our contributors, and especially Omer
Bartov for his exhaustive afterword.
Finally, we would like to thank our editors at University of Nebraska
Press for their care, support, and interest in this project, and the anon-
ymous readers for the press who offered an invaluable critique. Last
but not least, we would like to thank our families and friends for their
patience and support.
Introduction
1
on the one hand, and on the other hand, of getting the past wrong,
thus making both the past and present not only bearable but also
predominantly positive and “bright.” It demonstrates that in main-
stream historical consciousness and public memory the painstakingly
“uncovered” accounts of the “dark” pasts are chiefly perceived in a
category of “too much truth” that can hardly be accepted on a larger
social scale. And it shows too that in public memory, remembering is
not necessarily about getting the past right, but rather about main-
taining the positive collective self-image and soothing national myths.
Thus, “the dark past” is perceived as a spoiler.
The memory of the Holocaust and the Jewish past in postcommunist
Europe also has manifold practical implications for the development
of national cultures and international relationships in postcommunist
Europe, as well as for international relationships between the post-
communist countries and Israel and the Jewish diaspora, and between
the postcommunist countries and the United States.
We had each been working on the problematic memory of the
dark past when we decided to put together this volume. Joanna had
already coedited a book with Antony Polonsky about the debates over
the massacre of Jews at Jedwabne on 10 July 1940 in Poland and had
just finished her monograph Poland’s Threatening Other, which dealt
with Polish images of Jews from the 1880s until the early twenty-first
century.6 John-Paul was near the beginning of a research project on
Ukrainians and the Holocaust in history and memory and was work-
ing out some of his ideas about Ukrainian Holocaust memory at con-
ferences. We realized that we were working on problems that exhibited
many striking similarities. We also read with interest the work of other
scholars on how the Holocaust was being remembered (or forgotten)
in the Central and Eastern European countries making the transition
out of communism. It would be very fruitful, we thought, to bring
together a collection of interpretive surveys of the struggle with the
memory of the Shoah in every postcommunist country in Europe,
addressing a wide array of developments throughout the region.
2 himk a a nd michlic
North America, the memory of the destruction of European Jewry
has been alive since the late 1960s and early 1970s. There is no need
to recapitulate all the moments in the development of the memory of
the Holocaust in the noncommunist West, but they include the cap-
ture, trial, and execution of Adolph Eichmann (1960–62), the airing of
the television miniseries The Holocaust in the United States and Ger-
many (1978–79), the release of the blockbuster film Schindler’s List
directed by Steven Spielberg (1993), and the opening of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the center of Washington dc
(also 1993). In fact, during the thirty years preceding the collapse of
communism in Europe, the Holocaust had evolved in the West into
the most potent, easily recognizable, and ubiquitous symbol of mass
murder and genocide. It was regularly appropriated by groups other
than Jews to make points about their own sufferings. It became a
source of reflection for philosophers like Hannah Arendt, sociologists
like Zygmunt Bauman, and historians like Raul Hilberg.7 It brought
into question all the accomplishments of Western Enlightenment—
how did such great evil emerge from a civilization so proud of its
moral and intellectual achievements? The Holocaust came to occupy
a centerstage position in ethical thinking about the modern world. It
was to stand as an example of the dangerous consequences of racial
and ethnic prejudice and hatred: “Never again!”
Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, this intense focus on the Holocaust
occurred in societies that were more removed from the actual histor-
ical event. No Holocaust occurred, of course, in the United States,
Canada, or Britain. The Jews of Nazi-occupied Western Europe, even
of Nazi Germany and Austria, were generally murdered outside West-
ern Europe, in the death and concentrations camps in the East. Lucy
Dawidowicz’s widely used estimate of Jews killed in various countries
in the Final Solution shows that victims from countries that entered
the postwar era as capitalist numbered fewer than half a million; how-
ever, Jews killed in European countries that were communist after the
war totaled almost five and a half million.8
It was certainly easier to think about the Holocaust in places where
it was more abstract, though in Western Europe the Jewish victims
were not publicly acknowledged either during the two decades after
the war.9 But it was much harder to do so in societies where the mas-
Introduction 3
sive machinery of genocide had actually been let loose, taking not
only victims but also accomplices. The messiness of actual historical
experience made it difficult to imagine clarity. For example, while the
West could more easily distinguish among neat categories of victims,
perpetrators, and bystanders, the East had difficulty making sense of
the tangled complexities—victims forced to act as perpetrators (Jew-
ish Ordnungsdienst were the largest manpower component in many
ghetto roundups), perpetrators as rescuers (those who had the power
to kill also had the power to save), selfless rescuers who exceeded the
call of moral duty and rescuers who became perpetrators against their
Jewish charges, and bystanders who had no sidelines to flee to.10
Another difference between the West and the East was the inten-
sity of the experience of Nazi occupation. Occupied France, Belgium,
the Netherlands, and Italy did not experience anything like the ter-
ror that raged in occupied Poland, the Soviet Union, or Yugoslavia. In
the latter region, the Germans mass murdered intelligentsia, burned
innumerable villages to the ground, deported millions to Germany as
forced labor, starved over three million Soviet pows to death, and rou-
tinely shot large numbers of the population as hostages or suspected
resisters. For the West, clearly, the Holocaust, once it reentered mem-
ory in the late 1960s, stood out more boldly from the background of
wartime violence than it did in the East.11
4 himk a a nd michlic
of the North”; Lublin, the “Jerusalem of the East”; and Sarajevo, the
“Jerusalem of the Balkans.” As a result, and also because of tight cen-
sorship of the press in these countries, there was insufficient thrash-
ing out of locals’ complicity in the Holocaust. True, former policemen
and camp guards in German service were arrested and sentenced to
years of exile or the death penalty, but these trials were not the sub-
ject of public discourse, nor were the ramifications of political and
social collaboration in the Holocaust articulated and incorporated
into historical consciousness and social memory.12 Also insufficiently
aired was the legacy of interwar and wartime anti-Semitism; in fact,
at various moments in postwar communism, the regimes themselves
manipulated and reemployed the old anti-Semitic attitudes and tropes
for their own purposes. Although, and indeed because, wartime col-
laborationist regimes—like those of Romania, Hungary, Slovakia,
and Croatia—were anathematized by the communists, anticommu-
nist and nationalist intellectuals privately viewed these regimes with
less hostility, sometimes with favor. The same was true for wartime
nationalists in places like Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Lithuania.
At the same time, Jewish communities in the communist coun-
tries experienced more alienation from the surrounding society as a
result of their experience with the Holocaust in the first place and the
absence of recognition of their special suffering in the second place.
Whatever they felt, it was not possible for them to articulate it out-
side the family and immediate community. Within the remaining
local Jewish communities, the Holocaust survivors acted as the chief
organizers of low-key Holocaust commemorations and, at the same
time, represented the only sympathetic audience for these commem-
orative events.13 In the spirit of bearing witness, they felt compelled
to write—in a censored press of limited circulation and for a numer-
ically limited audience—about the lost vibrant Jewish world and its
destruction.
In 1994 the anthropologist Rubie S. Watson contended that the
socialist states failed to convince society of their interpretation of
the past, and as a result, alternative “underground memories” always
existed and were kept alive.14 This contention holds true with respect
to the public memory of the precommunist and communist pasts of
the majority group, understood in an ethnic sense. However, in the
Introduction 5
case of the troubling, painful relations with Jews and other minori-
ties during the war, “underground memory” was not alive among the
majority groups, except for a few individuals, as chapters in this book
confirm. In fact, as argued by Michael Steinlauf in a pioneering study
of the memory of the Holocaust in Poland, the official communist way
of dealing with the memory of the Holocaust reflected, ultimately, a
popular need.15 It was socially acceptable and accepted.
Only after the fall of communism did the deeply buried memories
of the Holocaust resurface among eyewitnesses who as children and
young adults had had a firsthand experience of the local killing fields
and who had after the war kept these troubling memories from dis-
turbing their everyday conscience. But by the early twenty-first cen-
tury these individuals slowly began to speak out about the wartime
horrors that they witnessed, as oral history projects and interviews
conducted in the region in that period confirm.16 Correspondingly,
Jewish survivors, who had previously drawn a veil of silence over
their wartime experiences and their Jewish background, have begun
to articulate their past traumas and trajectories of survival.
6 himk a a nd michlic
from both the precommunist and communist pasts. As a result, many
skeletons from national closets have been exposed to daylight for
the first time since 1945. The restoration of memory has not been a
smooth, unifying, or unified process.18 And at present it is still under-
going many dynamic transformations of competing and discordant
remembering.
So far we can differentiate two major stages of the process of resto-
ration of memory. This is central to understanding how the national
communities—the political and cultural elites as well as ordinary
members of societies—have related to, remembered, and commemo-
rated the Holocaust throughout the postcommunist period. It is also
essential to understanding the continuities and discontinuities of the
major narratives about the Holocaust and Jews that emerged prior to
and during this time, and the continuing redesigning, refashioning,
and reconceptualizing of these narratives.
The first phase, which occurred immediately after the fall of com-
munism, took on an (ethno)nationalist form. A powerful dichotomy
of “we” the nation and “they” the communist regime was strongly
emphasized at the expense of a more nuanced representation of the
past. The “ethnic vision” of the past, excluding the memory of the
local Jewish communities and other minorities, was prevalent. More-
over, the memory of the Holocaust continued to be repressed in public
discourse, and defensive attitudes toward the difficult past in relation
to the destruction of the Jews played a more significant role in pub-
lic discourse than the newly emerged narratives aiming at exposing
the dark past. At the same time, a new wave of recycled and modi-
fied nationalistic and anti-Semitic narratives about the Jews as per-
petrators during the communist period (Judeocommunism) have also
(re)emerged. The theme of Judeocommunism, in its various versions,
is the key narrative in the repertoire of the right-wing ethnonation-
alist politicians, journalists, and historians in the Baltic states, Hun-
gary, Romania, Poland, and Ukraine. It serves to justify and minimize
any wrongdoing against the Jews during the Holocaust and to rein-
force the narrative of one’s own victimhood during World War II and
in the post-1945 communist period. A good illustration of the still-
potent nature of Judeocommunism is that even some Eastern Euro-
pean historians and public intellectuals, such as Krzysztof Jasiewicz,
Introduction 7
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