Jews and Gentiles in Central and Eastern Europe during the Holocaust

History and memory

Hana Kubátová, Jan Láníček

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351668163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Providing diverse insights into Jewish–Gentile relations in East Central Europe from the outbreak of the Second World War until the reestablishment of civic societies after the fall of Communism in the late 1980s, this volume brings together scholars from various disciplines – including history, sociology, political science, cultural studies, film studies and anthropology – to investigate the complexity of these relations, and their transformation, from perspectives beyond the traditional approach that deals purely with politics.

This collection thus looks for interactions between the public and private, and what is more, it does so from a still rather rare comparative perspective, both chronological and geographic. It is this interdisciplinary and comparative perspective that enables us to scrutinize the interaction between the individual majority societies and the Jewish minorities in a longer time frame, and hence we are able to revisit complex and manifold encounters between Jews and Gentiles, including but not limited to propaganda, robbery, violence but also help and rescue. In doing so, this collection challenges the representation of these encounters in post-war literature, films, and the historical consciousness. This book was originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies.

Jews and Gentiles in Central and Eastern Europe during the Holocaust in history and memory

Hana Kubátová and Jan Láníček

ABSTRACT
In Eastern Europe, where the genocide of the Jews became an almost “ordinary”, integral part of life during the war, as well as in Central Europe, removed from the direct proximity of the mass murder, the culpability of the Germans and their principal role in the Holocaust has not been doubted. After all, the Holocaust was an all-German story to tell. Far more complex has been the recognition of the local majority societies’ – that is non-Germans’ – involvement in the persecution and extermination of the Jewish population, and of the majority societies’ ambiguous responses to the return of the Jewish survivors (or refugees and exiles) after 1945. This essay opens a collection of eleven articles that provide diverse insights into Jewish-Gentile relations in Central and Eastern Europe from the outbreak of the Second World War until the reestablishment of civic societies after the fall of Communism in the late 1980s. The interdisciplinary and comparative perspective of this issue enables us to scrutinize the interaction between the individual majority societies and the Jewish minorities in a longer time frame and hence we are able to revisit complex and manifold encounters between Jews and Gentiles, including but not limited to propaganda, robbery, violence but also help and rescue.

The Holocaust left an indelible mark on Central and Eastern Europe. Across the whole region, the German troops, including the special units of the SS and order police, and their local collaborators, left millions of Jews – as well as other racially, ethnically, and ideologically defined groups – dead. The places of suffering – the Babi Yar ravine, the pits of Ponary, the Treblinka extermination camp, or the former sites of the Warsaw or Lublin ghettos – have since the end of the war been an uncomfortable reminder of the mass murder committed more than 70 years ago. The culpability of the German occupiers and their principal role in the Holocaust has never been doubted. From the very moment of the liberation in 1943–45, even if the retribution for the specific crimes against the Jews (and their commemoration) remained partial to say the least, the Germans – as a nation – were burdened with the guilt for the Holocaust. Far more complex has been the recognition of the local majority societies’ – that is non-Germans’ – involvement in the persecution and extermination of the Jewish population, and of the majority societies’ ambiguous responses to the return of the Jewish survivors (or refugees and exiles) after 1945.

The legacies of the Second World War, including the problematic behavior of their former neighbors during the war, impacted on the survivors’ efforts to start new lives following the war’s end. They had to cope with the unwillingness of both the national authorities and the majority societies to correct the past wrongs, and allow the Jews to regain their properties and return to the socio-economic positions they had been forced to leave during (but sometimes even before) the war. The Europe as they knew it, writes Pieter Lagrou, vanished, becoming a grim place, “disrupted by demographic, social and political turmoil, stricken by physical destruction, haunted by recollections of violence and killing.”¹ The joy of liberation, the expectations of the war coming to an end, anticipations of reuniting with loved ones, feelings of elation and excitement went hand in hand with anxiety and concerns.² Yet the bitter return of refugees, exiles, and survivors has still not been properly addressed in many countries across the region.³ The same applies to the question of local involvement and the degree of profiteering from the Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews, examined in this volume. Although there have been debates about the complicity of the local non-German population, especially in Poland as we shall see below, often they only touched upon the role of the political elites (as has been the case with Hungary or Slovakia, countries governed by their own administrations until the German invasion in 1944, in March and August respectively, or with Croatia, Romania, and Bulgaria).⁴ Furthermore, most of these investigations have remained confined to scholarly debates that did not reach a broader public. This is also the case with the relatively recent Hungarian Historikerstreit, which addressed some of the most problematic questions about the Horthy regime, including the indigenous antisemitism and the Hungarians’ participation in the Holocaust.⁵

Only in Poland has the academic research on the degree of local participation in the crimes against the Jews led to several intense general debates after the fall of the Communist rule (though they were initiated already in the 1980s by academic research in Israel, Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah, and by the first articles in the Polish press, for example by Jan Błonski that questioned the established war memory⁶ ). Further debates were stimulated by the opening of the local archives after 1989 and by the deeper involvement of scholars in free research of all topics pertaining to the Holocaust, including its precedents and the aftermath. Interestingly, many of these debates, be it the more general ones in Poland or the academic disputes across the region, were triggered by research studies published either by émigré scholars, as was the case with Randolph L. Braham, István Deák, or Jan T. Gross, or foreign authors, including Benjamin Frommer or James Mace Ward, who have no direct family ties to the countries whose histories they have challenged.⁷

Despite the undeniable progress that has been made in historical research and public awareness about the Holocaust in its local context, in recent years and months we have been witnessing renewed efforts in the countries across Eastern and Central Europe to relativize, deny, and even criminalize particular avenues of Holocaust research and commemoration. Discussions of the majority societies’ involvement in the Holocaust have increasingly become associated with a direct or indirect attack on the national master narratives and accounts of the experiences of the war. Such discussions are often perceived as contradicting and endangering the sense of national identity, and myths of national heroism and victimhood during and after the war, that continue to exist throughout Europe, East and West alike.⁸ Any reckoning with the past deeds is then understood as besmirching the good name and honor of the nation. Hence, not surprisingly, new scholarship, problematizing the role different parts of society had in the Holocaust, has not necessarily led to a “transformation of the mythological narrative.”⁹

In Hungary, the recent state-sponsored commemorations of the war, especially the controversial Memorial of the Victims of the German Invasion, dedicated to “all victims” of the German occupation, present the Hungarian majority society as a victim of Nazi Germany.¹⁰ Also the House of Fates, a new Holocaust museum in Budapest that opened just last year, remains largely silent about the involvement of the Horthy regime in the Holocaust, including the deportations of 1941 (which led to the mass massacre of foreign Jews, expelled from Greater Hungary to Kamenets Podoľsk in today’s Ukraine, committed by the German troops and their Ukrainian and Hungarian helpers), crimes committed in Vojvodina (the part of Yugoslavia occupied by Hungary), and then the large-scale collaboration of all levels of the Hungarian administration in the 1944 deportations to Auschwitz and elsewhere.¹¹ In the Baltic states, annual marches of former local SS soldiers – although criticized by the international community – have become a part of the “folklore.” In Lithuania, there have even been attempts to prosecute former Jewish partisans – including the erstwhile Yad Vashem director and chief historian Yitzhak Arad – for the alleged crimes they committed against the locals during the war.¹²

In Slovakia, Marián Kotleba’s ultranationalist People’s Party – Our Slovakia entered the parliament in the spring of 2016. The country’s intellectuals spoke of democracy suffering a blow, while only about 1000 people gathered in the center of Bratislava to protest against fascism. Kotleba, since 2013 the governor of the Banská Bystrica region in the center of the country, has not been shy in expressing his deeply troubling views. In the more than 10 years during which he rose from the leader of a fringe party banned by the constitutional court to a parliamentary member, Kotleba openly spoke of “Gypsy parasites” or “an alleged Holocaust,” claiming that the Slovaks had no reason to “deal with any feelings of collective guilt or to endlessly apologize to those who have despised, exploited, oppressed the Slovak nation for centuries.”¹³ Last year, Kotleba’s party sued a Slovak non-governmental organization for “promoting racism” because they, as part of their exhibition commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, displayed a photograph of Ŝtefánia. Born in Slovakia, Lorándová helped Slovak Jews in Hungary to obtain false papers and flee to safety during the war, thus actually saving many from imminent death. As also stated on the photograph, Lorándová was a member of the Zionist Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. Basing their argumentation on the 1975 UN General Assembly resolution th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Jews and Gentiles in Central and Eastern Europe during the Holocaust in history and memory
• 2. Intimate violence: Jewish testimonies on victims and perpetrators in Eastern Galicia
• 3. Helping, denouncing, and profiteering: a process-oriented approach to Jewish–Gentile relations in occupied Poland from a micro-historical perspective
• 4. Geographies of obligation and the dissemination of news of the Holocaust
• 5. Was the antisemitic propaganda a catalyst for tensions in the Slovak-Jewish relations?
• 6. Memories of the Holocaust: Slovak bystanders
• 7. The image of the “Jew” as an “enemy” in the propaganda of Late Stalinism and its reflection in the Czechoslovak context
• 8. Abandoned, confiscated, and stolen property: Jewish–Gentile relations in Hungary as reflected in restitution letters
• 9. The “Holocausts” in Greece: victim competition in the context of postwar compensation for Nazi persecution
• 10. Conceptions of the catastrophe: discourses on the past before the rise of Holocaust memory
• 11. Lamentations of a shopkeeper for his sluttish daughter? Tadeusz Borowski and His “Holocaust Socialist Realism”
• 12. Nontraditional images of the Holocaust in Czech literature and cinema: comedy and laughter
• Index