Abstract: The Shoah belongs to one of the most thoroughly investigated aspects of modern European history. Scholars have used the Holocaust methodology to study other genocides, or forms of ethnic or political violence. Nevertheless, our understanding of the extermination of the European Jewry is limited, fragmented, and changes constantly due to new investigation methods, research interests, and public debates. The first studies on the Holocaust were conducted already during the Shoah but because of different reasons historians in some countries such as Germany and Ukraine did not pay much attention to them and concentrated rather on the documents left by the perpetrators and their fate during the war. While in Poland the research on the Holocaust never stopped, even if it was subjected to various political and ideological limitations, and the Shoah has been publicly debated since the middle of the 1980s, this was not the case in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Nevertheless, in the last two decades, the importance of the Holocaust was discovered in these countries as well and it is currently conceptualized in the framework of regional, national, and European history.
Abstract: Drawing upon developments in cultural and social memory studies and Europeanization theory, this article examines the Europeanization of Holocaust memory understood as the process of construction, institutionalization, and diffusion of beliefs regarding the Holocaust and norms and rules regarding Holocaust remembrance and education at a transnational, European level since the 1990s and their incorporation in the countries of post-communist Eastern Europe, which is also the area where the Holocaust largely took place. The article identifies the transnational agents of the Europeanization of Holocaust memory—the European Union’s parliament, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, as well as the United Nations. It analyzes chronologically the key Holocaust-related activities and documents of these agents, highlighting East European countries’ varied and changing position towards them. It examines synchronically the outcome of the Europeanization of Holocaust memory by these transnational agents—a European memory of the Holocaust—identifying its key components, discussing the main aspects, and illustrating the impact of this process and outcome upon the memory of the Holocaust in the East European countries. The article argues that the Europeanization of Holocaust memory has significantly contributed to the development of Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe, although other agents and processes were also involved.
Abstract: This article addresses the persistence of anti-Semitism in Romania, placed in the context of some recent debates concerning the memory of the Holocaust in the country, as well as in the area of Central and Eastern Europe more broadly. It argues that, despite significant improvements in terms of legislation, the memory of the Holocaust remains a highly contested issue in contemporary Romania, torn between the attempts to join in the European memory of the Holocaust and local legacies that on the one hand focus primarily on the suffering of Romanians under the communist regime, and on the other perform a symbolic “denationalisation” of the Jewish minority in the country, whose own suffering is thus excised from national memory. It does so by focusing in particular on the debates surrounding the adoption of Law 217/2015, meant to clarify earlier legislation on Holocaust denial, and comparing them with those prompted by the Ukrainian “memory laws” passed in the same year. Taking into account both the national and international reactions to these very different pieces of legislation, the article shows the still-persisting discrepancy between a (mostly Western) “European” memory of the legacy of the twentieth century and local memory topoi characteristic of the countries that were part of the former socialist bloc.
Abstract: Förintelsen är en historisk händelse som lever vidare i samtidens medvetande i form av minnesmonument och museala minnesutställningar och processas av forskningsinstitutioner och myndigheter. Bland överlevandefamiljerna lever minnet kvar och nu har några av deras barnbarn, den Tredje generationens överlevande, tagit på sig att förvalta minnet. Samtidigt florerar antisemitismen i det svensk samhället vilket formar och påverkar den judiska gruppen och barnbarnen. Den socialantropologiska studien som har genomförts kan visa att detta påverkar deras identitet. Syftet med studien är att undersöka den tredje generationens identitetskonstruktion och hur den formas av minnet av Förintelsen, samtida antisemitism samt de judiska institutionerna. I den etnografiska undersökningen som primärt har centrerats kring intervjuer och observationer framkom att det finns en uttalad vilja att minnas Förintelsen. Vissa påpekar vikten av att minnas i ett privat sammanhang, inom familjen, medan andra tycker att de mer offentliga minnesstunderna uppfyller behovet. Samtidigt lever barnbarnen i en tid med en manifest och latent antisemitism vilket formar både deras tillvaro och självbiografi. Några av forskningsdeltagarna har blivit utsatta för regelrätta antisemitiska påhopp medan andra har strategier för att undgå att synliggöra sin judiska identitet. Identiteten formas dock inte bara av detta utan också av den judiska etniska samhörigheten, de judiska institutionerna, det judiska kalendariet och kulturella och sociala riktlinjer. I studiens slutsatser kan det konstateras att den Tredje generationen överlevandes minnesbearbetning av Förintelsen baseras i mångt och mycket på en generationella minnesöverföring som har pågått under forskningsdeltagarnas liv då de har samtalet med överlevandegenerationen. Empirin visar också att de bär på förhållningssätt och strategier kring hur de hanterar en samtida antisemitism i kombination med att de bär på de överlevandes berättelser om den tyska, extrema formen. Detta tillsammans utgör en av grunderna till identiteten. Empirin visar också att den tredje generationen väljer att leva ett judiskt liv, inom den Judiska församlingens ramar, baserat på individuella val och ställningstaganden.
Abstract: This research contributes to the understanding of the process of reconstructing the memory of Jews in contemporary Poland. Focusing on a case study of a town in southern Poland, Mszana Dolna, the study analyses how Jewish/non-Jewish relations and the history of the Jews of the town are remembered by the current inhabitants of Mszana, as well as by Holocaust survivors and their families. The research is based on an interdisciplinary approach to the subject of memory, using in depth oral history interviews, archival and other written materials, as well as participant observation as sources of analysed data. The study concentrates on the memory of the life in Mszana before, during and after the war in terms of the coexistence of two communities, Jewish and non-Jewish ones. Focusing mainly on the annual commemoration of the shooting of the Jews of Mszana in August 1942 by non-Jewish members of the community and their participation in the educational programmes, the research elucidates the process of regaining the Jewish heritage of the town by non-Jewish inhabitants and incorporating it into the past of the community of Mszana. Identifying the variety of levels of interactions between Jews and non-Jews before the war, it argues that the interrupted coexistence of both groups in Mszana resulted in the void which remained after the destroyed Jewish community. The memory of Jews found its place in the oral history for several decades. Through examining the forms of remembrance of the Jews in Mszana, this study attempts to illustrate the transition of the memory of Jews from private sphere of life to the public discourse on the Jewish inheritance of the town.
Abstract: As we approach the post-witness era this paper investigates the changing role of the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors in twenty-first century British politics and culture. In the first part, the article discusses the ways in which, through their role in educational initiatives and commemorative culture, survivors have acquired an increased visibility in British understandings of the Holocaust. For a significant period of time, this process was characterized by a tendency to abstract survivors from their Jewish identities to ensure that they could more easily act as mediators of a universalized, yet highly domesticated, Holocaust narrative with meanings for contemporary British society. However, in the second part the article will argue that, starting from the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is also possible to discern an increasing acknowledgement of British Holocaust survivors’ ‘difference.’ It will be suggested that British politicians have attempted to mobilize survivors, the Anglo-Jewish community they are seen to represent, and the Holocaust more in general, in Britain’s domestic battle against Islamic extremism and in the pursuit of the rather elusive concept of ‘British values.’
Abstract: Poland presents the most advanced case of the transformation of the memory of Jews and the Holocaust in
all of postcommunist Europe. For that reason, it can serve as a paradigm in comparative studies of the
scope, dynamics, complexities, and challenges of this memory transformation.
The memory of Jews and the Holocaust in postcommunist Poland has persistently occupied a central stage
in public debate since 1989. At present, the more than twenty-year-old boom of the “theater” of Jewish
memory shows no sign of declining. This does not, however, mean that the archeology of the Polish
Jewish past has been completed and that a broad public consensus has been reached on how to remember
the Jews and the Holocaust, especially the dark uncomfortable past in Polish-Jewish relations showing
Christian (ethnic) Poles in a bad light.
One can differentiate three key dimensions in this landscape of memory: “remembering to remember,”
“remembering to benefit,” and “remembering to forget.” The first underscores the void left after the
genocide of Polish Jewry, and Polish-Jewish relations in all their aspects. In “remembering to benefit,” the
key intention behind the recalling of the Jews and the Holocaust is to achieve tangible goals. In
“remembering to forget,” the memory of Jews and the Holocaust is regarded as an awkward problem.
In Poland’s immediate future, these three modes of remembering Jews and the Holocaust will persist. This
landscape of memory will continue to resemble a film with a multiple array of scenes—many fascinating
and intellectually and morally uplifting, others confusing, hypocritical, intellectually dull, morally
despicable, and opportunistic.
