NOW AVAILABLE remembrance a n d s o l i d a r i t y Holocaust/Shoah The Organization of the Jewish Refugees in Italy Holocaust Commemoration in Present-day Poland in 20 th century european history Ways of Survival as Revealed in the Files EUROPEAN REMEMBRANCE of the Ghetto Courts and Police in Lithuania – LECTURES, DISCUSSIONS, remembrance COMMENTARIES, 2012–16 and solidarity in 20 th This publication features the century most significant texts from the european annual European Remembrance history Symposium (2012–16) – one of the main events organized by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity in Gdańsk, Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Budapest. The 2017 issue symposium entitled ‘Violence in number the 20th-century European history: educating, commemorating, 5 – december documenting’ will take place in Brussels. Lectures presented there will be included in the next Studies issue. 2016 Read Remembrance and Solidarity Studies online: enrs.eu/studies number 5 www.enrs.eu ISSUE NUMBER 5 DECEMBER 2016 REMEMBRANCE AND SOLIDARITY STUDIES IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPEAN HISTORY EDITED BY Dan Michman and Matthias Weber EDITORIAL BOARD ISSUE EDITORS: Prof. Dan Michman Prof. Matthias Weber EDITORS: Dr Florin Abraham, Romania Dr Árpád Hornják, Hungary Dr Pavol Jakubčin, Slovakia Prof. Padraic Kenney, USA Dr Réka Földváryné Kiss, Hungary Dr Ondrej Krajňák, Slovakia Prof. Róbert Letz, Slovakia Prof. Jan Rydel, Poland Prof. Martin Schulze Wessel, Germany EDITORIAL COORDINATOR: Ewelina Pękała REMEMBRANCE AND SOLIDARITY STUDIES IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPEAN HISTORY PUBLISHER: European Network Remembrance and Solidarity ul. Wiejska 17/3, 00–480 Warszawa, Poland www.enrs.eu, [email protected] COPY-EDITING AND PROOFREADING: Caroline Brooke Johnson PROOFREADING: Ramon Shindler TYPESETTING: Marcin Kiedio GRAPHIC DESIGN: Katarzyna Erbel COVER DESIGN: © European Network Remembrance and Solidarity 2016 All rights reserved ISSN: 2084–3518 Circulation: 500 copies Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag. In cooperation with the Nordost-Institut (IKGN e.V), Lüneburg. Front cover photograph: The Hall of Names in the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. Courtesy of Yad Vashem. REMEMBRANCE AND SOLIDARITY STUDIES IN 20TH-CENTURY EUROPEAN HISTORY ISSUE NUMBER 5 DECEMBER 2016 Holocaust/Shoah CONTENTS Editor’s Preface 7 Dan Michman and Matthias Weber I. ARTICLES History – STUDIES ON THE PERIOD The National Socialist ‘National Community’ in the 13 ‘Foreign German Community’ through the Example of Transylvanian Saxons and their National Church Dirk Schuster Resolving the ‘Jewish Question’ in Púchov 35 District of Slovakia (1939–45) Pavol Makyna The Organization of the Jewish Refugees in Italy: 61 Cultural Activities and Zionist Propaganda inside the Displaced Persons Camps (1943–48) Chiara Renzo ‘Purchasing and bringing food into the ghetto is 79 forbidden’: Ways of Survival as Revealed in the Files of the Ghetto Courts and Police in Lithuania (1941–44) Joachim Tauber MEMORY – STUDIES ON REMEMBRANCE Anne and Éva: Two Diaries, Two Holocaust 97 Memories in Communist Hungary Kata Bohus From Absence to Loss: Holocaust 115 Commemoration in Present-day Poland Marta Duch-Dyngosz Personalization of the Memory of Holocaust Victims in 137 Polish Cinema and Museum Exhibitions after 1989 Amelia Korzeniewska and Bartosz Korzeniewski Holocaust Memorials in Central and Eastern 159 Europe: Communist Legacies, Transnational Influences and National Developments Marek Kucia ‘The spirit of the time left its stamp on these 185 works’: Writing the History of the Shoah at the Jewish Historical Institute in Stalinist Poland Stephan Stach Construction of Identity in Romania in Relation to its Past: the 213 Case of the Shoah in History Textbooks in Secondary Education Maria-Philippa Wieckowski Holocaust Memory and the Logic behind Comparisons 227 Heidemarie Uhl II. Miscellanea Work-in-progress Report: Research Project – the 257 Economic Plundering of the Jewish Population in Württemberg and Hohenzollern Benedict von Bremen Gerhard Richter: ‘Post-remembering’ the 271 Holocaust in German Contemporary Art Kris Belden-Adams Popular Awareness and Ill-intent or Passivity 281 of those in Power: Memory of the Holocaust in Russia and Ukraine in the 21st Century Alexander Gogun Stealth Altruism: Reflections on a Neglected 297 Aspect of the Holocaust Arthur B. Shostak Editor’S Preface Editor’S Preface Dan Michman and Matthias Weber The persecution and systematic murder of the Jews throughout Europe and beyond during the National Socialist regime in Germany (1933–45) – now known as the Holocaust or Shoah – is a turning point in history in many ways and has aptly been called a crisis of civilization [Zivilisationsbruch]. More than seven decades after the end of the Second World War, study and reflec- tion on this unprecedented crime is still a vital issue for historical learning in Europe and worldwide. The crime was carried out by many perpetrators and affected not only the Jews but also the societies in which they had lived. Historians had and still have an important role to play in this respect, yet they can provide only the descriptive and analytical basis of the event as such. Transmission of the deeper human meanings of the event needs additional channels, among them the testimonies of survivors and various forms of media and art. Given the demise of a generation of witnesses – victims as well as bystanders and perpetrators – one of the main objectives of current teaching initiatives is the dissemination of the memories of victims to the younger generations. Thus, the issue of individual and collective memory has become a core issue of research and education. And in spite of the growing number of studies on memory, much has still to be investigated, such as the Holocaust’s different regional and local dimensions. The Holocaust/Shoah is of great importance in the cultural, educational and academic activities of the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS). For instance, in 2011 the ENRS co-produced the educational docu- mentary Quietly Against the Tide which dealt with the concentration camps; the Sound in the Silence project has brought youngsters to memorial sites where they have conducted their own artistic and creative endeavours; and the short filmMemento by the Hungarian author Zoltán Szilágyi Varga was aired in numerous countries on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day 2015 (http://www.enrs.eu/january27). The ENRS has also promoted aca- demic research and conferences (such as ‘The memory of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes in Europe after 1989 – competition and conflict’, Vienna 2014). The current issue of the ENRS periodical Remembrance and Solidarity. Studies in 20th-century European History is similarly an expression of this enterprise. REMEMBRANCE AND SOLIDARITY 7 Editor’S Preface The two terms that are used in the title of this issue – ‘Holocaust/Shoah’ – need some clarification. Shoah, meaning ‘(unexpected) catastrophe’ or ‘di- saster’ and to a lesser extent ‘Hurban’ (in Hebrew) or ‘Churbn’ (the Yiddish pronunciation of the same word) meaning ‘destruction’ are the Hebrew words that have been used among the Jewish community over the past seven decades to relate to the fate of the Jews during the Nazi era. It is worth noting that other terms arose during the period itself and immediately after 1945, such as Tevah Am [massacre of a nation], Cataclysm, Yemei Haza’am [days of wrath] and Umkum [extinction]. Neither the Holocaust or Shoah were coined especially, they were retrieved from existing vocabulary. Shoah was used in Hebrew by the Yishuv, the Jewish community in mandatory Palestine, to describe the escalating persecutions they had been monitoring since 1933; inevitably the meaning of the term became increasingly loaded. In 1945 this turned into HaShoah, that is the ultimate catastrophe. Holocaust, a Greek word meaning ‘an entirely burnt sacrifice’ originally re- lating to pagan sacrifices and used in the Greek version of the Bible to translate the Biblical korban ‘ola [burnt offering]. It gradually became the principal term to describe the fate of the Jews of the Nazi era in the late 1950s – mainly, though not only, in the English-speaking world, where most Jews lived after the Second World War. The term was not used by Jewish survivors or in Jewish traditional circles; rather, it was rooted in Christian European tradition. It was also used in general secular discourse to describe real or looming large-scale massacres before, during and after the Second World War. The gradual increase in the use of the term Holocaust occurred in the late 1950s, precisely when the cumulative results of the first wave of scholarly research on the perpetrators, primarily carried out by German researchers, concluded that anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish policies had not just been one of the many facets of the Third Reich but was central to its totality; in other words, the ‘Jewish’ ingredient of the Nazi period was rec- ognized as having special, pivotal importance and that fact raised the quest for some clear epithets. The worldwide attention given to the Eichmann trial in 1961, undoubtedly contributed to that desire, and it brought the Jewish and non-Jewish understandings of the peculiarity of the event together. The French intellectual François Mauriac used the term in his introduction to Elie Wiesel’s autobiographic novel Night (published in French in 1958 and in English in 1960). Thus, the existing term with its