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Between Denial and "Comparative Trivialization": Holocaust Negationism in Post-Communist East Central Europe

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Between Denial and Between Denial and "Comparative Trivialization": Holocaust Negationism in Post-Communist East Central Europe Michael Shafir Motto: They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more Czeslaw Milosz Introduction* Holocaust denial in post-Communist East Central Europe is a fact. And, like most facts, its shades are many. Sometimes, denial comes in explicit forms – visible and universally-aggressive. At other times, however, it is implicit rather than explicit, particularistic rather than universal, defensive rather than aggressive. And between these two poles, the spectrum is large enough to allow for a large variety of forms, some of which may escape the eye of all but the most versatile connoisseurs of country-specific history, culture, or immediate political environment. In other words, Holocaust denial in the region ranges from sheer emulation of negationism elsewhere in the world to regional-specific forms of collective defense of national "historic memory" and to merely banal, indeed sometime cynical, attempts at the utilitarian exploitation of an immediate political context.1 The paradox of Holocaust negation in East Central Europe is that, alas, this is neither "good" nor "bad" for the Jews.2 But it is an important part of the * I would like to acknowledge the support of the J. and O. Winter Fund of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for research conducted in connection with this project. I am indebted to friends and colleagues who read manuscripts of earlier versions and provided comments and corrections. While responsibility for the contents of this article remains mine, I would like to acknowledge the help of Leon Volovici and Michael Finkenthal (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Randolph L. Braham (Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, City University of New York), András Kovács (Central European University, Budapest), Radu Ioanid (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), Norman Manea (Bard College), Lya Benjamin (Center for the Study of the History of Romanian Jewry, Bucharest) and George Voicu (University of Bucharest). The article is dedicated to the memory of my daughter, Tamar, who knew what sufferance was all about. 1 In the following I am employing the concept of "Holocaust denial" to include all shades of explicit and implicit references to the Holocaust that question either its very existence or its significance as an unprecedented atrocity in mankind's history. Except for indicating its improper usage by having it in quotation marks, I am not using the concept of "revisionism," for reasons largely exhausted in arguments presented by Deborah Lipstadt (1994), and by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman (2000). On the uniqueness of the Holocaust see Bauer 2001, 39–67. 2 Estimates of Holocaust decimation vary, the more so as borders radically shifted between the two world wars, during the war, and in its aftermath. According to Ivan T. Berend (1993, 130), some 4 million East Central European Jews perished during the Holocaust, but it is unclear whether this number includes Jews in the former Soviet Union. Raul Hilberg, one of the foremost authorities on the Holocaust, provides country- by-country estimations based on the 1937 borders (Hilberg 1994, 3:1300). For another country-by-country estimate, see Gutman and Rozett 1990, 1799–1802. With the exception of Hungary, where a community of more than 100,000 mostly assimilated Jews still survives, there are no Jewish communities to speak of in the region nowadays. In Bulgaria, estimates of the number of Jews currently living in the country range between 5,000 and 8,000; in the Czech Republic between 3,500 and 6,000; in Poland Between Denial and "Comparative Trivialization" 3 quo vadis transitional equation. If under the Communist regime "antisemitism without Jews" (Lendvai 1971) was part and parcel of the of the non-optional pseudo-offer of monopolistic regimes, post-Communist East Central Europe remains "without Jews" but is no longer "without offer." Ideologies and politicians compete in a relatively free political market; there is no longer one history but several, and here, too, the offer is competitive. Last but not least, literati are also relatively free to "offer" their vision of past, present, and future. Attitudes towards the Holocaust will not directly determine the region's outlook. But they may do so indirectly, insofar as facing collective responsibility is part of any "democratic game." Criminal responsibility, however, can never be collective. Though looming large in post-Communist East Central Europe, suspicions of an intended "collective incrimination" speak more of personal options than they speak of collective apprehensions. In a free society, choice is personal, but its outcome is collective. It is in this sense – and this sense alone – that Holocaust negation in the region is value-ridden. And those who "produce values," and offer them on the newly-established competitive market are politicians and intellectuals, sometimes working in tandem, at other times at odds. The argument can be made that there is nothing specifically "East- Central European" about that. Indeed, that argument should be made. However, what is specific about the region is its former Communist legacy. And this collective legacy partly facilitates, partly explains, and to a certain extent even exonerates Holocaust denial and its "comparative trivialization." In what follows, I shall, first, examine the Communist legacy of "organized forgetting" and its impact on post-Communist attitudes of denying the Holocaust; second, I shall separately scrutinize three Holocaust-denying postures ("outright," "deflective," and "selective"), before proceeding, in the last section of the study, to examine the specific East Central European aspects of "Holocaust comparative trivialization." These distinctions should be viewed as being above all generic, rather than being mutually exclusive. Each of these (largely heuristic) categories belongs to the larger "family" of Holocaust denying, but they are different in terms of intensity, scope, or basic motivation. Mobility from one category to the other (or back) is by no means impossible. In fact, it is rather common. As Pierre Vidal-Naquet put it when he stood up against the so- called Holocaust "revisionists": "there is more than one room in the revisionist house" (Vidal-Naquet 1992, 18). And people do move from room to room, one should add. between 10,000 and 15,000; in Romania between 12,000 and 14,000; and fewer than 4,000 Jews live in Slovakia; there are about 2,000 Jews in Croatia; between 2,000 and 3,000 in "post-Yugoslav" Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro); some 120 in Slovenia; between 100 and 150 in Macedonia; and an even smaller group in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Gruber 1999). Latvia has a community of 12,800 Jews but, with the exception of Russia (325,000 at the beginning of 1998), Ukraine (155,000) and Belarus (23,000), no community in the former Soviet Union is larger than 11,000 (Gitelman 1999, 395–96). 4 Michael Shafir 1. The Legacy of "Organized Forgetting" In a book on post-Communist Slovakia, Shari J. Cohen forged the concept of "state-organized forgetting of history" to describe the former regime's Orwellian manipulation of the historical record to serve its political purposes (Cohen 1999, 85–118). For reasons that need not preoccupy us in this context, I disagree with Cohen's generalization, among other reasons because "forgetting" history implies obliteration rather than manipulation (Shafir 2002). I believe Nancy Whittier Heer's 1971 study on Communist history-manipulation remains to this day as relevant as it was three decades ago, when its focus-object (the Soviet Union) was still with us (Whittier Heer 1971). But "state-organized forgetting" is fully applicable when it comes to the East Central European Communist regimes' "de-Judiazation" of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and/or their local emulators or official allies, as amply demonstrated by contributors to a volume edited by Randolph L. Braham after the demise of those regimes (Braham 1994a). This makes the task of Holocaust negationists easier, and the receptivity to "Holocaust trivialization" arguments higher than it would otherwise be in the Western parts of the continent. Except for the very first postwar years, Soviet historiography and its imposed model strove to both "nationalize" and to "internationalize" the Holocaust. "Nationalization" amounted to transforming Jewish victims into local victims, while "internationalization" derived from those regime's ideologically- determined "definition" of "Fascism." In an essay written in 1985, French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet noted that the History of the Great Patriotic War by Boris Tepulchowski, while mentioning the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Maidanek, and Treblinka, never indicated that these had been put in place mainly to serve the purpose of the Jews' physical elimination; instead, Tepulchowski wrote that six million "Polish citizens" had been murdered by the Nazis. As for the extermination of Jews on Soviet territory proper, it was covered in just two lines (Vidal-Naquet 1992, 94). Thanks to the poet, Evgenii Yevtushenko, the case of Babi Yar, where Soviet authorities constantly sought to blur the record of the victims' Jewish identity,3 acquired world notoriety. When 3 This statement may, however, be somewhat exaggerated, since at different times and in different political circumstances, Soviet historiography did not always, and/or entirely ignore the Jewish aspect of the Holocaust. Zvi Gitelman (1997, 14) observes that "While most Soviet writers either ignored the Holocaust or submerged it in more general accounts of the period, none denied it, and some did treat it not simply as German atrocities but as a uniquely Jewish fate. A survey of Soviet writings reveals that they vary significantly in the prominence and interpretations they give to the Holocaust.
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