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The Europeanization of Holocaust Remembrance

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The Europeanization of Holocaust Remembrance The Europeanization of Holocaust remembrance How far has it gone, and how far can it go? Ferenc Laczó 29 January 2018 This year's International Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 January) was marked by a row over a new Polish law that would criminalize any suggestion that Poland was responsible for Nazi atrocities. In a prescient speech delivered just days earlier, historian Ferenc Laczó observes that the Europeanization of Holocaust remembrance still has a long way to go. Few facts of European history appear to be as widely known today as the following: the genocide against European Jews was initiated and implemented by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, and primary responsibility for the murder of its six million victims lies with the German state and society of the time. The Holocaust was a European event in the sense that there were numerous perpetrators and even more numerous collaborators across the continent from Ukraine to France and from Bulgaria to Norway. A key aspect of the murder campaign by Nazi Germany and its various allies and collaborators was its enactment in otherwise highly diverse places, irrespective of such basic factors as the size of local Jewish communities, their levels of social integration, or types of political and cultural orientation (just recall the major differences in these respects between the Netherlands and Greece, or between Belarus and Italy). In other words, the genocide against European Jews, unlike other major instances of genocide in the past century, such as the Armenian, Rwandan or Cambodian, had practically nothing to do with the specific constellations of a region or a country. It amounted to an ideologically motivated, practically pan-European and systematically executed programme. Notwithstanding some notable exceptions, such as Spain or Ukraine, the geographic scope of the Holocaust closely overlaps that of the European Union today. Crucially for my argument, this statement about close geographic overlap could not have been made before the EU enlargements of the early 21st century. After all, nearly every area that is part of the European project today experienced the Holocaust, but did so far from uniformly. During the late 1930s the five largest Jewish Page 1/9 communities on the European continent resided in Poland, the Soviet Union, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, all of which later became members of the Eastern bloc. Jews from East European countries came to account for the large majority – well over five million, or about 90% – of all the victims of the Holocaust, with Jews from prewar Poland alone constituting about half the total. By contrast, major Jewish victim groups from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France together constituted around 6% of all victims. This means a still terrifyingly large number of over 350,000 individual murders – genocide on an unprecedented scale in modern western Europe – but the numbers for each of these four countries are notably lower than the relevant indicators for a host of lesser known cases such as Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Belarus or Lithuania. While any encompassing history of the perpetrators ought to prioritize Germans and Austrians without making them the exclusive focus, any inclusive and adequate history of the victims would have to begin with Poland and eastern Europe at large before arriving at the European level. Surprisingly, while there has been consensus on the former point ever since the war, the latter is far from established practice even today. Many of the finest historians of the Holocaust who devote attention to the Jewish experience of the Nazi era tend to focus almost exclusively on Jews in Nazi Germany prior to 1939 – to take an eminent example, Saul Friedlaender’s justly praised The Years of Persecution. Such books thereby largely neglect Jews from elsewhere in the same years – people who came to account for some 98% of the victims. What is more, the crime of the Holocaust was committed primarily on the pre-war territory of Poland and the Soviet Union. The main extermination camps of Operation Reinhard, most infamously Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, where the majority of Polish Jews were murdered during the main phase of the Holocaust in 1942-43 and which in fact were little more than killing facilities, are all located in what is now Poland; the main sites of the Holocaust where victims were killed by bullets, a method that started and reached its peak in 1941, such as Mikolaev or the Babi Jar ravine just outside Kiev, are in Ukraine; even the Reich-territory that Auschwitz constituted during World War II – a surprisingly little known fact in Germany today – belonged to Poland both before and after the war. Not forgetting several key exceptions such as Bergen-Belsen or Dachau, one might still state that almost all of the major sites of Holocaust perpetration and nearly all the main sites where the human remains of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Jewish victims are to be found were located on the eastern side of what became the Iron Curtain. It should be added that postwar eastern Europe contained not just the major sites of Jewish death, but at first also several of the major locations of Jewish life in Europe. In the early postwar years, the two largest Jewish communities in Europe were those of the Soviet Union and Romania – even though their numbers were to dwindle in subsequent decades due to mass emigration. More generally, with the unprecedented destruction of European Jewry during World War Two, the main Jewish centres of the world clearly shifted to other continents: to the United States of America and, increasingly, to the newly founded state of Israel. Due to waves of emigration out of eastern Europe and Jewish flight from Arab countries in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflicts, the aforementioned two countries currently account for over 80% of the Jewish populations around the world – a previously unseen geographic concentration in modern times. Page 2/9 A consequence of this larger shift with direct bearing on our subject is that Holocaust survivors and their descendants are thus more likely to reside outside Europe than within it. The Europeanization of Holocaust remembrance that I am going to discuss has thus been unfolding in the context of the now rather marginal presence of Jews in Europe. Similarly, several of the major institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust, such as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., are also located outside the continent, even if many Europeans may have visited them and various projects of theirs exert an impact here too. * Pre-89 Budapest, where I was raised, probably had the largest number of Jewish Nazi camp survivors in the whole of Europe. However, this was not something that was part of public knowledge at the time or that anybody would have ever mentioned to me in my youth. It was only during the deepening westernization and Europeanization of Hungary in the late 1990s, that remembrance of the Holocaust became a more prominent public matter. The word ‘survivor’ came to be uttered more frequently in the course of private conversations too, albeit discreetly. It was only around the turn of the millennium – in parallel with a major transnational wave of Holocaust remembrance epitomized by the launching of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust – that it was openly and repeatedly stated in Hungary that Jews from my country were the single largest group of victims of Auschwitz- Birkenau. What exactly this striking and shocking fact had to do with Hungary’s role as perpetrator, however, remained much less frequently addressed at the time and is yet to be properly acknowledged to this day. At around the same time, it became popular for members of the more liberal and pro- European circles in Hungary to remark that the country had much left to do to belatedly confront its recent past and that the German way of dealing with its dark pasts, most particularly its responsibility for the Holocaust, could serve as an example. Rather characteristically for the intellectual horizons of early post-communist eastern Europe where former dissidents constituted a significant and, for me personally, the most intriguing part of the intellectual establishment, the transformation of the post-Nazi West German society into that of an enlightened and morally sensitive Federal Republic was associated with the almost magical year of 1968. The dominant position in West Germany of a laudably self-critical perspective was supposedly clearly demonstrated by the historians’ quarrel, the Historikerstreit, of 1986-87. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, opened in the heart of Berlin in 2005 was meant to underline the point further that the cult of heroism and glory had gone out of fashion and that sober analyses and self-critical reflections had become the new norm. Source: Flickr In 2010, when I arrived in Germany as a relatively young historian, I was soon struck by the scholarly impact of the cohort of historians born between 1960 and 1966. In Page 3/9 retrospect, this makes perfect sense: after all, members of this cohort had just started their academic and professional careers around 1989 and benefitted from – and greatly contributed to – the grand intellectual opening of Europe that followed: scholars like Frank Bajohr, Christoph Dieckmann, Christian Gerlach, Dieter Pohl, Sybille Steinbacher and Jürgen Zimmerer. The accomplishments of these historians all provide key examples of what the opening of counties such as Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia in 1989-91 and, more specifically, the opening of their archives meant for German historiography of the Nazi times. It was this opening alone that created the possibility of studying the major Nazi crimes in their actual setting and based on documents from all of the most relevant sides.
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