Airbrushing the Ghettoes
From Eastern Europe to the Middle East, the legacy of the Holocaust has been used to denigrate left anti-fascism and promote the interests of ethno-nationalist establishments. But we should remember who really killed the ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks’ of the Second World War.
At the heart of the pogrom group, an individual wearing a white armband can be seen. This is the distinctive sign of the members of the Ukrainian militia, who are, for the most part, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN, particularly its most radical faction, led by Stepan Bandera, the OUN(B). (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Leonard Lauder)
When 19-year-old Sara Ginaite escaped from the Kaunas Ghetto in Lithuania during the winter of 1943, she had one clear objective. With the recent arrival of the Schutzstaffel (SS) in the ghetto, it had become clear that its remaining Jews would soon be sent to their deaths. Attempts by Jews in Kaunas to link up with the underground Lithuanian resistance had been firmly rejected by the latter on account of the former’s perceived ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’. Those who wanted to give themselves and their families the best chance of survival had to do it on their own, so they set up a partisan camp in the nearby forest. As one of these partisans, Sara understood her situation with clarity: ‘Jews did not join the partisans as a normal act of choice. We were forced to fight the Nazis to save ourselves from extermination.’
Sixty years later, the Lithuanian government took the decision to undertake pre-trial investigations into alleged ‘war crimes’ by Sara and other elderly survivors against Lithuanians in the village of Koniuchy, where in January 1944 members of the village’s armed defence force were killed by Soviet partisans. The trial never happened, but only because it became clear that there was insufficient evidence that Jewish partisans were involved in the killings.
Surprising as this 2004 investigation seems, it is in fact an early example of the myth-building that has become central to the memory politics of the formerly occupied countries of Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. What actually happened at Koniuchy is still under dispute. But a cursory glance at the context that the Lithuanian investigation chose to ignore is revealing: that the village had formed a defence force armed by the German-sponsored Lithuanian Auxiliary Police, that Jewish partisans in Lithuania were engaged in a struggle to survive, and — the most glaring omission of all — the fact that no equivalent investigations were being made into the role of the Lithuanian population in the slaughter of the country’s Jews.
Of all the countries occupied by the Nazis, Lithuania has a particularly shameful history. By the end of the war, 96 percent of its 250,000-strong Jewish population had been murdered, almost all of them on Lithuanian soil. Clearly, the mass murder of Jews would not have happened without the Nazi invasion. But so eager were large parts of the Lithuanian population to kill their Jewish neighbours that in the weeks after the Soviets had fled east, and before the Nazis arrived, volunteers for the fascistic Lithuanian Activist Front launched hundreds of pogroms around the country, torturing and murdering thousands of Jews, often in public places such as town squares.
After the Nazis arrived and initiated the second, planned stage of the Lithuanian Holocaust, Lithuanians were involved in every level of the slaughter: serving in the police and as guards, as members of nationalist paramilitary units and auxiliary forces, and as bystanders and informers. A similar set of events occurred in Ukraine, where local collaboration in the Jewish genocide was widespread throughout society. Deemed the ‘Holocaust by Bullets’, most of the killings there took place in forests and ravines outside of towns and cities, and not by deportation to death camps.
Nazism Rehabilitated
Many reasons have been given for such enthusiastic participation in these killings in countries like Lithuania and Ukraine: pervasive antisemitism, the opportunity to acquire and steal the property and capital of the Jewish population during the power vacuum between the Soviet withdrawal and Nazi invasion, the association of all Jews with Bolshevism, the unwillingness to defy orders and risk unemployment or worse.
An additional motivation, however, was the belief, held by many nationalists, that by supporting and collaborating with the Nazis, the latter would help their countries to fight the Soviets and achieve independence. Since the Nazis’ objectives in the region were both to kill the Jewish and Gypsy Roma populations and to defeat the Red Army, the nationalists took part in both.
It is the fight against the Soviets that is the lynchpin around which the mythological history of these countries has been created — which brings us back to the investigation against Sara Ginaite and her fellow survivors. For countries like Ukraine and Lithuania, only a reconstructed history can serve the purpose of defining their identity in the modern world — a history in which Nazi-aligned nationalists are national heroes and martyrs, while those who fought the Nazis are traitors. In the logic of Lithuania’s reconstructed history, Sara’s real crime was to find herself fighting on the same side as the Soviets.
Extreme cases such as the Koniuchy investigation; the removal of statues of anti-fascists fighters; the renaming of streets and town squares to honour fascist collaborators; and the drastic downplaying of the Nazi Holocaust in the various genocide and terror museums frequented by tourists in Vilnius, Prague, and Budapest — all show how civil society and governments across the region hide away inconvenient truths and recast collaborators and pogromists as heroes or victims, while Soviet Russia is cast in the role of the ultimate enemy. When Nazism is mentioned, such as in the 2008 Prague Declaration and its subsequent launch of Black Ribbon Day (a day commemorating the victims of communism and Nazism together), it is equated with communism as an example of evil totalitarianism.
The highly convenient logic goes that countries such as Lithuania that were indeed occupied by the Soviets before and after the war, and did indeed suffer atrocities under Stalinism, can lay claim to victimhood status from one of the totalitarian systems and thereby, as victims, avoid scrutiny for their role in aiding and abetting the other. Needless to say, to equate the two is historically illiterate on many counts, as well as a deliberate misunderstanding of the nature of fascism and its relation to capitalism.
In Poland, where more Jews were killed by Poles during the war than were Poles by Nazis, the myth-building was taken to the next level in 2018, when the country made it a criminal offence to publicly accuse Poland of participating in — or being responsible for — communist or Nazi crimes. Similar laws have been passed in Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania. The latter can take advantage of the fact that the archetypal Holocaust imagery is of trains rolling through a barren landscape to a camp enacting industrial slaughter, which bears little resemblance to how it played out in the towns and villages of Lithuania.
New Pillars of European Civility
Lingering antisemitism is naturally one of the motives behind the cultural misremembering at play in the region. But the insecure status of relatively new independent nation states like Lithuania and Ukraine is also key. These post-Soviet states differ greatly from, say, Britain, which has had centuries to acclimatise itself to its own history of genocide. In contrast, the countries that gained independence in the late 1980s and early 1990s have had to play catch-up.
No country wants to see itself, or be seen by others, as having committed atrocities, and the beckoning membership to EU and NATO has compelled the post-communist states to define themselves as new pillars of European civility. Nothing fitted that role better than to be seen first and foremost as the victims of the West’s common enemy, the Soviet Union. Conveniently, the West is still relatively united in its opposition to both communism and Putin’s Russia — a commonplace which can in turn be summoned when the Soviet Union is invoked.
At the same time, so-called Auschwitz Syndrome — whereby portrayals of the Holocaust have focused on the death camps and the industrial nature of the slaughter within them — has also been an influential tendency, spreading from academia to the general public, and leading to the neglect of other methods of mass killing, especially those used in Ukraine and the Baltics. According to the historians Wendy Lower and Ray Brandon, ‘Auschwitz became the central symbol of modernity derailed, the nadir of Western civilization.’ The myth-builders of the countries of Eastern Europe are liable to raise no objections to this tendency, as their own problematic histories are overlooked in the process, and the Holocaust is both simplified and removed from its localised contexts.
In the current global context, these countries need to define themselves and their national goals — and replacing inconvenient histories with a simpler nationalist narrative is an easy way to do this. This includes airbrushing not only the bad but also the good. Ukraine, for example, was before and during Soviet rule a multi-ethnic country, with Jews, Russians, Gypsies, Greeks, Tatars, and many more ethnicities living alongside Ukrainians.
However, to remember the histories of certain ethnicities in Ukraine obstructs the ability of political actors to create an ethno- nationalist identity — the need to do so having increased greatly following the 2022 Russian invasion. The multicultural history of Ukraine has therefore been deliberately forgotten. While Nazi collaborators are being valorised as heroic fighters for independence and their Jewish victims sidelined, centuries-long Russian cultural influence in Ukraine has been deemed ‘colonial’, and monuments to Russian writers have been taken down.
Forgetting Kaunas
One consequence of this identity-building is the normalisation and growing strength of the far right in Ukraine in response to Putin’s unjustified invasion — evident in the incorporation of the neo-Nazi Azov Brigade into the Ukrainian army and the valorisation it receives from the supporters of Ukraine in the West. A more absurd example was the apology the then Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was forced to make after he praised a Ukrainian former SS member as a ‘hero’ in the Canadian parliament. The Ukrainian in question, Yaroslav Hunka, was a volunteer for 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division, but was deemed a freedom fighter for having battled the Russians — just like the Ukrainians of today, so the logic goes.
Trudeau exposed what happens when we allow the status of victimhood to be used as a political playing card divested of history and context. In a sort of nightmarish mirror-image of the European narrative, no political actor has played this game more effectively than the state of Israel and its backers. The genocidal pursuits of this settler-colonial state are endlessly justified on the world stage by evoking the memory of the Holocaust to present Israel as the victim. Meanwhile, back in Europe, politicians and journalists come back from ‘Never Again’ ceremonies to parrot Israel’s cynical uses and abuses of history to justify the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
Ironically, the way the new Israeli state treated those European Jews who had, against the odds, survived the Nazi Holocaust, and in whose name it is currently committing genocide, was far from warm. For the crime of not being sufficiently Zionist to move to Palestine before the war, survivors were dismissed as ‘human debris’ by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion in the late 1940s and reluctantly received into the country. The Yiddish language was marginalised, political expression suppressed, and compensation payments meant for survivors were withheld by the government. While Netanyahu cosies up to far-right parties in Europe to garner support for his genocide, many of the remaining Holocaust survivors are living in poverty in Israel.
Eighty years on from Sara Ginaite’s escape from the Kaunas Ghetto, as Western-made missiles are turned on sleeping children in the ruins of Gaza, we can see the horrific consequences of allowing victimhood to be exploited. For the crime of wanting to live, the Palestinians are currently being slaughtered in their tens of thousands. In the narrative that serves as a flimsy cover for the misdeeds of Israel, there is a place for one victim only, and the humanity of the Palestinians is denied. The failure to condemn this is an insult to the memory of the victims of all holocausts throughout history — not forgetting, perhaps above all, those of the Second World War.