Special Cluster: Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s

Źródło: East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

Special Section: Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine: Historical Research, Public Debates, and Methodological Disputes. Foreword

Antony Polonsky

East European Politics and Societies, vol. 34, 1: pp. 124-128. , First Published September 17, 2019.

Abstract

This article is part of the special cluster titled Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s, guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe.

This special section examines how debates on local participation in the mass murder of the Jews during the Second World War have evolved in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. The comparative approach adopted in this collection has highlighted the common problems in these four countries in coming to terms with the “dark past”—those aspects of the national past that provoke shame, guilt, and regret. Like the contributors to this collection I believe it is debate among historians that offers the best chance to move forward and that the intervention of politicians has had a clearly deleterious effect. This debate needs to be conducted in an open and collegial manner although we may differ strongly in our conclusions. We should always remember that the past cannot be altered. We can only accept the tragic and shocking events that have occurred and try to learn from them. This is a process that could begin in northeastern Europe only after the collapse of the communist system—a coming to terms with the many neglected and taboo aspects of the past in all four countries. The first stage of approaching such issues has usually been from a moral point of view—a settlement of long-overdue accounts, often accompanied by apologies for past behaviour. It seemed that we were reaching a second stage, where apologetics would increasingly be replaced by careful and detailed research based on archives and reliable first-hand testimony.

Introduction: Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine: Historical Research, Public Debates, and Methodological Disputes

Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

East European Politics and Societies, vol. 34, 1: pp. 129-142. , First Published September 17, 2019.

Abstract

This article is part of the special cluster titled Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s, guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe.

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.

In the Eyes of the Beholder: The Complexion of the Shoah in the Lublin District

David Silberklang

East European Politics and Societies, vol. 34, 1: pp. 143-157. , First Published September 16, 2019.

Abstract

This article is part of the special cluster titled Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s, guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe.

The article addresses sources for understanding the complexion of the Shoah in Poland, through a focus on the Lublin District and Jewish forced labor there. From the opening story of the wedding of Shamai Grajer and Mina Fiszman in Lublin on April 17, 1942, the article extrapolates several central themes: two constants in Nazi policies and Jewish experience—forced population movements and forced labor, the behavior of the various actors involved in the story, and sources. The main individuals involved in the opening story highlight these subjects. Fiszman was a refugee deported in February 1940 from Stettin. Grajer, Fiszman, and Rabbi Zvi Elimelech Talmud, who performed the wedding, had all been selected as forced laborers when the majority of the Jewish community was murdered during the previous month, and they hoped that their labor would help them survive. The behavior of the main German actors in the story, Harry Sturm and Hermann Worthoff, was not uniformly evil, and the behavior of the Jewish actors was not uniformly “heroic.” The Bełżec forced labor complex in 1940 highlights the brutality and murderousness of much of the early forced labor in Poland. Yet, during the deportations to death in 1942 the Jews needed to “unlearn” the lessons of avoiding such labor if they were now to have a hope of surviving. Among the varied sources for this and the subsequent subjects addressed in the article, the Jewish sources provide a sense of what actually happened in these camps and situations.

Rehearsal for Volhynia: Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 and Hauptmann Roman Shukhevych in Occupied Belorussia, 1942

Per Anders Rudling

East European Politics and Societies, vol. 34, 1: pp. 158-193. , First Published September 16, 2019.

Abstract

This article is part of the special cluster titled Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s, guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe.

In 2007, Roman Shukhevych (1907–1950), the commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), was designated an official Ukrainian state hero. He has since become the object of an elaborate cult of personality. Lauded for his resistance to the Soviet authorities in 1944–1950, Shukhevych is highly controversial in neighbouring Poland for the ethnic cleansing that the UPA carried out in 1943–1944, as he commanded that organization. Over a few months, the UPA killed around ninety thousand Poles, expelling hundreds of thousands of others. The brutal efficiency of this campaign has to be seen in the context of the larger war, not least Shukhevych’s training by Nazi Germany, in particular the military experience he obtained as a captain in the Ukrainian formation Nachtigall, and as a commanding officer in Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201, which served in occupied Belorussia. This article is an attempt at reconstruct Shukhevych’s whereabouts in 1942, in order to establish the context and praxis under which Shukhevych operated until deserting the auxiliary police in January 1943.

The Polish Underground Home Army (AK) and the Jews: What Postwar Jewish Testimonies and Wartime Documents Reveal

Joshua D. Zimmerman

East European Politics and Societies, vol. 34, 1: pp. 194-220. , First Published September 16, 2019.

Abstract

This article is part of the special cluster titled Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s, guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe.

The attitude of the Polish Home Army (AK) to Nazi exterminationist policies is among the most controversial topics of wartime Polish–Jewish relations. Scholarly studies appearing since the 1980s have reconstructed the Home Army’s complex local and national organizations, its many sub-divisions and departments, its policies and objectives, as well as its sacrifice in the Warsaw Uprising of August–September 1944. In this article, I will analyze Holocaust survivor testimonies as a source for evaluating the attitude and behavior of the Home Army towards the Jews during the Second World War. Archival repositories used will include testimonies preserved at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem, the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, and the Shoah Foundation Visual Archive at the University of Southern California. I will demonstrate that the widely held view in collective Jewish memory and Jewish historiography that the Home Army was hostile is largely confirmed by these sources. At the same time, however, the same sources reveal that a substantial minority of the testimonies—approximately 30 percent—tells stories of a Home Army that rescued and protected Jews. The second part of this article compares testimonies to the documentary record, asking whether or not the behavior of the Home Army as a whole reflected the experience of Jews as reflected in postwar testimonies. The article will give more concrete form to the debate over the Polish underground’s attitude and behavior towards the Jews during the Second World War.

Survivor Testimonies and the Coming to Terms with the Holocaust in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia: The Case of the Ukrainian Nationalists

Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

East European Politics and Societies, vol. 34, 1: pp. 221-240. , First Published September 16, 2019.

Abstract

The question, if and to what extent the Ukrainian nationalists murdered Jews in Volhynia and eastern Galicia during the Holocaust, has haunted Jewish and Ukrainian communities in various countries of the Western world during the entire Cold War. It also puzzled German historians of Eastern Europe and Nazi Germany. Historians, although in theory responsible for investigating and clarifying such difficult aspects of the past, have for various reasons not investigated them or they investigated only other aspects of the Holocaust in Ukraine. This article briefly explains how factions of the Ukrainian diaspora invented a narrative that portrayed Ukrainian nationalists as anti-German and anti-Soviet freedom fighters who did not kill or harm any Jews during the German occupation of Ukraine. In the next step, it shows how testimonies and other sorts of documents left by survivors from Volhynia and eastern Galicia can help historians understand the role that ordinary Ukrainians and the OUN and UPA played in the Shoah in western Ukraine. Finally, it asks why it took Ukrainian, German, Polish, Russian, and other historians so many years to investigate and comprehend the anti-Jewish violence of the Ukrainian nationalists, if relevant documents were collected and made accessible as early as in the middle 1940s.

Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukraine and Belarus: Public Debates and Historiography

Olga Baranova

East European Politics and Societies, vol. 34, 1: pp. 241-260. , First Published March 21, 2019.

Abstract

This article belongs to a forthcoming special section, ‘Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s’ guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe.

This article investigates how the Holocaust was recollected, presented, and interpreted in Ukraine and Belarus during the Soviet era. It further examines the changes that have taken place in the representation of the Holocaust in Ukraine and Belarus in the post-communist period. First, the article aims to explain the ideological reasons why the Jewish origin of many Nazi victims was largely played down or ignored in the Soviet historiography. Second, it investigates the new political dynamics in independent post-communist Ukraine and Belarus that have influenced public discourse and historiographical reflections on various issues of the Second World War, including the persecution of the Jews. As well as historiography, the article investigates the developments that have taken place in contemporary Ukraine and Belarus regarding commemorative practices, monuments, museum exhibitions, and education initiatives to honor the victims of the Holocaust and to promote knowledge about this event.