Articles

ABSTRACT

The article analyses various literary representations of one of the common features of 20th-century dictatorships and totalitarian political regimes: the ‘enforced disappearance’. The study focuses on several Central European novels and short stories (German, Czech, Slovak and Polish) published after 1989. The methodological framework adopted here is that of cultural memory and trauma studies that have lately received systematic scholarly interest in Central Europe (Kratochvil 2015; Lysak 2015). The study draws on the works of Paul Ricoeur (French), Michel de Certeau (French), Jacques Derrida (French), Berber Bevernage (Belgian), Alexander Etkind (Russian) and Stef Craps (Belgian), especially on the way they define and interpret trauma and the ‘work of mourning’. The mechanisms of the ‘work of mourning’ function also on a collective level and are one of the ways of dealing with a traumatic past.

Literature has played an important role in the debates on the legacy of communist dictatorships in post-communist Central Europe since 1989, and historical topics have flourished in Central European literatures. We propose to interpret them as specific ways of coming to terms with the legacy of the traumatic past of the 20th century in Central Europe, especially the long-term collective trauma caused by Nazi and communist dictatorships.

We want to address the concept of ‘lieux de mémoire’ [places of memory], its limits and dangers as it is discussed (among others) by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) in his major contribution to this theoretical debate La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli [Memory, History, Forgetting] (Ricoeur 2000; Englishtrans. 2004). Furthermore, we will pay attention to the recurring patterns that keep appearing in contemporary Central European literatures. Indeed, in our previous research, we discovered recurrent patterns and structures that allow us to read many of these texts as commemorative rituals and the ‘work of mourning’ (we draw on the Freudian terminology here) for traumatic elements of the 20th century in Central Europe. The work of Paul Ricoeur inspires us to transpose the Freudian model of trauma and mourning (used in the psychoanalysis of an individual) onto the processes put in motion in national and other communities. As our topic focuses on the connection between literary representations of history and psychoanalysis, we should mention the crucial research of the French thinker Michel de Certeau (1925–86). He was directly addressing the link between literature, historiography and psychoanalysis in several of his studies, especially L’Écriture de l’Histoire [The Writing of History] (1975) and Histoire et psychanalyse [History and Psychoananlysis] (1987). We will also call on the works of the philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and his concept of the ‘spectral’, ‘haunting’ past and the works of scholars that Derrida’s work inspired in their reflections on historical trauma and literature: those of Berber Bevernage, Stef Craps and Alexander Etkind.

We will focus on concrete examples of such texts, dealing with the traumatic aspects of 20th-century Central Europe, especially with the topic of enforced disappearance. More specifically on novels dealing with the memory of the German presence in Central Europe and post-Second World War expulsions. This topic keeps coming back as an almost obsessive theme in German, Polish and especially Czech post-1989 literature. A link to psychological trauma seems evident with this reoccurring theme.

The authors we will pay special attention to in our interpretations will be W. G. Sebald, Paweł Huelle, Pavel Vilikovský, Jiří Kratochvil, Kateřina Tučková, Radka Denemarková and Jakuba Katalpa. All these authors and their works have received constant attention from literary theoreticians and the public. They have been awarded important literary prizes and have been taking part in the public debate on historical and social issues in their respective countries. Some of the books have been adapted for theatre or cinema. Each novel offers a critical evaluation of an individual’s encounter with dictatorship, of the massive expulsions of populations after the Second World War (especially that of the Germans from Central Europe) or of the Holocaust, topical issues and challenging topics linked to thecollective memory of today’s European society¹ and even more so in postcommunist countries.

Enforced disappearance

‘Enforced disappearance’ has become an official term in international law. The United Nations (UN) established a committee on enforced disappearances that issued an official text entitled ‘International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance’, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 2006 and enforced from December 2010.² Enforced disappearance is considered a crime and, in certain circumstances, defined in international law as a crime against humanity. The convention stipulates, among other things, ‘the right of any victim to know the truth about the circumstances of an enforced disappearance and the fate of the disappeared person, and the right to freedom to seek, receive and impart information to this end’.³ It is this need and right to ‘know the truth’ and ‘seek, receive and impart information’ about the disappeared that is at the core of the literary works considered in the present article. As Berber Bevernage explains, the notion of the right to seek the truth was pioneered in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights with cases on enforced disappearance. Furthermore, it was included in two reports by UN special rapporteurs Louis Joinet and Diane Orentlicher.⁴ The right to know, Joinet explains:

"is not simply the right of any individual victim or closely related persons to know what happened, a right to the truth. The right to know is also a collective right, drawing upon history to prevent violations from recurring in the future. Its corollary is a ‘duty to remember’, which the State must assume, in order to guard against the perversions of history that go under the names of revisionism or negationism; the knowledge of the oppression it has lived through is part of a people’s national heritage and as such must be preserved" (Bevernage 2018).⁵

The enforced disappearance causes trauma to the survivors; trauma that is both personal and collective. As stated by editors of a recent collective monograph on trauma studies, the theory and concept of trauma is still evolving (Bond, Craps, Vermeulen, 2017). Indeed, trauma officially gained the status of a disease in the Western world in 1980, when it was rape, military combat, earthquake, aeroplane crash or torture. Later, various long-termstress factors were added, such as witnessing or learning of one’s family or friends being exposed to serious danger (Bond, Craps and Vermeulen, 2017).

There are several aspects that justify the interpretation of the literary texts within the methodological framework of trauma studies. The plots of the texts are constructed around an absence that implicitly points to a traumatic disappearance. The disappearance further infers a missing, disappeared body (with clear hints of its previous maltreatment or torture). The disappearance might concern an individual or a whole group. The topic of enforced disappearance can even serve as metonymy of a dictatorship or a totalitarian regime. The disappeared groups represented in the texts of our corpus might be Jews (systematically exterminated during the Second World War as one of the consequences of totalitarian fascist ideology), the bourgeois middle classes (as an integral part of the Soviet application of the Marxist theory of the class struggle in the Soviet Union and in countries of the Eastern Bloc), or the Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. All these motifs and topics can be found in the studied texts. Thanks to the crucial work of Paul Ricoeur L’Histoire, la mémoire, l’oubli (Ricoeur 2000), we can apply the Freudian model of trauma and mourning on the mourning mechanisms of groups and communities. Indeed, the texts are constructed as mourning rituals, revealing the mourning processes described by Freud and Ricoeur. Furthermore, the contributions of Berber Bevernage (Bevernage 2012), Alexander Etkind (Etkind 2013) and Stef Craps (Craps 2013) help us to see the specificities of trauma as they are expressed in the literary texts of contemporary Central European authors.

Literary texts as ‘places of memory’?

We would like to reflect on the problematic aspects, dangers and limits of the concept of ‘places of memory’ (lieux de mémoire) introduced in the 1980s by the French historian Pierre Nora. The concept is indeed closely related to our topic. Nora directed a large research project published in three volumes between 1984 and 1992 under the same title, Lieux de mémoire [Places of Memory]. His ambition was nothing less than describing the basic elements that, in his opinion, constitute French national identity.

The present paper is inspired, among others, by the methodology and theoretical concepts of Paul Ricoeur as he developed it in his book La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli [Memory, History, Forgetting] (Ricoeur 2000; English translation 2004)]. Our starting point is Ricoeur’s commentary on the work of Pierre Nora andon the concept of ‘places of memory’. Ricoeur pinpoints the major dangers and limits of Nora’s concept and shows that Nora himself changes his way of perceiving the ‘places of memory’ and that, during the preparation of the successive volumes, Nora already realizes the potential abuse of his concept:

"Nora himself complains of a similar assimilation of the theme of the ‘places of memory’ by ‘commemorative bulimia (that) has all but consumed all efforts to control it’ (Ricoeur 2004, Kindle loc. 609)".⁶

"The destiny of these Lieux de mémoire has been a strange one. The work was intended, by virtue of its conception, method, and even title, to be a counter-commemorative type of history, but commemoration has overtaken it ... What was forged as a tool for maintaining critical distance became the instrument of commemoration par excellence" (Ricoeur 2004, Kindle loc. 1404).⁷

The concept of ‘places of memory’ has been very successful and has been widely used in Central and Eastern European Studies after 1989. It has been applied also in studies dedicated to contemporary literature of this region (see for example Smorag-Goldberg and Tomaszewski 2013). Nevertheless, one needs to keep in mind that the concept of ‘places of memory’ can be used as a tool for commemorative needs for various interest groups that do not aim at historical objectivity. The notion of the problematic aspects of memory was also one of the major motivations for Ricoeur’s work as he himself admits in the introduction:

"Public preoccupation: I continue to be troubled by the unsettling spectacle offered by an excess of memory here, and an excess of forgetting elsewhere, to say nothing of the influence of commemorations and abuses of memory – and of forgetting. The idea of a policy of the just allotment of memory is in this respect one of the avowed civic themes" (Ricoeur 2009, Kindle loc. 51).

In countries that have been undergoing essential geopolitical changes, as is the case for Central European post-communist countries, the question of public memory and commemorations is an important one. Indeed, the commemorative strategies are an integral part of the identity-creating process. The fragile national identity of the new geopolitical units is also projected on the way society deals with its memory. As Ricoeur notes, the fragility of identity opens possibilities for the manipulation of memory (Ricoeur 2000, 579). This is the reason why this study focuses more on the aspects of trauma expressed in literary texts than on the way they deal with memory and commemoration.

Trauma, the work of mourning and the haunting past

In our analysis, we use the parallel that Paul Ricoeur draws between the work of mourning (‘le travail de deuil’) as it is described by Freud and used in psychoanalysis and the work of memory (‘le travail de souvenir’) and of forgetting in the collective memory of communities and societies, especially in connection to traumatic collective memory:

"It is the bipolar constitution of personal and community identity that, ultimately justifies extending the Freudian analysis of mourning to the traumatism of collective identity. We can speak not only in an analogical sense but in terms of a direct analysis of collective traumatisms, of wounds to collective memory. The notion of the lost object finds a direct application in the ‘losses’ that affect the power, territory, and populations that constitute the substance of a state. Mourning behaviours, from the expression of affliction to complete reconciliation with the lost object, are directly illustrated by the great funeral celebrations around which an entire people is assembled. In this way, we can say that such mourning behaviours constitute a privileged example of the intersecting relations between private and public expression. It is in this way that our concept of a sick historical memory finds justification a posteriori in this bipolar structure of mourning behaviours" (Ricoeur 2009, Kindle loc. 1214).⁸

The traumatic collective memory and traumatic ‘losses’ mentioned by Ricoeur correspond to losses put forward in numerous novels by Central European authors after 1989. The burden of history, its taboos and deformations constitute central preoccupations of the literary texts that we analyse. However, the Freudian ‘complete reconciliation with the lost object’ that Ricoeur refers to does not seem to happen in these texts, which maintain the haunting presence of the lost object.⁹ Indeed, the recent contributionsto the classical works of trauma studies (we mean works by Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch or Dominick LaCapra) address the limits of the Freudian model (we mean Western, modernist concept of mourning) according to which a successful work of mourning is when the mourning person totally reconciles themselves with their loss. Historian Berber Bevernage (Bevernage 2012) and literary theoretician Stef Craps (Craps 2013) both draw on Jacques Derrida and his Specters of Marx (1993, English translation 1994) while addressing the limits of the Freudian model of mourning.¹⁰ Indeed, Derrida proposes against Freud’s model of a concept of ‘demi-deuil’ (semi-mourning).¹¹ Both Craps and Bevernage bring evidence from Western and non-Western examples of mourning (be it personal or that of a community) that do not correspond in their practice to the Freudian ideal model of the final and utter ‘dismissal’ of the lost/grieved object. Instead, the traumatized individuals and communities maintain a certain way of contact and spectral presence of the grieved object, person or past. It goes with the observations of Derrida in Specters of Marx who claims that the possibility of a just future (when we talk about traumatic pasts of communities or nations) depends on our readiness ‘to learn to live with ghosts’ and ‘thinking the possibility of the spectre’. Berber Bevernage, inspired by Derrida, uses the term ‘haunting past’ in order to describe the reality of people and communities dealing with historical trauma. Instead of being able to draw a thick line over a traumatic past, the communities are faced with the necessity of coming to terms with a ‘haunting past’, which maintains its presence in the everyday lives of its members.¹² Bevernage’s book pleas for a different approach to history. Inspired by Michel de Certeau and his L’Écriture de l’Histoire [Writing history] and in accord with current tendencies in historiography, Bevernage questions certain concepts of modern historiography. Many theoreticians have dealt with the link between artistic creation, historiography and the work of mourning:

"a close relationship exists between the writing of history and the work of mourning. Dominick LaCapra, for example, analyzes post-holocaust historiography by using the psychoanalytical concepts of ‘working through’ and ‘acting out’, and he has proposed that the German Historikerstreit should be interpreted as a form of collective mourning. Jörn Rüsen argues that in relation to the traumatic character of the experiences of the last century, the writing of history can be conceived as a ‘procedure of mourning’. [...] I agree with LaCapra, Rüsen, and Domanska that a closerelationship exists between mourning and historiography, and I think that these authors are right when they argue that a lot can be learned about the writing of history by analyzing it from the perspective of the practice of mourning or the discourse on death" (Bevernage 2012, 147, Kindle loc. 3595).

It is in this sense that we adhere to Bevernage’s comment:

"one can analytically distinguish between at least two profoundly different concepts of mourning and death that relate to different notions of historicity: namely, a modern (mostly Western) concept of mourning and a non-modern (but not necessarily non-Western) concept of mourning. The most important difference between the relatively young modernist theory of mourning and the much older and much more widespread non-modern concept of mourning, I will argue, can be found in different ways in which they relate the notions of ‘loss’ and ‘absence’" (Bevernage 2012, 148, Kindle loc. 3614).

This seems to be the recurrent pattern of the representation of history in the chosen corpus. The texts are full of ghosts and spectres of the past. The characters are incapable of drawing a thick line over the past that maintains a haunting presence and interferes with the lives of the characters.

The expulsion of Germans: whose trauma is that?

In the case of ‘German memory’, we suggest drawing again on the parallel made by Paul Ricoeur between the process of personal and collective ‘work of mourning’. The events linked directly or indirectly to the expulsion of Germans from Central Europe after 1945 and the loss of German cultural heritage can be viewed from this perspective: the loss that must be worked through during the process of mourning. The obsessive reoccurrence of the topic of German memory in post-1989 Polish (see Huelle, Chwin, Tokarczuk), German (see Reinhard Jirgl or Uwe Johnson) and especially Czech literature (Jiří Kratochvil, Jáchym Topol, Kateřina Tučková, Radka Denemarková and Jakuba Katalpa) seems to prove the importance and extent of this collective trauma. It is important to note that contemporary Central European writers focus almost exclusively on the topic of expulsions and not on numerous other aspects of the long history of the Germans’ presence in the culture, politics and economics of Central Europe. Interestingly enough, this omission is mirrored in the works of Czech historians. Those who focus their research on Czech-German relationships, work mostly on the post- Second World War period and the topics related to the expulsions. It is, of course, connected to the fact that Central and Eastern European historiography has undergone important changes since 1989 primarily thanks to the opening of numerous important archives that were inaccessible before 1989. It is nevertheless interesting to note that the highly relevant and significant period of Czech-German tension and armed clashes between 1918 and 1923 when many German-speaking inhabitants of the Sudeten region contested (sometimes armed) their inclusion in post-First World War Czechoslovakia.

It is surprising to discover that the Germans represented in Czech contemporary novels are mostly depicted as positive characters or as (innocent) victims described in a way that inspires compassion. This approach, whereby the honouring of a certain memory causes the amnesia of other memories, leads inevitably to certain distortions. As Václav Maidl states in his study, if we look at the literary representations of German-speaking characters and the German environment over the last 200 years, their image in Czech literature is mostly negative (Maidl 1998). For Kateřina Tučková especially, her novel The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch has a performative function. It is her ‘duty of memory’ and ‘duty of commemoration’ that she claims to honour in the prologue because she has the impression that the political representatives do not do fulfill these duties sufficiently well. We can thus legitimately ask the question whether both historians and the writers do not take part in a process of consciously creating a new Czech post-1989 ‘European’ identity, forming what Berber Bevernage designates as ‘reconciliation historiography’ or ‘shared history’:

"Bridging can happen negatively through levelling attempts to expose myths of conflicting parties or it can happen through the construction of so-called positive histories which stress common traditions, shared values and cultural exchanges in the past. Bridging reconciliation historiographies are also often referred to as shared histories. Yet, the term ‘shared history’ is often used more broadly among scholars and practitioners focusing on reconciliation and can refer to at least three potential aspects of reconciliation historiographies: it can refer to shared methodological procedures or shared authorship, to a focus on shared events, values or actions in the past, orto the construction of a single ‘common’ narrative which claims evenhandedly to represent the different perspectives of conflicting parties" (Bevernage 2018).

These questions, however, need more space and thought than is possible within the scope of this study. But we can certainly argue that texts of contemporary Central European writers reveal much more of the circumstances of the time of the writing of the novels than about the actual historical subjects they try to present and assess.

If we apply Ricoeur’s adaptation of Freud’s psychoanalysis to the collective wounded memory, Ricoeur justifies this methodological transfer (as we have already stated) by the fact that Freud himself alluded to ‘situations that go far beyond the psychoanalytic scene, in terms of both the work of remembering and the work of mourning’ (Ricoeur 2004, Kindle loc. 1203). Furthermore, ‘all of the situations referred to in the psychoanalytical treatment have to do with the other, not only the other of the “familial novel”, but by the psychosocial other and the other, as it were, of the historical situation’ (Ricoeur 2004, Kindle loc. 1203).

The link between personal work of mourning and collective sick memory is alluded to in the very title of one of the analysed novels – Jakuba Katalpa’s novel The Germans: Geography of Loss (2012). The process of personal mourning for the loss of a mother of one of the central characters (Klara, the mother, left for Germany after the Second World War and left her baby behind in Czechoslovakia) stands here for the collective mourning for the expulsed German minority (or maybe more for the act of expulsion?). Katalpa’s novel can thus be seen as a literary transposition of a commemorative mourning ritual. Klara, the main character, of Katalpa’s novel, comes closest to the idea of a ‘pure’ German among all the Czech contemporary novels that deal with the topic of expulsions. She is born in Germany to a wealthy family and hardly questions Germany’s political orientation under Hitler. She is a teacher and refuses to intervene for one of her Jewish students when she asks for help. After a series of personal tragedies (the death of her fiancé among others), she decides to accept a placement as a teacher in the Sudeten region. She works with German-speaking children but is seen as a stranger by the local Sudeten Germans. She becomes pregnant and is welcomed at the end of the war by the family of one of her Czech friends in Prague. She gives birth to a boy and finally decides, under circumstancesthat are never totally explained in the novel, to leave the baby behind when she has to depart form Czechoslovakia as a German. The boy, Kurt, is then adopted by the family that welcomed Klara and the fact of his adoption is revealed to him by his foster mother when he becomes an adult and father of three children himself. The boy is the father of the narrator of the novel. After her father’s death, she decides to find out the truth about her real grandmother and she meets Klara’s two daughters in Germany. She even meets Klara, an old woman in an old people’s home. Klara has Alzheimer’s disease and cannot help the narrator with her quest for the ‘truth’.

Jiří Kratochvil draws a link between personal psychological trauma and a collective one in most of his novels. The metaphor of schizophrenia that structures his first novel Medvědí román (Bear’s Novel, 1985, 1990) covers both a mental breakdown of one of the central characters and a schizophrenic psychological split of people living under communist dictatorship. His novel Slib (The Pledge, 2009), which features as one of its themes the expulsion of Germans from Brno, has a subtitle: The Requiem for the 1950s. The topic of expulsions in Kratochvil’s novels is always closely connected to the questioning of the legacy of communism.

One of the dangers of obsessive insistence on the topic of expulsions as the central moment of German memory in Central Europe is the distortion of history by the feeling of the ‘duty to remember’ or ‘duty of commemoration (memory)’ as we have already stated. Ricoeur talks about the ‘devoir de mémoire’ (duty of memory) and going back to Nora’s ‘lieux de mémoire’, he evokes the potential ‘abuse of commemoration’ (Ricoeur 2000, 528).

We therefore argue that the representation of the expulsion of Germans always closely reflects the communist dictatorship in Central Europe.¹³ Indeed, in all analysed texts, the authors choose to present history from (or even before) the Second World War until very recent times (often up until now). In relation to the expulsion of Germans and dealing with Germans, 1945 is often interpreted like a first step in the establishment of communist rule in Central Europe (this is most strongly present in Kratochvil’s writings). The trauma of the communist past is being projected onto the topic of the expulsions of Germans. Paradoxically, the texts focus more on the Czech collective historical trauma than on the suffering of the Germans. The vision of history thus seems to fall into a narrow frame of a national trauma that it finds difficult to overcome. We conclude this part by statingthat even in the case of literary representations of German memory and especially of the expulsions, the process of mourning at work in the novels is not so much about the loss of the German community but about the long-term legacy of communism in Central Europe.

The trauma of the enforced disappearance and the figure of absence

Common to the analysed works is the use of a subjective and individual perspective to represent the enforced disappearance. In Central Europe, under both Nazi and communist regimes people were made to ‘disappear’, often leaving their families without news as to their fate. The enforced disappearance is often represented by an absence. There is an absent body, an absent person, whose loss is being mourned. Austerlitz’s trauma in Sebald’s novel (Sebald 2001) of the same name stems from the disappearance and the absence of his parents and from the lack of any precise information concerning their death. Austerlitz is a Jewish child born in Prague and sent to safety by his parents thanks to one of the trains heading from Prague to England during the Second World War. In the course of his investigation in the 1990s, he finds out that his Czech-Jewish mother was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and very probably died in a killing facility in Poland. This was most likely the fate of his father too, who went to France and was sent from Paris to one of the concentration camps in the south of France where he disappears without trace. Nevertheless, Austerlitz learns nothing certain about their fate nor can he find the place of their burial. The whole book thus seems to be constructed around this traumatic loss and absence.

In Huelle’s novella Mercedes Benz (2001), the two dictatorships (fascist and communist) and their treatment of people are juxtaposed, making the parallels between the use of enforced disappearance by both dictatorships deliberate and evident. The whole family of the central character, the Jewish photographer Chaskiel Bronstein, meets a ‘terrible end’, ‘in a mass death-pit near Buczyna’ (Huelle 2001, 101). The Jewish brothers Baczewski, whose ‘vodka and liqueur factory’ is ‘bombed by the Luftwaffe’ (Huelle 2001, 95), die from ‘no less cruel death’, ‘in the Donbas mineshafts’ (Huelle 2001, 101) in 1940 after having been deported by the Soviets. Their deaths are thus emblematic of the end of Jewish civilization in Eastern Europe during the Second World War and the way Jews have been targeted both by the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships (topics difficult to address in Polish fiction or historiography before 1989). As we will see, it is their disappearance that is interpreted as a major force behind the creation of Mercedes Benz.¹⁴

In Pavel Vilikovský’s novel The Autobiography of Evil (2009) the major character of the first part of the text, Jan Karsten, after being kidnapped by the Czechoslovak secret police during his tentative escape to Austria, decides to commit suicide when he realizes that he has adopted the same behaviour as his tormentors. He kidnaps a girl whom he believes to be the daughter of one of the agents (which she is not) and holds her prisoner. Finally, he decides to let her go. Nevertheless, his decision to stick to his humanity leads to his suicide as he does not see any other outcome of the situation he finds himself in. His body is disposed of and his family is never informed about his final fate. The disappearance and absence of his father shapes the life of his son, the central character in the second part of the novel. At the end of Vilikovský’s novel, Igor talks about the book he plans to write. Writing about the mysterious disappearance of an unknown woman dating back to the 1970s might be seen as compensating for the impossibility of discovering the truth about the disappearance of his own father. It is at the same time an act of mourning over the absent body and the missing story of his disappeared father.

In Kratochvil’s novel The Pledge (2009), the beloved sister of architect Modráček dies after being interrogated by the Czechoslovak secret police in the early 1950s. Having not been allowed to see the body of his dead sister, he does not believe that she committed suicide as the police claim. He vows to avenge his sister’s death and to punish the policeman, Láska, whom he believes to be responsible for his sister’s death. Modráček captures Láska and holds him prisoner in his underground prison alongside more and more people who could endanger his secret and destroy his plan for vengeance. At the end of the book, Láska’s daughter appears and talks about the mysterious and never-explained disappearance of her father that haunted her and her mother their whole lives. The book is thus conceived by the author as a requiem for the victims of the Stalinist era of 1950s Czechoslovakia, represented in Kratochvil’s text by his mother (herself a victim of the communist persecution to whom the book is dedicated and who appears as a minor character in the novel), Modráček’s sister, and the policeman Láska, unjustly imprisoned and punished.

The motif of traumatic disappearance also appears in the novels that deal with German memory. In Kratochvil’s novel Uprostřed nocí zpěv [In the midst of the night a song] (1989), the Germans are represented intriguingly by a couple of lesbian women who are ostracized by everyone – their Czechneighbours as well as the other Germans; they finally die during the expulsion process and their absence haunts the memory of one of the main characters of the novel, Petr, for the rest of his life.

In her novel The Expulsion of Gerta Snirch (2010), Kateřina Tučková tells the life story of Gerta Snirch, a girl from Brno, born to a mixed Czech- German family.¹⁵ After the war, she is included in the ‘death march’ of Brno Germans destined for expulsion. Gerta finally avoids the expulsion and comes back to her hometown. Her life seems to be returning to normal as she attempts to rebuild her life with her teenage love who had become a committed communist in the meantime. Nevertheless, her life is finally shattered when her lover disappears at the moment of the show-trial with the communist leader Rudolf Stránský and his collaborators in 1952. It is this traumatic disappearance that seems to shape Gerta’s life most profoundly. Each text is characterized by the absence of bodies; the people simply disappear, making the process of mourning, if not impossible, at least extremely difficult.

‘State-sponsored violence’ and the tortured bodies

The trauma of those left behind is magnified by unverifiable images of torture. Enforced disappearance can hardly be dissociated from political violence and torture. It is the ‘state-imposed violence’ that Berber Bevernage uses as part of the title of his book. Michel de Certeau wrote a decidedly relevant text on the subject ‘Corps torturés, paroles capturés’ [Tortured bodies, captured speech] included in the volume Histoire et psychoanalyse (1987). He claims that violence is systemic in the imposition of social order, especially in dictatorships: ‘Totalitarian violence needs credibility and, scientifically, it strives to produce the ersatz with living bodies’ (Certeau 1986).¹⁶

The frequent use of metonymy in the studied texts might be connected to the theme of torture, as Alexander Etkind remarked in his book Warped Mourning when he spoke about prevailing features of post-1989 Russian literature: ‘In this process, the metonymical poetics of magical historicism emulate the “piecemeal” logic of torture, which also manipulates parts of the body with the aim of changing the whole truth, integrity, and history’ (Etkind 2013, Kindle loc. 4329).

This might be also the reason why the main characters in novels dealing with the memory of expulsion of the Germans are subjected to horrible violence. Female Germans are often subjected to rape, physical torture and abuse. As if this violence suffered by individual examples of Germans was to stand in for the suffering and violence inflicted on the expelled German community.

The haunting past and rituals of mourning

How is the absence of the disappeared personified in the texts? Very often old photographs are used as a link to the missing era, person or community. Sebald and Huelle even incorporate black-and-white photos directly into their books, Huelle using authentic photographs from his family’s archive. When in 1992 Austerlitz finds his former nanny in Prague, she shows him two photographs from before 1939 (the time of Austerlitz’s early childhood), possibly depicting Austerlitz’s parents. While looking at the photos, Austerlitz affirms that it seems as if the pictures had their own memory and were remembering the dead and those who survived (Sebald 2001, 266). When Austerlitz tries to find some traces of his parents in the archives in Prague, he also watches one of the films made in Teresienstadt. Austerlitz describes the music that accompanies the film as a funeral march coming from the ‘subterranean world, through the most nightmarish depths’ (Sebald 2001, 356). This description is a direct reference to the underworld of the dead and the phantoms of classical antiquity. In the archives, Austerlitz also finds a photo of a woman who might be his mother but he says that she looks rather like a phantom.¹⁷ Sebald’s writing illustrates perfectly Derrida’s semimourning and Derrida-inspired Bevernage’s term ‘haunting past’.

Indeed, photography has a close link to memory, trauma, death and forgetting¹⁸ – it also shows the limits and failings of photography to bring back the disappeared. Especially in Sebald’s work, the figures in the photos look rather like ghosts (Lachmann talks about phantasma and simulacrum, Derrida about spectres and revenants) and the found pictures problematize rather than facilitate the process of mourning (Sebald 2001, 117).¹⁹ As Carolin Duttlinger puts it:

"it is the latency and the transience of the photographic image, rather than its permanence and stability, which serve as a model for the process of memory, as the image of neither photography nor memory can be grasped or arrested, and are hence both prone to disappearance. Photography is thus figured as a model not for the permanence of memory but for the phenomenon of forgetting" (Duttlinger 2004, 158).

Whereas Sebald stresses in his use of photography the haunting character of the past, Vilikovský and Huelle are more affirmative about the charm of old photographs and their capacity to perpetuate objective memory. Igor, the protagonist of Vilikovský’s novel, contemplates the significance of the photography and what impresses him most is the lasting trace of a human life that photography saves even after the death of the portrayed person (Vilikovský 2009, 147). In Huelle’s Mercedes Benz, when the narrator’s grandfather, Karol, understands that Poland is subject to the double invasion of Hitler’s Germany and of the Soviet Union, he reacts in a surprising way – on his return from the eastern part of Poland invaded by the Russians, he starts to sort out family photographs:

"When he got home at last, instead of reporting for work at the now German factory, he spent days on looking through old photographs, putting his archive in order, writing the missing dates and names of people and places on their cardboard backing. As he unrolled it again, this particular reel of time already felt like something very different from a catalogue of ordinary memories; it felt as if those moments captured in the past by the cold shutter of his Leica now made up a completely new volume that he’d never intended to create, consisting of chance moments, twists and turns of light, bits and pieces of matter and voices that stopped sounding long ago; it was like a suddenly open, secret gate, revealing a previously unknown vista to the astonished passer-by, a wonderful spectacle of phantoms of time and space, swirling like golden pillars of dust in a dark old granary" (Huelle 2005, 96).

Photography functions in Huelle’s work as witness to history. At the same time it also works as means of transmitting cultural memory. The fact that Karol buys his rolls of film and photographic paper from the Jewish photographer Chaskiel Bronstein is particularly important. Karol pays the last visit to Chaskiel just after having sorted out the family photographs. On this occasion, the Germans have already closed down Chaskiel’s shop and Karol learns that Chaskiel’s family was sent to the ghetto. On leaving, Chaskiel gives the last rolls of film to Karol to show him his gratitude. With the means of capturing images (the rolls of film), he also transmits to Karol the duty to remember. Indeed, the memories from the past in Huelle’s book come back to life through photos that accompany the book (alongside theposter of Chaskiel’s shop, making the link between history and literature explicit). Writing is then an act of invocation of phantoms from the past through a kind of funeral ritual (Huelle 2001, 145). The commemorative aspect of Huelle’s text is thus evident.

The patterns of mourning that transpire from these texts have a clearly cathartic function – writing becomes a funeral ritual and at the same time a commemorative act (with all the dangers Ricoeur warns against). The Jewish photographer Chaskiel of Huelle’s story cannot share the story of the life and death of the Polish Jewish community, but with the remaining films delegates the task to Karol who transmits the duty of remembering and the transmission of cultural memory to his grandson (the author of Mercedes Benz). The text of Mercedes Benz is evidence of the fulfilled pledge to the narrator’s grandfather. And we can assume that it is the collection of photos sorted by Karol before his stay in the concentration camp and later transmitted to the narrator that serves as the starting point to the text of Mercedes Benz: ‘when I got home and sat at the table, I spread out the small set of photographs from Chaskiel Bronstein’s company envelope, and the first sentence rolled out all by itself ’ (Huelle 2001, 154). The texts thus have the cathartic and ‘memorial’ function assigned to literature by Renate Lachmann:

"At the beginning of memoria as art stands the effort to transform the work of mourning into a technique. The finding of images heals what has been destroyed: The art of memoria restores shape to the mutilated victims and makes them recognizable by establishing their place in life. Preserving cultural memory involves something like an apparatus for remembering by duplication, by the representation of the absent through the image (phantasma or simulacrum), by the objectification of memory (as power and ability, as a space of consciousness, or as thesaurus), and by the prevention of forgetting through the retrieval of images (the constant recuperation of lost meaning)" (Lachmann 2008, 302).

Writing as therapy to historical and personal trauma is present also in Denemarková’s book. The main character, Gita Lauschmann, dies in the middle of the process of writing her memoirs that would say and explain ‘everything’. Her last thoughts are ‘not yet’: ‘But indeed, I am not ready yet, noteven close to ready, I do not feel like dying yet, I haven’t brushed my teeth yet, I am not properly dressed, I haven’t said everything yet ...’²⁰

Time has run out for Gita and prevented her from finishing her story. In Denemarková’s book the trauma of the past maintains its haunting presence and the wish to know the truth and to arrive at a total reconciliation with the loss is not totally fulfilled (as it is implied in models of trauma and mourning commented by Bevernage and Craps).

The narrator of Katalpa’s The Germans chooses to overcome the trauma and the depression that haunted the life of her father (and the whole family) after the revelations concerning his biological mother. If we go back to Ricoeur’s comparison of the individual work of mourning in psychoanalysis, Kurt, the father, chooses the sadness of acedia (lack of care), whereas his daughter goes through the work of mourning towards life (through the work of sublimation), very much in the sense of the short epilogue that Ricoeur adds at the end of his book:

"Under history, memory and forgetting.
Under memory and forgetting, life.
But writing a life is another story.
Incompletion" (Ricoeur 2004, Kindle loc. 7535).²¹

Indeed, her success at the work of mourning is due to her acceptance of the incompletion of this reconciliation and thus of the work of mourning: ‘I turn the envelope in my fingers. It came from Germany, so it is clear that it constitutes another piece of our investigation, information as useless as the previous one. What should interest us now does not lie in the past.’²²

The narrator receives a letter from Germany that could give her some new information. But instead of opening it and going back to the past and the wounded, sick memory (as Ricoeur calls it), she chooses life and goes out to join her little daughter who is playing in the garden, accepting the incompletion of her quest for the truth.

Conclusion

All the interpreted texts have a common topic: the enforced disappearance (of an individual or that of a whole community). As we have shown, these literary works also share descriptions of historical trauma and themechanisms of the work of mourning. ‘The haunting past’ maintains its disturbing presence and does not allow the Freudian-ideal final reconciliation with the lost object or past. The successful work of mourning seems to depend rather on the capacity to accept its incompletion and to learn to live with the spectres of the past (as suggested by De Certeau, Ricoeur, Derrida, Bevernage, Craps and Etkind).

As we have disclosed, the texts only partly become ‘lieux de mémoire’, places of remembrance of the dictatorships of Central Europe and its victims. Indeed, the authors put topics that have been taboo for decades into the public realm through artistic representation. These texts are rather literary transpositions and representations of historical traumas and their possible mourning mechanisms. Indeed, we have shown the tricky limits of Pierre Nora’s concept of ‘lieux de mémoire’ as it is discussed by Paul Ricoeur. Indeed, the reserve expressed by Nora himself and shared by Ricoeur of memory being consumed and dissolved in commemoration seems to be justified in relation to these interpreted texts. By its nature, literature can be used as a tool for subjective depictions of history and contemporary writers are taking part in debates on highly sensitive political and social issues (such as the Holocaust and massive expulsions). It seems that (often unintentionally) the writers might put themselves in the service of various ‘memory activists’. In extreme cases, far from giving ‘objective’ descriptions of national history, they are not only not participating in the noble cause of the struggle against politically imposed amnesia of the communist past but might be taking part in promoting other, new political causes. The mourning in these texts could often bring back memories and reveal a point of view of a specific social group that particularly suffered under communist rule in Central Europe – for example, that of the bourgeois elites of the interwar period (the texts of Huelle and Kratochvil are the best representations of this perspective). This topic is certainly worth further analysis and examination.

The analysed literary texts show clearly common ways of expressing collective mourning. They reveal a more general pattern of dealing with the collective past, especially a traumatic one. However, this mourning is far from objective and expresses clear subjective bias. It is even more evident in the literary texts dealing with the memory of the German past. Indeed, even if the texts might be considered to a certain extent as ‘places of memory’ (as problematic as this concept might be), they are not so much places of memory as expressions of personal and historical traumas of the20th century in Central Europe. As writers have focused almost exclusively on the issue of post-Second World War expulsions from the long-standing history of the German presence in Central Europe, we feel entitled to ask whether we are not dealing here with the mourning process for the cleansed national memory? The novels dedicated to the memory of the German past would thus be less about the mourning of the loss of the cultural legacy of the lost German community and more about a way of coming to terms with the legacy of dictatorships of the 20th century in Central Europe, especially that of communism.

PETRA JAMES

Petra James obtained her PhD in Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies from Sorbonne University in Paris in 2009. Since 2011 she has been chair of Czech Literature and Language and director of Centre d’Etudes Tcheques [Centre of Czech Studies] at Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium [Free University of Brussels]. Her book Bohumil Hrabal: ‘Composer un monde blessant a coups de ciseaux et de gommes arabiques’ [Bohumil Hrabal: ‘Composing a wounding world with scissors and glue’] was published by Les Classiques Garnier in Paris in 2012. Her main research areas are the comparative history of the avant-garde and cultural memory topics in Central European fiction. The special issue of the Belgian magazine Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire entitled ‘How to Tell the Story?’ edited by Petra James on the relationship between history and fiction and will appear shortly.

ENDNOTES

¹ Claus Leggewie, ‘Seven Circles of European Memory’, Eurozine, 20 December 2010.

² ‘International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance’. Accessed 10 December 2017: www.ohchr.org.

³ Ibid.

⁴ The right to truth was eventually included in a resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 16 December 2005: ‘Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law.’ Accessed 8 February 2018: www.ohchr.org.

⁵ ‘Question of the impunity of perpetrators of human rights violations (civil and political)’ (final report prepared by Louis Joinet pursuant to Sub-Commission decision 1996/19) [26 June 1997]. Accessed 6 January 2017: documents-dds-ny.un.org.

⁶ Ricoeur 2000, 528.

⁷ Ricoeur 2000, 523.

⁸ Ricoeur 2000, 95.

⁹ Ricoeur intuitively senses that the Freudian model is not absolutely satisfactory. He writes further: ‘as for reconciliation with the loss itself, this will forever remain an unfinished task’ (Ricoeur 2009, Kindle loc. 1365). It is also interesting to note that the final epilogue (in form of a short poem) of the book finishes with the word ‘l’inachevement’ (incompletion).

¹⁰ Derrida’s work is today considered as one of those marking the so-called ‘spectral turn’ in humanities in 1990s (see especially Peeren and Del Pilar Blanco 2013 and Peeren 2014 and Del Pilar Blanco 2014).

¹¹ “I claimed, moreover, that the spectral figure of the desaparecido and the idea of wandering ancestral spirits have to be interpreted as reflections of particular conceptions of historicity.” (Bevernage 2012, 148; Chapter ‘History and the Work of Mourning’, Kindle loc. 3607.)

¹² Bevernage is basing his conclusion on field research in South Africa, Sierra Leone and Argentina. See also the works by Esther Peeren on spectrality and the scholarship produced after the ‘spectral turn’ in humanities in 1990s.

¹³ To give one example, the main character of Tučková’s novel The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch, finally escapes expulsion and comes back to her hometown Brno. Life seems to be returning to normal and she is about to reconstruct her life with her teenage love, who has become an important member of the communist party. Nevertheless, her life is finally shattered when her lover disappears at the moment of the show trial with the communist leader Rudolf Slánský and his collaborators in 1952.

¹⁴ The research on the parallels between Nazism and Soviet totalitarianism were taboo in Soviet historiography before 1989 but some writers, such as Grossmann (Life and Fate), have addressed this question (see Etkind 2013, Kindle, chapter ‘Soviet hauntology’). Central European writers address this topic in their writings and it is clearly visible in the texts by Kratochvil and Huelle.

¹⁵ According to Tučková the character is based on a real person and the story is inspired by the personal diary of this woman that the author was able to access.

¹⁶ De Certeau 2016, 343.

¹⁷ See also Jan Ceuppens, ‘Seeing Things: Spectres and Angels in W. G. Sebald’s Prose Fiction’, in J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (eds), W. G. Sebald, A Critical Companion, 190–202 (Edinburgh, 2004, 2006), and Anne Fuchs, ‘Die Unerlösheit der Geschichte: Der Film als Fantom’ [History impossible to solve: Film as Phantom], in Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte: Zur Poetik der Erinnerung [To the Poetics of Remembering], in W. G. Sebald’s Prosa, 62–67.

¹⁸ See also the famous texts on photography by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes or Susan Sontag.

¹⁹ From the vast bibliography on the use of photography by Sebald, see in particular Carolin Duttlinger, ‘Traumatic Photographs: Remembrance and the Technical Media in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz’, in J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (eds), W. G. Sebald, A Critical Companion, 155–71, and Alexandra Tischel, ‘Aus der Dunkelkammer der Geschichte. Zum Zusammenhang von Photographie und Erinnerung in W. G. Sebalds Austerliz’, in Michael Niehaus, Claudia Öhlschläger (eds), W. G. Sebald, Politische Archaologie und melancholische Bastelei [W. G. Sebald. Political Archaeology and melancholic DIY] (Berlin, 2006), 31–45.

²⁰ Denemarková 2009, 230.

²¹ Ricoeur 2000, 257.

²² Katalpa 2012, 416.

LIST OF REFERENCES

Bevernage, Berber (2012) History, Memory and State-Sponsored Violence. New York: Routledge, Kindle.
— (2018) ‘Narrating pasts for peace? A critical analysis of some recent initiatives of historical reconciliation through “historical dialogue” and “shared history”’, in The Ethos of History, ed. Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svennungsson, Berghahn Books (in press).

Bond, Lucy, Stef Craps and Pieter Vermeulen, eds (2017) Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies. New York: Berghahn Books.

Certeau, Michel de (2016) L’Ecriture de l’histoire (1st edn 1975). Paris: Gallimard.
— (2016, 3rd edn) Histoire et psychanalyse (1st French edn 1987, 1st American edn 1986). Paris: Gallimard.

Craps, Stef (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Kindle.

Denemarkova, Radka (2009) Penize od Hitlera: Letni mozaika (Money from Hitler: Summer Mosaics). Brno: Host.

Del Pilar Blanco, Maria and Peeren, Esther eds (2013) The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Del Pilar Blanco, Maria (2014) Ghost Watching American Modernity. New York: Fordham University Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1994) Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York, London: Routledge (first published in French in 1993)

Etkind, Alexander (2013) Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied. Stanford: Stanford University Press, Kindle.

Huelle, Paweł (2001) Mercedes Benz: Z listow do Hrabala. Kraków: Znak.
— (2005) Mercedes-Benz: from Letters to Hrabal. English trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. London: Serpent’s Tail.

James, Petra (2013) ‘Chasseurs de fantômes. Agrandissements sebaldiens de la prose tcheque, slovaque et polonaise’ [Ghost-Spotters. Sebaldien close-ups from Czech, Slovak and Polish literature], in Memoire(s) des lieux dans la prose centre-europeenne apres 1989 [Places of memory (memories) in Central European prose after 1989], ed. Małgorzata Smorag-Goldberg and Marek Tomaszewski: Lausanne: Les Éditions Noir sur Blanc, 2013, 293–305.
— (2014) ‘Contemporary Literary Texts of Central European Authors as Lieux de mémoire’ Central Europe, vol. 12, no. 1, 62–68. Accessed 20 March 2016: www.maneyonline.com

James, Petra, ed. (2018) Special issue ‘How to tell the Story?’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire [Belgian Review for Philology and History].

Maidl, Vaclav (1998) ‘Obraz německy mluvících postav a německého prostředí v české literatuře 19. a 20. století’ [The image of German-speaking characters and German milieu in the Czech literature of the 19th and 20th Century], in Obraz Němců, Rakouska a Německa v česke společnosti 19. a 20. Stoleti [The image of Germans, Austria and Germany in the Czech society of the 19th and 20th century], ed. Jan Křen and Eva Broklová. Prague: Karolinum.

Kratochvil, Alexander, ed. (2015) Paměť a trauma pohledem humanitnich věd (Memory and Trauma in the Perspective of Human Sciences). Prague: Akropolis, 2015.

Lachmann, Renate (2008) ‘Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature’, in Cultural Memory Studies: an International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter GMbH, 301–10.

Lysak, Tomasz, ed. (2015) Antologia studiow nad traumą. Cracow: Universitas.

Peeren, Esther (2014) The Spectral Metaphor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ricoeur, Paul (2000) La memoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil.
— (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting, English trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Blamey. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press.
— (2009) Kindle edition of English trans. – see above.

Sebald, Winfried Georg (2001) Austerlitz. English trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Random House, 2001.
— (2008, 4th edn) Austerlitz (1st edn 2001). Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.

Smorag-Goldberg, Małgorzata and Marek Tomaszewski, eds (2013) Memoire(s) des lieux dans la prose centre-europeenne apres 1989 [Places of memory (memories) in Central European Prose after 1989]. Lausanne: Les Éditions Noir sur Blanc.

Tučkova, Kateřina (2010)Vyhnani Gerty Schnirch [The expulsion of Gerta Snirch]. Brno: Host.

Vilikovsky, Pavel (2009) Vlastný životopis zla [The autobiography of evil]. Bratislava: Kalligram.

This article has been published in the sixth issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the memory of Violence in 20th-century European History.

>> Click here to see the R&S Studies site

ABSTRACT

The actions surrounding the display of images and artefacts in museums – collection, conservation, research and exhibition – are bound up with how the past is presented and remembered. These conditions and decisions relating to exhibitions are largely invisible to viewers who are confronted with the apparent completeness of an exhibition display. By conducting a historical and visual analysis of the bloodstained vest of political leader James Connolly, this article uncovers how this artefact has become a relic of historical violence due to the way in which particular aspects of its configuration, form and trajectory have been manipulated in order to elicit powerful emotional responses from the exhibition’s viewers.

... I have done nothing but see in the National Museum of Ireland the rusty red spot of blood, rather dirty, on the shirt that was once worn on the hero who is dearest to me of them all ... (MacLean 1971, 270–71)

Sorley MacLean’s poem ‘National Museum of Ireland’, written in 1971, contemplates the display of the bloodstained shirt of political leader James Connolly that he wore during the 1916 Rising. The shirt has been on display in the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) in several exhibitions and has been subject to considerable attention and research.¹ Another bloodstaineditem of Connolly’s clothing – his vest – is part of the NMI collection and was displayed publicly for the first time in 2016 as part of their centenary commemorative exhibition. Connolly’s vest, which is soiled with a bloodstain on the back of the left arm, marks the location of one of the wounds he received during this 20th century conflict.

As discussed by Mary M. Brooks, ‘garments that protected, shaped and presented the body in life can become surrogate bodies in the museum, evoking and memorialising the absent wearer’ (Brooks 2017, 20). The way in which the vest is carefully laid out in the exhibition display, creates a feeling that the vest has been untouched since Connolly last wore it and heightens its symbolic potency. This symbolism is created by the way the garment is folded in half with the arms crossed at the front. Positioning the folded arms in this way resembles the positioning of the arms of a deceased body and congeals the transfiguration of Connolly from a citizen, who took up arms with a view to achieving independence, into a martyr who gave the ultimate sacrifice for his country.

Brooks also contends how careful judgements when exhibiting garments is essential as artefacts must be comprehensible as dress in order to carry the meaning selected for a specific display context, whether as a work of art, a design statement or, in this case, as a representation of its previous wearer (Brooks 2017, 22). The positioning of the vest in the display case differs from other pieces of clothing in the exhibition. Rather than putting the vest on a life‑size mannequin at eye level like all of the other forms of clothing within the exhibition, the vest has been folded and placed in a glass counter-top display case. This has been done for two reasons; firstly, in order to explicitly expose the bloodstain; and secondly, to evoke the absence of the deceased body it represents.

This article centres on James Connolly’s bloodstained vest – a valuable material artefact of the 1916 Rising, which was loaned to the NMI by his family in 1941. With its display in the ‘Proclaiming a Republic: The 1916 Rising’ exhibition, this biographic relic has become symbolic as a tangible link to the death of a principal figure in Ireland’s political history. By examining this artefact through the institutional processes of acquisition, preservation and exhibition, this article demonstrates how ordinary objects can foster particular historical understandings when they are authenticated and mediated within the museum environment. Using grounding principles of visualculture, museology and material culture to undertake a visual analysis of this artefact and its display, I direct attention to the visual processes employed when representing death in exhibitions and raise questions about the ways in which exhibition displays can perpetuate particular aspects of violent events.

James Connolly and the 1916 Rising

The 1916 Easter Rising is regarded as ‘the most controversial event in modern Irish history’ (McGarry 2010, 8). The conflict lasted for six days during which militant Republicans sought to seize political power from Britain, and declared – though unsuccessfully in the short term – an independent state (Brück and Godson, 2015, 1). At the time, the public perception of the Rising was hostile due to the unpredictability and chaotic nature of the rebellion from the outset.² As noted by David Fitzpatrick, the determination of the leaders to stage a rebellion marked by honour and chivalry was inevitably sullied by cases of brutal or cowardly conduct, callousness towards civilians, and looting; but the leaders emerged after the surrender with impressive dignity to meet their fate (Fitzpatrick 2016, 82–83).

James Connolly (1868–1916), socialist and revolutionary leader, is a significant figure in the story of the Rising and in the history of modern Ireland. Connolly was instrumental in establishing the Citizen Army in 1913 and during the Rising he commanded military operations. As Commandant General of the Republic’s forces, he fought in the city centre where the majority of the battles took place until surrendering on 29 April. Connolly received several injuries during the six days of fighting with the most severe shattering his left ankle. He was court-martialled and was the last one of the fifteen leaders to be executed by firing squad. He was shot dead in Kilmainham Gaol on 12 May 1916 and was survived by his wife and six children.

The execution of the leaders of the Rising without trial caused widespread public consternation, encouraged sympathy and swayed public opinion in favour of the rebel forces. Darragh Gannon contends that the beatification of the dead of 1916 persisted through the publishing of obituary biographies of those who had been killed as a result of the Rising, along with photographs of the widows and children left behind that evoked natural sympathy (Gannon 2016, 218). Jack Elliott also notes how in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising, there was a proliferation of images of the executed leaders that circulated widely in newspapers and on pieces of mass-produced ephemera. These visual and material representations of the executed leadersplayed a particular role in shaping sympathetic and intelligible narratives of the conflict and created a familiarity with the appearance of the leaders (Elliott 2015, 91–95).

In a time when the visualization of the conflict was limited to newspapers and material artefacts, tangible entities became extremely significant in ‘the construction of both personal and official histories’ (Brück and Godson, 2015, 1). In April 1917, a three-day gift sale compromising of relics of the Rising and souvenirs of other Irish rebellions was held in support of Republican relief organizations. Many of the items auctioned that day eventually made their way into the MMI’s Easter Week Collection, such as leader Éammon Ceannt’s imitation ancient Irish costume worn when playing the Irish warpipes before Pope Pius X in 1908. Connolly’s wife Lillie donated a pair of his gloves to the auction but their whereabouts today is not known. Material and artefacts within the Easter Week Collection associated with Connolly are mainly ephemeral, consisting of leaflets promoting his lectures, communicative documents used during the Rising and handwritten postcards and letters. Given the limited nature of his material legacy, the NMI are immensely restricted in how they represent Connolly through artefacts.

National Museum of Ireland (NMI)

The NMI has a long history of hosting exhibitions commemorating the 1916 Rising with its first in 1932. In the years following the inaugural exhibition, the NMI collected materials and objects bound together only by their association with the Rising and established what is known as the ‘Easter Week Collection’ – the first thematic collection in the institution. The NMI still stands apart as the pioneer in hosting 1916 exhibitions and its collection built around this pivotal event in Irish history set the stage for the preservation and presentation of the material culture of Ireland.

The ‘Proclaiming a Republic: The 1916 Rising’ exhibition that opened in March 2016 is the NMI’s eighth exhibition on the subject and has been the centrepiece of the NMI’s centenary programme. Housed in the Riding School at the Department of Decorative Arts and History, Collins Barracks in Dublin, this exhibition has been described as revealing ‘the physicalities of life in Ireland before, during and after the events of Easter Week in the form of three hundred objects, articles and images’ (Gannon, 2016, xvi). Artefacts, which have visible traces of use because of the conflict, have been mobilized by curators throughout the exhibition in order to accentuate thedistress and physicalities of war. Many of these artefacts are everyday materials, which have become extraordinary because of their association with this significant event in Ireland’s political history and illustrate how ordinary lives and actions collided during the conflict. Artefacts such as a crucifix hit by a stray bullet, a sign from the front of the burnt-out General Post Office (GPO) and James Connolly’s bloodstained vest are examples of ordinary objects whose storytelling ability is enhanced because they have visible evidence of the physicalities of violence.

Many of the exhibited objects have never been on public display before while others, such as the flags that flew over the rebel garrisons around Dublin city, were specially conserved for this display. Through the combined effect of the objects, words and imagery of the period, visitors follow the stories of those caught up in the events of that momentous week – civilians, combatants and survivors alike.

The exhibition is laid out in a series of ten zones: introduction, the proclamation of the Irish Republic and early 20th-century Ireland; establishing the rebel garrisons and the British countermoves; surrender and the scenes of destruction; courts martial and execution; widows and orphans; deportation and imprisonment; commemorating the Rising through the last 100 years; Art Ó Murnaghan’s national memorial; the legacy of 1916 and a resource room. The narrative ordering of the exhibition content presents episodes of the conflict semi-chronologically meaning that visitors get a general sense of the chronology of events, but this arrangement also allows visitors to make their own narrative connections between the different zones. For example, in the centre of ‘Zone 3: Establishing Rebel Garrisons and the British Countermoves’, there is a large glass case displaying the Irish Republic flag that flew from the GPO during the Rising. The flag was captured by British soldiers after the surrender, kept as a war trophy and entered the Royal Collection of King George V of England.³ A large-format digital photograph of British soldiers with the captured flag immediately after the Rising features prominently on a display panel in ‘Zone 4: Surrender and the Scenes of Destruction’. The displays do not refer to one another, encouraging viewers to connect both artefact and image autonomously.

Visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners are catered for using object displays, text panels, graphics, interactive touch screens, soundscapes, audio recordings and short film. Speakers in the main exhibition area play a looped audiosoundtrack, which contains noises of a street scene overwhelmed by explosions and guns. The overall mood of the soundtrack creates a sensory environment, which summons feelings of chaos and provides context for the exhibition. This soundscape is most prominent in ‘Zone 3: Establishing Rebel Garrisons and the British Countermoves’ but is phased out gradually so that ‘Zone 5: Courts Martial and Execution’ achieves a reverential mood for viewers to reflect silently and ‘empathise with the executed leaders’ (Heise and Tandem Design 2015). This is an intentional curatorial strategy implemented in order to promote intimacy and contemplation in this section of the exhibition.

‘Zone 5: Courts Martial and Execution‘

As discussed by Jane Tynan, ‘notions of tragic heroism dominate the memory of the Rising’ – a narrative which also emerges in the ‘Courts Martial and Execution’ section of the exhibition (Tynan 2015, 32). This section of the exhibition details the last moments of the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising individually, by describing their last meetings with families and displaying artefacts, which were in their possession before they met their death by firing squad in the yard in Kilmainham Gaol. A generous graphic area introduces the executions, interprets the reaction of the public and the swing in public opinion that followed. The curators and exhibition designers have positioned this section in a particular way so that it is possible for visitors to bypass the display of last letters and objects if they choose. This positioning represents the exhibition makers’ consciousness of the sensitive nature of the death-related content on public display. The possible bypassing of this section is not made explicit on display panels or in a disclaimer, so that visitors can come to their own decisions on how to deal with the complex nature of displaying artefacts closely associated with death and more specifically, execution.

The central feature of this section is a long bespoke display case, where each execution is treated separately with its own grouping of objects. The ‘last objects’ are housed within the case, with the associated last letter and death certificate viewable within a drawer positioned directly underneath the case. Visitors can listen to dramatized readings of each of the last letters on a bank of listening pods that helps them to ‘decipher the letters of the often difficult to read handwriting and understand the emotions behind the words’ (Heise and Tandem Design, 2015). The objects belonging to the leaders include a button from Michael Hanrahan’s uniform, which he gave to his sisters during their last visit to him, rosary beads given by Joseph Plunkettto firing squad member Sergeant W. Hand before his execution and a silver cigarette case inscribed by John MacBride during Easter Week. The object that materially represents Connolly in this section is his bloodstained vest. As Albano has outlined, by displaying such artefacts as biographical material evidence, not only is something about the objects themselves revealed, but information about those who acted on them is also uncovered (Albano 2007, 17). The aim of this display strategy is to produce a human connection between the exhibited artefacts and the viewer.

James Scott asserts how the perception of objects can be influenced heavily by what surrounds them in displays (Scott 2015, 500). The difference between Connolly’s vest and the other objects on display within the ‘Courts Martial and Execution’ section of the exhibition is that the majority of artefacts representing the other leaders were gifted to visitors before they met their death, indicating a conscious effort to leave a material legacy of their last moments. This gifting of artefacts by the leaders before their executions is an example of what Guy Beiner refers to as ‘prememory’ – ‘the anticipations and expectations of those who are committed to predetermine how history will be remembered’ (Beiner 2016, 34). Unlike the other leaders who bequeathed material artefacts to trusted individuals during their final visits from family and final moments with others in Kilmainham Gaol, Connolly did not intentionally leave a ‘prememory’ personal possession.⁴ The bloodstained vest was among Connolly’s possessions, which were returned to his family after his death along with his watch and wallet.⁵ Perhaps if Connolly had bequeathed his watch or wallet during the final visit with his wife and daughter, curators of the exhibition may have selected those objects to represent his last moments instead of a piece of clothing that he possibly last wore two weeks prior to his execution. The watch and wallet were not donated to the museum by the Connolly family, but were instead kept as private relics of his last possessions. In fact, the vest and undershirt are the only material artefacts in the NMI collection that were donated by Connolly’s family and which can be tangibly associated with his execution.⁶

That said Connolly’s execution was different to that of the other leaders due to the severity of the injuries he had sustained during Easter Week. Upon arrival at Kilmainham Gaol, Connolly was removed from the ambulance in a stretcher and unlike the other leaders who were positioned on wooden boxes pending the gunshots from the firing squad, Connolly was strapped to a chair where he sat in an extended position with his head falling backwards.⁷It is unlikely that Connolly wore this vest during his execution as it was stated by witnesses that he was wearing only his pyjamas prior to execution and had lost a lot of blood after the shots were fired, meaning that the bloodstains on the vest do not correspond with the details of his death.⁸ However, the display of the vest in relation to the other last objects on display and the selective information in the accompanying display label suggest that the curators may, in fact, intend visitors to assume it was worn by Connolly during his execution. While many of the other artefacts describe how they were distinctly used or gifted during the leaders’ final moments with their loved ones, the information accompanying Connolly’s vest makes no reference to the visit but instead focuses on the injuries he received during Easter Week and how the vest was deposited in the National Museum.

Display texts in museums can provide a basic starting point for directing viewers towards the politics of exhibition – the unseen features of artefacts such as their creation, acquisition and historical background. Considering that many of the other leaders’ biographies detail their final moments prior to execution and display material evidence of those moments, the avoidance of this description in Connolly’s case may represent a conscious curatorial strategy, which is implemented in order to heighten the emotional strength of the vest. Examining such aspects of display outlines the importance of considering the invisibility of the construction of exhibition displays and exposes the extent to which museums control visitors’ engagement with the past. Focusing on the institutional acquisition of the vest after Connolly’s death can be seen as a selective manipulation of certain attributes of the artefact in order to correspond with other artefacts on display and to validate the NMI’s role in displaying this contested personal possession, despite the original owner’s unwillingness to engage in material acts of ‘prememory’.

Historical configuration of the vest

On Thursday, 27 April 1916, surrounded by burning buildings and a hail of gunfire and artillery shelling, James Connolly led 30 volunteers out into a street to erect a barricade at the rear of the GPO, which was the insurgent’s headquarters for the duration of the Rising. A few minutes later, Connolly returned to the building and asked the medical orderly, Jim Ryan, if he could speak to him somewhere in private. Behind a screen, Connolly took off his coat and revealed a flesh wound in his arm where he had just been shot. After having the wound dressed, he told Ryan: ‘Not a word about this to anyone’ and returned outside to the fighting (Nevin 2005, 654).

This sequence of events uncovers three aspects that affect the display of the vest in the museum environment. Firstly, the witness accounts of Connolly’s injury correspond with the configuration of the bloodstain, authenticating the description presented by the NMI in the exhibition display. Secondly, it reveals reluctance on the part of Connolly for his injuries to become common knowledge and demonstrates how the eventual trajectory of personal artefacts often goes beyond the control of their owners.⁹ Finally, they reveal how an everyday artefact can be transformed into a tangible link and a symbolic representation of a first-hand experience of a violent conflict in Irish history.

After his execution, Connolly’s daughter Nora recalled going to Dublin Castle to retrieve some of his personal items:

We went to the Castle after that, to claim his watch, his wallet, or anything they might have belonging to Daddy. We thought there might be a chance of getting his uniform; but we did not. We only got his underclothes; and they were marked with his blood, where he had been hit by a sniper. I have given them to the Museum also.¹⁰

Nora’s wish to retrieve her father’s uniform accentuates the emotional weight that is attached to personal items of clothing, particularly in the absence of their wearer. Nora loaned the bloodstained vest and undershirt to the Easter Week Collection in 1941, where they remain in the care of the NMI. The transfer of these items from a private collection to a national collection in a public institution shows an awareness, on the part of the Connolly family, of the significance and potential value of such soiled artefacts.

As outlined by Annie E. Coombes, the way an object is used, how it is moved around and its very survival is an indication of value and meaning (Coombes 1988, 89). The display label states that ‘The vest, along with the shirt he wore over it, was returned to his family after execution and his daughter Nora, kept it until she deposited in the National Museum.’ This selective information gives viewers an insight into the actions surrounding the collection and acquisition of this artefact; and offers an understanding of the range of actions that take place in order for an object to become part of a museum collection and subsequent display. There is limited information available in the NMI archives on the vest and undershirt aside from the dates of donation and a request some years later from Connolly’s other daughterIna to view the items.¹¹ The preservation of the vest by the wearer’s family and the NMI memorializes and authenticates Connolly’s presence in the violent battles of the 1916 Rising.

Form and style of the vest

Eastop and Brooks have outlined the importance of leaving stained textiles untouched as the stains often ‘contain’ considerable historical and cultural evidence (Eastop and Brooks 1996, 688). It is a specific event in Irish history – the 1916 Rising: Connolly being shot for the first time – which caused its eventual configuration and the reason why this artefact was collected as a historic relic, loaned to the museum, conserved and now on display to the public. Like many other soiled historical artefacts, the form and style of this artefact is configured by an unintentional event – that is, the vest only looks the way it does by accident (residue of blood from a flesh wound after a stray bullet hit Connolly). Furthermore, the vest was not intended by its user to be made visible as presumably it would have been worn underneath his uniform and as already mentioned, the wearer hoped to keep his injury secret. Instead, it was the subsequent custodians of the vest – Connolly’s family – who deliberately collected and donated his bloodstained underclothes as evidence of the experience and conditions of the 1916 Rising. As the vest has remained in the care of the NMI since it was loaned in 1941, it is their institutional practices of collection, conservation and curation that now control the cultural visibility of the vest after Connolly’s death.

As discussed by Jane Tynan, the peculiar dynamics of the Rising demanded an equivocal attitude to uniform (Tynan 2015, 31). The rebel leaders for example, wore uniforms that were dark green in colour and distinct from the other Volunteer uniforms. However not all of the insurgents were noted for their elegant appearance. Due to financial hardship, lack of military experience and the chaotic unfolding of events, the majority of participants in the fighting had a casual and unmilitary appearance (Tynan 2015, 29).

Connolly was described as wearing ‘a green Volunteer uniform with rings on his arm, and a wide-awake hat’ (Nevin 2005, 665). His daughter Ina elicited the delight she felt the first time seeing her father in his green Volunteer uniform: ‘How splendid he looked! How pleased I was to see him in the uniform of Ireland’s green! Wouldn’t mother be proud of him if she could get one glace of him?’¹²

Connolly’s ‘splendid’ appearance was not maintained in the aftermath of the conflict as he was brought to Kilmainham Gaol to meet his death wearing ‘his pyjamas only’.¹³ His material legacy in the ‘Proclaiming a Republic’ exhibition is reflective of the unheroic image chosen to represent the Rising, which as Tynan has asserted ‘features what appears to be a working class man wearing civilian clothes’ (Tynan 2015, 33).¹⁴ This vest has agency as material culture as it communicates either the physical body or presence of its owner and signifies his personal identity through its traces of use, general wear and tear and personal style. The proximity to the body it represents is intensified by the presence of a visible bodily residue, which is exposed by the particular positioning of the vest in the display case.

Conclusion

The actions surrounding the display of images and objects in museums – collection, conservation, research and exhibition – are bound up with howthe past is presented and remembered. These conditions and decisions of exhibition display are largely invisible to viewers who are confronted with the apparent completeness of an exhibition display.

Conducting a historical and visual analysis of this bloodstained vest has uncovered how particular aspects of this artefact have been manipulated in order to be appropriate alongside other artefacts within the exhibition. Other than representing his clothing and reinforcing the casual heroism of the Rising, Connolly’s vest was not crucial to the theme of the ‘Courts Martial and Execution’ section of the exhibition. Instead its significance lies in the particular positioning of the artefact in the display case in order to make the bloodstain fully visible. This mode of display intentionally gives the vest a heightened sense of tangible connection to the violence of the Rising in an attempt to elicit powerful emotional responses from the exhibition’s viewers.

SIOBHAN DOYLE

Siobhan Doyle is a PhD scholar at the Dublin School of Creative Arts in the Dublin Institute of Technology and received the Dean of the College of Arts & Tourism scholarship award in March 2016. Siobhan’s research project investigates representations of death in commemorative exhibitions in national cultural institutions and the challenges facing museums when commemorating historical conflict. Other research interests include the historiography of visual and material culture and dark tourism. Siobhan has a written a chapter ‘Funerary Traditions and Commemorative Practices in Glasnevin Cemetery and Museum’ in Grave Matters: Death and Dying in Dublin 1650–2000 (Four Courts Press, Dublin, June 2016).

ENDNOTES

¹ The shirt has been on display in the ‘Soldiers and Chiefs’ exhibition at the NMI since 2006 and was featured in the History of Ireland in 100 Objects initiative which began as a column in The Irish Times by Fintan O’ Toole and culminated in an illustrated book, website and series of stamps. This collection of one hundred objects was selected to illustrate Ireland’s history and in doing so, directed readers to where each object was on public display.

² The Rising was originally scheduled to take place on Easter Sunday, 23 April 1916 but Eoin MacNeill issued a cancellation of ‘manoeuvres’ which led to the non-participation of many potential rebels. The countermand was only partly successful and caused confusion, especially outside Dublin. Consequently there was no Rising in Cork or Limerick. The dissidents delayed their plans by 24 hours and launched the Rising on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916.

³ The flag was returned by the British state to the Taoiseach Sean Lemass as gesture of reconciliation in 1966. Lemass formally presented the flag to the NMI in the hope thatit would be ‘preserved as one of the important relics of that important event of Irish history and as a source of inspiration to all who come to this museum’. (‘Exhibition Tells Story of the Rising: Post Office Flag on View’, Irish Times, 13 April 1966, 11.)

⁴ Connolly gave a copy of his Court Martial statement to his daughter Nora during the final family visit the night before his execution, which is on display in the pull-out drawer underneath the glass display case.

⁵ Bureau of Military History (1949): Witness Statement of Nora Connolly-O’Brien (WS286). www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie. Accessed 6 November 2017.

⁶ The items were originally on loan to the NMI from 30 April 1941 and include a portrait of James Connolly and a shirt and vest worn by James Connolly when he was wounded during Easter Week 1916. Both are stained with his blood. The loan register lists the lender as Nora Connolly O’Brien (daughter of James Connolly), 39 The Rise, Glasnevin, Dublin. NMI Archives: NMIAS.AI.EWL.0097.003.00034. Accessed 3 November 2017.

⁷ Bureau of Military History: Witness Statement of Peter Paul Gilligan (WS170). www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie. Accessed 6 November 2017.

⁸ Bureau of Military History: Witness Statement of 2nd Lieutenant R. C. Barton (WS0979). drive.google.com. Accessed 16 January 2017.

⁹ Despite returning to duty immediately after receiving the wound on his arm dressed, Connolly received a much more severe injury to his ankle shortly afterwards that immobilized him for the remainder of the conflict, and up until his execution two weeks later.

¹⁰ Bureau of Military History (1949): Witness Statement of Nora Connolly O’ Brien (WS286). www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie. Accessed 6 November 2017.

¹¹ NMI Archives: NMIAS.AI.EWL.0097.003.00034 (9). Accessed 3 November 2017.

¹² Bureau of Military History (1954): Witness Statement of Ina Connolly Heron (WS0919) www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie. Accessed 6 November 2017.

¹³ Bureau of Military History: Witness Statement of 2nd Lieutenant R. C. Barton (WS0979). www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie. Accessed 16 November 2017.

¹⁴ Tynan, Jane (2015) ‘The Unmilitary Appearance of the 1916 Rebels’, in Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture of the 1916 Rising, ed. Lisa Godson and Joanna Bruck. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

LIST OF REFERENCES

Published Sources:

Albano, Caterina (2007) ‘Displaying Lives: The Narratives of Objects in Biographical Exhibitions’. Museum and Society, 5, no. 1. 15–28.

Beiner, Guy (2016) ‘Making Sense of Memory: Coming to Terms with Conceptualisations of Historical Remembrance’, in Remembering 1916: The Easter Rising, the Somme and the Politicsof Memory in Ireland, ed. Richard S. Grayson and Fearghal McGarry, 25–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brooks, Mary M.(2017) ‘Reflecting Absence and Presence: Displaying Dress of Known Individuals’, in Refashioning and Redress: Conserving and Displaying Dress, ed. Mary M. Brooks and Dinah D. Eastop, 19–32. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute.

Bruck, Joanna and Lisa Godson (2015) ‘Approaching the Material and Visual Culture of the 1916 Rising: An Introduction’, in Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture of the 1916 Rising, ed. Lisa Godson & Joanna Brück, 1–11. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Coombes, Annie E. (1988) ‘Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities’. Oxford Art Journal, 11, no. 2. 260–72.

Eastop, Dinah D. and Brooks, Mary M.(1996) ‘To Clean or Not to Clean: The Value of Soils and Creases’, in Preprints of the 11th Triennial Meeting of the ICOM–CC, Edinburgh, ed. Janet Birdgland, 687–91. London: James & James.

Elliott, Jack (2015) ‘“After I am Hanged my Portrait will be Interesting but not Before”: Ephemera and the Construction of Personal Responses to the Easter Rising’, in Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture of the 1916 Rising, ed. Lisa Godson and Joanna Brück, 91–8. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

‘Exhibition Tells Story of the Rising: Post Office Flag on View’ (1966) Irish Times, 13 April, 11. Accessed 29 January 2018: 0-search.proquest.com

Fitzpatrick, David (2016) ‘Instant History: 1912, 1916, 1918’, in Remembering 1916: The Easter Rising, the Somme and the Politics of Memory in Ireland, ed. Richard S. Grayson and Fearghal McGarry, 77–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gannon, Darragh (2016) Proclaiming a Republic: Ireland, 1916 and the National Collection. Kildare: Irish Academic Press.

Godson, Lisa and Joanna Bruck, eds (2015) Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture of the 1916 Rising. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

MacLean, Sorley (2011) ‘National Museum of Ireland’, in Sorley MacLean: Collected Poems, ed. Christopher Whyte and Emma Dymock, 270–71. Edinburgh: Polygon.

McGarry, Fearghal (2010) The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916. New York, Oxford University Press.

Nevin, Donal (2005) James Connolly: ‘A Full Life’. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan.

Scott, James (2015) ‘Objects and the Representations of War in Military Museums’, Museum and Society, 13, no. 4. 489–502.

Tynan, Jane (2015) ‘The Unmilitary Appearance of the 1916 Rebels’, in Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture of the 1916 Rising, ed.Lisa Godson and Joanna Brück, 25–33. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Primary Sources:

Bureau of Military History (1949) Witness Statement of Nora Connolly O’ Brien (WS286). Accessed 6 November 2017: www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie

Bureau of Military History (1954) Witness Statement of Ina Connolly Heron (WS0919). Accessed 6 November 2017: www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie

Bureau of Military History: Witness Statement of 2nd Lieutenant R. C. Barton (WS0979). Accessed 16 November 2017: drive.google.com

Bureau of Military History: Witness Statement of Peter Paul Gilligan (WS170). Accessed 6 November 2017: www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie

Heise, Sandra and Tandem Design (2015) ‘National Museum of Ireland: Easter Week Remembered Concept Design (Issue 1)’, 26 June 2015. National Museum of Ireland Archives: AI/16/111. Accessed 18 September 2017.

National Library of Ireland (1917) Irish National Aid and Volunteer Dependents’ Fund: Catalogue of Gift Sale to be Held in Aid of above at the Mansion House, Dublin on Friday and Saturday, 20 and 21 April 1917: MS. 35,262/27(1). Accessed 22 November 2017.

National Museum of Ireland Archives: NMIAS.AI.EWL.0097.003.00034 (9). Accessed 3 November 2017.

This article has been published in the sixth issue of Remembrance and Solidarity Studies dedicated to the memory of Violence in 20th-century European History.

>> Click here to see the R&S Studies site

The twentieth-century history of Europe was marked by two world wars and two totalitarianisms, national socialism and communism. To pursue their objectives, these two systems - despite their ideological differences - were making use of similar means, i.e. violence and terror, incarnated as concentration and forced labour camps. (…) Apart from being a unique kind of cemeteries, museums set up on the grounds of former death and concentration camps have also become monuments to the past, commemorating victims to regimes. It was there that a new area of educational activity, unknown before, was born in a natural way: memorial site pedagogy.
Luiza Kończyk, Pedagogika (miejsc) pamięci, 2012[1]

1. Introduction

Sound in the Silence is an international interdisciplinary educational project delivered by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS) in cooperation with the cultural centre MOTTE from Hamburg. Its main goal is to make adolescents attending upper secondary schools familiar with some difficult aspects of Europe’s past in a way that matches their emotional sensitivity. Guided by artists and educators, the participants visit memorial sites where they explore selected events from the history of totalitarianisms in East-Central Europe. Then, referring to their own emotions and experience, they process the newly acquired knowledge during art workshops of several days. Their work finds its culmination in a public performance which combines various genres of art: dance, theatre, music and stage setting. Emotions and feelings related to visits at memorial sites – particularly those marked with violence and pain, giving rise to emotions sometimes hard to express in words – become thus externalised in an artistic message.

2. Teaching method

The place where young learners come into contact with history for the first time, the school does not always offer conditions conducive to understanding the past. Sound in the Silence is intended to fill that gap, facilitating international, interdisciplinary cooperation between schools and external experts and artists representing various disciplines. Offering young people an opportunity to directly experience memorial sites and interact with others who have different experiences, the projects stimulates sensitivity, curiosity and tolerance. Learning in an international environment, coupled with integration and dialogue of youth from different countries and marked by twentieth-century history in different ways, will help them better understand the past and broaden their horizons.

The educational process proposed by the project includes two parts: one based on learning and history and one based on arts. During the first part, the young participants are guided around a selected memorial site, a concentration or forced labour camp. They learn about its history as well individual fates of its inmates, which facilitates stepping in their shoes and thus a more in-depth understanding of the past[2]. Then the participants attend an interactive lecture and discussion staged by scientific coordinators. The lecture aims at presenting a broader historical context as well as systematising and consolidating their existing knowledge (accounting for school syllabus differences in individual countries); the discussion, in turn, provides a space for asking questions, exploration and comprehension.

The other part is art workshops of around a week, during which the final performance is prepared as a team effort. They are delivered by means of an exposing teaching method intended to activate the student’s whole personality, both intellect and emotions. The method consists in simulating situations and role-play using words, gestures, movement and sometimes props[3]. The point is not theatre, however, as the final performance is not based on a ready-made text but is an open structure where new content, actions and interpretations can be inserted. Consequently, playing a specific role requires personal engagement on the part of the student. The method allows for the emotional experience of specific problems, looking for one’s own solutions as well as making choices. It also accelerates the students’ emotional, intellectual and social growing up. It additionally teaches them understanding themselves and others at the level of feelings and emotions.

3. Project measures

Project work begins long before going to the memorial site and comprises the following stages:

3.1. Project site selection: project coordinators select a site as the axis of a given edition of the project. They also select and describe a leitmotif, closely linked to the history of the site, which helps define activities to be performed more precisely. Then materials for the students and teachers are prepared, with the subjects contained therein to be explored more in-depth and supplemented with new aspects during the historical workshop. The coordinators remain in close cooperation with the institution or museum in charge of a given memorial site.

3.2. Recruitment: it targets teachers and schools, lasts two months and is executed by means of online applications. Each year, students and teachers participating in the project are recruited by a selection team comprising ENRS and MOTTE staff. Four upper secondary schools from EU member states may select seven students and a teacher to spend eight days at a selected memorial site. The following aspects are subject to evaluation during the recruitment process: motivation (the selection team will assess the convergence between the project objectives and the teacher’s interests, expectations and personal development plans); project recruitment modalities (the way in which the teacher/school selects seven young project participants as well as the teacher’s approach to the project’s interdisciplinary nature); experience in the delivery of interdisciplinary projects (outside the school syllabus) and the knowledge of English (with the teachers and students obliged to declare it to be at least at the B2 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages standard of the Council of Europe).
The project assumes that the teacher and the students he/she selects take part in all activities planned by the organisers, with the teachers not involved in work during individual workshops and playing mainly the roles of guardians and aides.

3.3. A trip to the memorial site: the formula – that of a momentary break from daily duties and routines – facilitates the creation of a safe space for discussion, becoming familiar with different point of views and consciously working out new perspectives. As a result, visits at memorial sites serve not just to help improve one’s knowledge of history but also as a starting point for juxtaposing various opinions in a way accessible to adolescents.

3.4. Visiting the memorial site and an educational workshop: the basic objective of the substantive workshop is to make the participants familiar as to the location where the project is delivered as well as discuss selected topics from the history of totalitarianisms in East-Central Europe. The knowledge acquired in the early days of the visit will also help the participants better prepare their final performance.

3.5. Groupwork with artists: one of the project objectives is to develop new outside-the-box ways to deal with history, based, on the one hand, on the participants’ individual involvement and dialogue, and openness on the other. Hence the idea for combining visits at memorial sites with art workshops as well inviting youth, artists, experts in memory and educators from different countries and with different experience and knowledge of history to work together. The work is executed in several workshop groups, each led by a different artist. During the first workshop day, after each leader has presented their approach, the students select the genre of art that suits them best.

3.6. Final performance: the last day and a half of the project serves to combine the ideas of all groups into a coherent whole and rehearse the final performance which is then presented to the public. Emotions and feelings related to visits at memorial sites – particularly those marked with violence and pain, giving rise to emotions sometimes hard to express in words – become externalised in an artistic message.

4. Learning through arts

The combination of two apparently contradictory domains as learning and arts may be seen, encourages young people to come into contact with history and points a way towards expressing one’s views personally and critically. Using one’s intellect, emotions, imagination and senses for learning purposes facilitates looking at the past from various angles and perspectives of many parties to the very same conflict. The formula of Sound in the Silence offers both students and teachers alike the possibility to move away from traditional history teaching routines giving a voice to witnesses to past events. The project has been conceived of as basic ground preparation work, aimed at counteracting exclusion, preventing nationalist attitudes, sensitising the participants to challenges faced by the modern world as well as promoting such terms a empathy, tolerance or dialogue.

The project focuses on individualised and multidimensional experience of the past. During the workshops, the students are encouraged to critically analyse the history presented. Dates and facts are contextualised with the experiences and feelings of those who lived past events coming to the fore. This is the point of visiting memorial sites, reading witnesses’ accounts or watching feature films and documentaries. Additionally, each student is given an opportunity to select a workshop related to the type of art most suited to their sensitivity. The artists are mentors, showing various ways to interpret historical events by means of arts. They are also there to help the participants work through and understand the most difficult topics, for which there is often no time available at school. Such an interdisciplinary and multidimensional approach to complex history facilitates reflection made more in-depth by one’s own emotions and understanding of both the past and presence. Use of forms and means to which contemporary youth can relate helps them find the importance of historical events for the modern-day world. As a participant of the previous edition put it: “I have never felt so connected to history before and would never have by just looking at a picture”[4].

Facing the history of the project site in emotional terms requires ensuring a common, safe space for dialogue for participants of various ages, characters and maturity levels. Thanks to re-defining certain educational methods, Sound in the Silence is a good solution for students who find it difficult to understand the timeless universality of historical messages. The artistic techniques applied as well as direct contact with memorial sites make the process of knowledge acquisition and analysis more accessible. They also facilitate personal engagement on the part of the participants and showing links between the past and their present-day lives.

One of the key challenges as regards the delivery of Sound in the Silence is transmission of expert historical knowledge to persons of various nationalities in a language other than their native one. The coordinators communicate with the adolescent participants in English, which may hamper the understanding of specialist historical terms. Should comprehension problems appear, the participants should contact the project coordinators or their guardians.

An additional difficulty as regards working with adolescents from various countries is varied levels of knowledge of the history of the site and region visited as well as differences in their knowledge of twentieth-century European history. That is why cooperation begins long before the project implementation stage. The coordinators meet representatives of the schools or hold consultations with them over Skype. They offer them materials prepared for the young participants serving to minimise such discrepancies. From the very start, the project is consulted with school teachers, head teachers as well as artistic and substantive coordinators. The point is to define the goals and objectives of the project precisely and communicate them to all the interested parties so that misunderstandings and tensions could be avoided.

Each edition of the project is assessed by all the persons involved in it: artists, teachers and students and then subject to detailed evaluation by a team from the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. The conclusions are used while planning is being done for successive editions of the project.

5. Summary

The idea behind Sound in the Silence is multi-track historical education delivered both at memorial sites and art workshops as well as integration and exchange of experiences between peers from various countries. Sound in the Silence makes us aware that new forms of historical education make it possible to combine individual engagement with exploring the past together. One’s own experience and sensitivity as well as understanding of views characteristic of individual countries allow for changing one’s own personal perspective and mutual contact regardless of where the participants hail from. Learning history through arts and expressing it through emotions makes it easier for adolescents to understand history and the world around them.

6. Organisers

6.1. European Network Remembrance and Solidarity
The European Network Remembrance and Solidarity is an international initiative established pursuant to the Declaration of 2 February 2005 by ministers of culture (or their equivalents) from four countries: Poland, Germany, Slovakia and Hungary. Back then, they acknowledged the need to hold a dialogue about twentieth-century history as well as engage in joint research, documentation and dissemination of most recent European history marked by wars and totalitarian dictatorships. In 2009, the intention to establish the ENRS expressed in the Declaration was repeated in letters of intent signed by the ministers of culture of Germany, Poland and Hungary. In May 2014, an annex was added to the Declaration as another country, Romania, joined the Network. The ENRS was set up as an entity active in the area of remembrance policy, an ambitious attempt at shaping international discourse about the history and memory of Europeans. An important factor that defines the nature of the initiative is the fact that there are constantly differences to be faced present at several levels of cooperation:
• level of the substance the Network deals with: various historical narratives specific to each member country;
• level of structure: various organisational or institutional solutions specific to the remembrance policy systems in the member countries;
• level of culture: different ways and experiences related to commemoration, different means of communication or interpretation of specific phenomena.

The current members of the Network are Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, while representatives of also Austria, the Czech Republic and Latvia serve on its advisory assemblies. Since the establishment of the ENRS Secretariat, i.e. 2005, the Network has delivered around 100 initiatives varied in terms of nature, theme and scope. Some of them have become flagship ENRS projects and are delivered in successive editions now.

6.2. Cultural Centre MOTTE
Established in 1976, MOTTE is a municipal centre of culture in Altona, a formerly working class district of Hamburg. From the very beginning, its main objective has been supporting its local, ethnically diverse, community through cultural education, promotion of media knowledge as well as development of vocational and social competences. The dynamics of the centre’s operation is based on cooperation with diverse institutions, i.e. schools, cultural centres, libraries as well as culture animators, journalists or artists.

Projects delivered by MOTTE target almost all age and social groups. Apart from a crèche and community centre for youngest children, the organisation offers many free programmes for adolescents aged 12 and above. Its activities cover such fields as remedial classes and advice in vocational development planning, games and cuisine workshops, or workshops for girls or persons with disabilities. Initiatives are also offered supporting schoolchildren in improving their vocational competencies in cooperation with local schools. Children aged 6-12 can benefit from a project at the intersection of black light theatre, musical play and film, where the participants learn to create their own radio broadcasts and develop their creativity. MOTTE is also planning to soon expand its operations and offer projects focusing on senior citizens.

Text has been written based on relevant literature on the subject:

Auschwitz i Holokaust : dylematy i wyzwania polskiej edukacji, edited by: Piotr Trojański, Oświęcim: Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2008, s. 397.
Michael Gray, Teaching the Holocaust: Practical Approaches for Ages 11–18, Routledge, New York, 2015
Grunewald, D., A., (2003). The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place, Educational Researcher 4 (32), s. 3-12.
Grzegorz Żuk, Edukacja w miejscach pamięci – od reliktu do refleksji, [in:] Pamięć jako kategoria rzeczywistości kulturowej, red. Jan Adamowski i Marta Wójcicka, Lublin 2012
James Woodcock, History, music and law: commemorative cross-curricularity, https://www.holocausteducation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Teaching-History-2013.pdf, (accessed on 5 May 2017)
Knapp, C., L., Woodhouse, J., L., Place – Based Curriculum and Instruction: Outdoor and Environmental Education Approaches, http://www.ericdigests.org/2001-3/place.htm, (accessed on 5 May 2017)
Luiza Kończyk, Pedagogika (miejsc) pamięci, 2012, http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/element/bwmeta1.element.desklight-1efca15a-a273-4533-aaa4-d482a723326b/c/11.pdf (accessed on 5 May 2017)
N.H. Weber, H.-F. Rathenow, Pedagogika miejsc pamięci – próba bilansu, „Kwartalnik Pedagogiczny” 1996, nr 2, s. 3–36; I. Scheurich, NS-Gedenkstätten als Orte kritischer historisch-politischer Bildung, w: B. Th imm, G. Kößler, S. Ulrich (Hrsg.), Verunsichernde Orte. Selbstverständnis und Weiterbildung in der Gedenkstättenpädagogik, Frankfurt a. M. 2010, s. 38–44.
Victoria Nesfield, Keeping Holocaust education relevant in a changing landscape: seventy years on, University of Leeds, UK, 2015.
Theodor W. Adorno, Education After Auschwitz, http://paep.ca/doc/CIYL%20-%20Theodor%20Adorno%20-%20Education%20after%20Auschwitz.pdf, (accessed on 5 May 2017)
Wincenty Okoń, Wprowadzenie do dydaktyki ogólnej, Warsaw, 1998
Wizyty edukacyjne w Państwowym Muzeum na Majdanku Poradnik dla nauczycieli, edited by: Tomasz Kranz, Lublin, 2012

Endnotes:

1 Luiza Kończyk, Pedagogika (miejsc) pamięci, 2012, http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/element/bwmeta1.element.desklight-1efca15a-a273-4533-aaa4-d482a723326b/c/11.pdf (accessed on 5 May 2017)

2 Grzegorz Żuk, Edukacja w miejscach pamięci – od reliktu do refleksji, [in:] Pamięć jako kategoria rzeczywistości kulturowej, red. Jan Adamowski i Marta Wójcicka, Lublin 2012, p. 237–244

3 Wincenty Okoń, Wprowadzenie do dydaktyki ogólnej, Warsaw, 1998

4 Mereike Fischer

The "In Between?" project is about stories and history, but it is also about pictures. During each study visit, the participants scan archival documents, take hunderds of photos, and record video images in order to capture the wider context of the accounts which are shared with them. In order to emphasize this dimension of the project, each event organised in connection to the "In Between?" has a separate visual identification based on one of the pictures collected by the participants.

This time, for the seminar in Berlin in 2017, it is a photograph from the archives of Ms. Maria Gavra from the Hungarian-Romanian borderland. Here is its story:

"Regarding the picture, I can only give you an approximate date on which it was taken, but I can describe the historical context in more detail.

Firstly, the characters: on the right, with a lighter coloured hat, is my maternal grandfather, with my grandmother besides him. My grandfather's name was Radosav Mircu - born in 1907, in Bătania, to a Serbian father and a Romanian mother, having moved to Romania after the border changes - and my grandmother's: Radosav Maria - maiden name Păștean, born in Curtici, in 1910, into a Romanian family. Next to them there are their friends, Lungu Ivan - half Serbian, half Romanian - and his Romanian wife, Lungu Valeria, born in Pecica.

The picture was taken in Turnu, a village [in Romania] close to the border with Hungary, approximately one or two years after the end of the Second World War. Those were still rough times, with many shortages. Almost all the people who lived in the village were poor. The situation was the same across the border, in Hungary, but there they were lacking in salt, which one could find in Romania. However, it couldn't be transported legally across the border, so my grandfather, together with his friend Ivan, decided to start to sell salt on the black market.

There was a connection in this regard, as my grandfather, who was born and spent his childhood in Bătania (Battonya in Hungarian), knew enough people in that village, especially since he had an uncle there, Soldan Traian, with whom he had very close relations. In 1907, the year when my grandfather was born, the village Bătania (Battonya), in which many Romanians and Serbs lived, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the border changes at the end of the First World War, my grandfather moved to the neighbouring village, Turnu, which had become by then a part of Romania. While there are only 6 kilometres between Bătania and Turnu, they have been separated by the border ever since.

Smuggling was very difficult, not only due to the risk of being caught, but also because carrying the salt on one's back was physically very demanding. They had to cross the border during the night, through the fields, not on the road, and when it rained, they could barely take their feet out of the mud. In the beginning, they were joined by a brother of my grandfather, also from Turnu, but he gave up quickly when he realised how difficult it was. Even I have memories from my childhood of my uncle telling the family: "I stopped going, I didn't do anything to deserve being put through this!"

At some point, my grandfather and his friend Ivan were caught and taken to the soldiers' picket of Turnu, and then they were taken back to Arad, to prison, for a short period of time (I can't tell you exactly for how long).

This picture was taken when the two of them came back from prison and were not sure what the future held in store for them. Many times peasants would take pictures of themselves in critical moments of their lives like disease, prison, when they didn't know if they would make it."

- from an account of Ms. Maria Gavra, born in 1957 in Turnu, currently teaching Romanian Language and Culture at University of Szeged.

Collected by: Anna Alexandrov, Laura Boglárka Bóka, Ana-Maria Despoiu, Šarūnas Rinkevičius, Diana Takácsova, Gabriel Vivas
Translation: Cătălina Vrabie

Ksenia Wilaszek recalls her experience from the 1st edition of the "In Between?" project.

When I decided to take part in the “In Between?” project I hadn’t expected to see so many new things and experience such wonderful moments. After all, I have been living in Lubusz Land – the area which we have visited – for six years by now. But to understand the region’s phenomenon properly, one needs to explore its diverse history.

Throughout the ages, Lubusz land belonged to various countries and members of many different nations lived here. One of the most crucial phases in the history of this area was the second half of the 20th century when, as a result of post-Second World War arrangements, Lubusz land became a borderland and the furthest western area of Poland. That was the time of a great population exchange which resulted in a mosaic of cultures, religions and ethnicities that we can observe in this region till this day.

During the “In Between?” project I explored Lubusz land with: Anna Anastasiia Zubko (Ukraine), Mariya Vasylyeva (Ukraine), Karen Nikiforov (Ukraine), Christoph Jakubowsky (Germany) and Kinga Czechowska (Poland). Igor Kalina (European Network Remembrance and Solidarity) and PhD Dorota Bazuń (Zielonogórski University) were our coordinators and guides. Thanks to them we were able to spend a whole week experiencing the uniqueness of the region. During those 7 days we carried out interviews with the Locals – citizens of the post Nazi Germany declaring Polish origins – and Bukovina inhabitants, mainly Poles who migrated to Lubusz land as a result of repatriation. We also talked to the inhabitants of “the other bank of the Bug river”: Ukrainians, Romanies and Greeks. Each of these people and their families shared their life story with us, giving us a glimpse at the tremendous history of the region.

What have I learned from visiting these places that I thought I knew so well? First and foremost, that it is possible to lead a beautiful life and cultivate our tradition, culture and religion along with people of different beliefs and history. I also learned more about the problems faced by the inhabitants of Lubusz land, where people differ from each other so much. Some of them were coerced to leave their homes and settle down on a new, foreign land. This couldn’t be carried out without any conflicts or misunderstandings caused by religious, social and linguistic differences. All in all, I admire the strength of those people who – despite these difficulties – managed to succeed in life. They have become a respected community and they can be proud of the place they live in.

Another lesson coming from communing with so many incredible people is how to love and call a place home, even when it has been assigned to us without our permission. Lubusz land isn’t a land of milk and honey for everyone. Many of its inhabitants still miss their first home. Talking about times before they came to these western lands evokes nostalgia in them. However, all the interviewees underlined that Lubusz land was their home now. Here they had spent most of their lives. Sooner or later each of them came to terms with their new situation and found themselves in this reality.

There is also a second group of people living here known as the Locals. They have been in this area for ages. Their lives and environments have undergone a huge transition, even though they haven’t moved anywhere. Their neighbourhood changed as new people arrived bringing their individual views of the world and their culture along with them. It’s been quite a challenge for the Locals to meet their new neighbours halfway and adjust to living in an inhomogeneous community. Therefore, what we can all learn from the local inhabitants is how to cultivate one’s traditions and customs while learning and applying new, foreign ones at the same time; how to build new and common relations on the basis of very different histories; and, last but not least, how to forgive and ask for forgiveness. I believe that all the stories we had the chance to hear during our visit in Lubusz land show that we mustn’t forget about our roots. At the same time, we need to learn tolerance and openness, and when to compromise and back away.

One of our interviewees said: “Everyone tells their story; all the stories are very similar and yet each is unique. Things are sad because every moment, every year, about thirty people (a moment of silence) pass away... We’re passing away… We are the last generation which can tell you how it used to be in those days, and soon we will be gone too.”

This is why the most important lesson for me coming from the “In Between?” project is that we have to care for memories and pass them on to the next generations. The stories of our interviewees included variety of moments: from hard and even traumatic ones to those which were optimistic and heartwarming. All of them will stay in our minds for long, and hopefully, thanks to programmes such as the “In Between?” project, other people will get a chance to hear them as well.

”Thoughts on how my grandfather visited Ukraine 28 years before I did.” Joanna Urbańska, one of the In Between? participants, compares her experiences from Bukovina with those of her grandfather.

My grandfather had been a teacher and as such he went on a trip to Ukraine with a group of teenage boys. For him this was not holiday time. Being responsible for these children doubled the pressure that came with his first time being so far away from home and family. Moreover, the trip took place in August 1988, a year before the Polish transformation. His wife says: “These were the times of communism. And these riots...! Do you know how nervous I was here with children while he was, you know... And here there were riots all the time. If they would come back or not... When they were leaving, there weren't any riots, they began later here!” My grandfather and his group stayed in a pioneer camp in the woods near Kharkiv and their interactions with local inhabitants were limited. In fact, he states that: “There, you understand, I think it was forbidden to leave the camp. And we would sneak out through a hole in the fence..."

My encounter with Ukraine was very different, but in some ways also similar. The aim of our “In Between?” study visit in Bukovina was to carry out ethnographic research and for that contact with the local people was necessary. We had many more opportunities for such interactions, due to the mere fact of staying in a hotel situated almost at the heart of Chernivtsi. Even though I visited Western Ukraine, many people expressed their concerns, alarmed by the on-going Ukrainian-Russian war. My grandfather went on his trip during an unsteady time for Poland and I went on mine when the situation became rough for Ukraine. Both of us also experienced a language barrier, but he dealt with it a lot easier, having studied Russian at school.

What my grandfather probably remembered the most about his visit was the train ride itself. In a postcard that he sent from Moscow he wrote: “When I'm writing this letter we've already been travelling for 36 hours. I don't know how much is still ahead of us”. In the end their journey lasted 52 hours and included a whole day of waiting for the train from Moscow to Kharkiv. Their ride back followed the exact same route and took just as much time. I cannot compare these experiences to my own, but what I want to focus on is border crossing. When asked about the border, my grandfather recalls: “At that time it was all Russia. Everything was Russia. The Russians were ruling it all. Only afterwards, 10 or 15 years ago, did it fall into pieces…” Nevetheless, I can easily relate to his stories about border crossing, even though he was referring to the former Polish-USSR border. A man he met on the train told him: "They [the officers] have even taken my socks off, but I haven't washed [my feet] in a long time, so, whatever...". The story continued, in my grandfather’s own words: “They searched him everywhere. But when it came to us, they only asked us questions. In the past they used to control everyone very thoroughly, they searched everything. It wasn't appropriate for them to do that to the youngsters. They asked me what I had. I said: this and this. They searched us in no time and they were gone." When I was crossing the Ukrainian-Polish border I felt the situation was somewhat similar. I, being a Polish citizen, received smiles and polite questions from the officers. In the meantime, my fellow travellers with Ukrainian passports were treated rudely and their possessions were double-checked.

My grandfather tends not to differentiate between Russians and Ukrainians, he even uses the terms interchangeably. He speaks as if he was under the impression that the Soviet Union was in fact populated by Soviet people (though he strongly emphasizes the differences between them and the Poles). “One time they [the pioneers] asked me if we would play football with them. I asked the boys: ‘Are we going to play?’, and they answered: "Yes, we can". I hadn’t known that all of these boys who were there, played in Warta [football team in Poznań]. So we won 2:0. They [the pioneers] couldn't get over it for a week. They said we should play again and this time we won 3:0. They stopped speaking to us. A Russian man cannot be defeated, you understand. They were teaching them [the pioneers] that. Do you know what they were doing? They were given just a bit of food and nothing more, and they went hiking for 2-3 days with their guardian. It was a sort of a survival camp.”

On one hand my grandfather speaks of Soviets as a separate nation, but on the other he has some history knowledge that lets him distinguish between Russians and Ukrainians as separate groups. "Stalin murdered half of the people of Ukraine, you understand... You know, what he did? He took away all the food. There were obligatory deliveries, and when they [the Ukrainians] didn't give enough food, he sent there the police and whatever people had hidden, he took everything away from them. And people died of famine, some people... many people died of famine."

In his stories, my grandfather presents also a different image of Ukraine. He mentions that their group was under observation, which at the time they didn’t realize: "And you know, they were watching us, I didn't know that. We were on a sort of a ground floor and there was also a basement. And one girl had a nice toy, of this remote-controlled kind, you know. And she was standing on a kind of a balcony... And the toy was riding there, downstairs... Right away, out of nowhere, a guy appeared, you know, from that basement, and wanted to catch it. A moment later, two more appeared, grabbed him and he was gone. He disappeared, I don't know where he came from.” Surprisingly enough, my grandfather does not remember being scared of being under surveillance and more importantly, he comes up with an explanation: "People there were normal, very polite, you know... Elderly... Only they were worried about us, because it was Ukraine, you know, different kinds of rebels".

Surprisingly, Polish national narration that often portrays Ukrainians as “different kinds of rebels” was also a starting point for many arguments even between Polish and Ukrainian researchers in our Bukovinian “In Between?” group. Obviously, modern day Ukraine does not follow the invigilation practices of the USSR. I think that nowadays, not only is it right to distinguish between Russians and Ukrainians, but it is necessary. Being in Ukraine it is impossible to forget which country you are in. In Chernivtsi every pole on the side of the road was painted blue and yellow, and the national colours were omnipresent on cars, doors and fences.

In the eyes of my grandfather Ukraine of late 1980s was definitely a great and rich place. He remembers that the architecture struck him as very sophisticated and more technologically advanced: "There was a golden dome, you know... Golden! I don't know how it was made, but it was really golden"; "There were 16 [underground stations] and all covered in marble. Everything in marble, everything... It was retty". He also points out a wide range of goods that some shops had to offer: "They had a lot of toys, there was a lot of toys there. If here [in Poland] there weren't such toys, they were there [in Ukraine]." With some kind of pride he exclaims: "So you see, I am a man of the world. They [his relatives] were in the West, but I was in the East!" For him, in 1988, the East was the world.

I think that after the fall of the USSR, for many eastern Europeans “the world” moved to the West – Germany, France, USA. What I observed and felt during my study visit was a very strong emphasis put on Ukraine’s bond with the western part of the world. This can be especially seen in Bukovina which used to be under the Habsburg rule. That period is cherished and often referred to, as indicated by the German language courses and summer schools, and bilingual German-Ukrainian books.

The stories that I presented are just a little part of my grandfather’s memories from his trip, but I think they are the most relevant ones. My aim was to show how some phenomena that my grandfather encountered in 1988 are still present in Ukrainian reality as seen through the eyes of the Polish visitors, even though their context is completely different now. Of course, such processes are unavoidable since the world changes every day. However, no matter how much political, geographical or social contexts get altered, the memories stay the way they were. To my grandfather, Ukraine is still the place that he visited 28 years ago: he even e keeps using present tense while describing it. For me, this is a great example of the idea of being “in between”. We, as people, are constantly trying to balance the actual, objective contexts that are thrown upon us with our own feelings and beliefs. It is not so much a clash of ideas as it is an attempt to follow official narratives without losing personal experiences. In my opinion, to be in between is to respect differences, understand reality and stay loyal to one’s values.

Joanna Urbańska - an aspiring cultural anthropologist and Hebrew student at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Passionate traditional music singer and traveller.

The October Revolution came to be one of the most notable events of the 20th century, with major repercussions for the political map of Europe. As the second phase of the larger Russian Revolution of 1917, the insurrection which took place on 25 October [7 November]* in Petrograd (modern day Saint Petersburg) resulted in the Bolshevik's seizure of power and subsequent establishment of the world's first communist state.

In 1917, Russia witnessed significant changes on a political level. The February Revolution brought about an abrupt end to the centuries-old rule of the Romanov dynasty with the forced abdication of tsar Nicholas II (who would later be executed). As a consequence, the so-called dual power solution was implemented, with the command of the state being divided between the Petrograd Soviet Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies and the provisional government. The escalating crisis within Russian society caused by the poor conditions of living, food shortages and mass unemployment, was only aggravated by the decision made by the provisional government to continue fighting the war against the Central Powers. Therefore, mass demonstrations began to take place whose leadership was often assumed by the Bolsheviks. Acknowledging the opportunity to take power, the Revolutionary Military Committee was born within the Petrograd Soviet, which planned to occupy strategic locations in the city.

On the day of 25 October [7 November], the Bolsheviks decided to make their move and led the uprising against the provisional government in Petrograd. The Red Guards took control over all major government facilities, including the railway stations, post and telegraph, with little to no opposition. Lenin announced a proclamation called "To the citizens of Russia!", in which he declared the seizure of power by the Military Revolutionary Committee. At night, the assault on the Winter Palace in Petrograd was launched. The insurgents surrounded the palace and some of them even managed to get in. The Bolshevik forces gave an ultimatum to surrender to the then trapped and practically defenseless members of the provisional government, who, ultimately, agreed to give up their powers.

While looking back at the 20th-century history, few events have been mythicised to such an extent as the October Revolution. This can be, in part, attributed to Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film reenactment of the events, October, which helped perpetuate the image of a bloody struggle in the Winter Palace with thousands of casualties. Moreover, this image was further reinforced by the official Soviet historiography. In reality, the October Revolution was a small-scale event, with no blood shed during the 'storming' of the Winter Palace.

In accordance with the communist ideology, the October Revolution – later also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution – destroyed an entire social system and replaced it with a better society, far superior than anything that had existed before. As later events have shown us, this proved to be a dangerous utopian vision. The October 1917 moment marked the beginning of 70 years of rule of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, which would only come to an end with the events of 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

by Cătălina Vrabie

*October Revolution actually started in November 1917. Its name derives from an Old Style calendar used at the time in the Russian Empire. In this article Old Style dates are accompanied by the New Style dates placed in brackets.

Bibliography:
Figes, Orlando, A people's tragedy. A history of the Russian Revolution, Penguin, 1996
S.A. Smith, The Russian Revolution. A very short introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002

The resettlement of almost 150 thousand Ukrainians, as well as Boykos and Lemkos, started on 28 April 1947. Its consequences are still visible today.

After the Second World War mass deportations of civilians were a common phenomenon. One of the groups influenced by the resettlements was the Ukrainian minority living in the South and South-Eastern parts of the post-war Poland. In 1947 Polish communist authorities decided to forcefully relocate Ukrainian inhabitants of three voivodships (Krakowskie, Lubelskie and Rzeszowskie) to the so-called Recovered Territories (Polish: Ziemie Odzyskane; lands which belonged to pre-war Germany but became part of Poland after the Second World War). The deportations affected also Lemkos and Boykos communities who also lived in the area.

Officially, the main goal of the relocation was to protect civilians by toppling the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Nevertheless, the region whose Ukrainian inhabitants were destined for deportation was bigger than the area influenced by the UPA's activity. The authorities' actual aim was mostly to enforce assimilation of the Ukrainian minority by creating a rupture within the autochthonic communities.

Direct pretext for the operation was the murder of general Karol Świerczewski, the Deputy Defense Minister on 28 March. He was claimed to be shot by UPA in an ambush in Bieszczady mountains. One month later the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party decided to start the resettlements on 28 April. At first the operation was codenamed "East" (Polish: Wschód), but later renamed to "Vistula" (Polish: Wisła).

Suspected members of UPA or the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) were sent to camps even before the operation had officially started. The most infamous was the Central Labour Camp located in Jaworzno, on the former premises of KL Auschwitz-Birkenau. Behind barbed wires were imprisoned not only UPA members but also other people who happened to be arrested during the relocations, including children, priests and members of intelligentsia.

Relocations within the operation "Vistula" followed one established sequence. Chosen villages were surrounded by soldiers and militiamen during the night. At dawn the inhabitants were told that they had 2-3 hours to collect a limited number of their belongings and livestock. Afterwards they walked to gathering points from which they were transported west by train. The journey itself could last even a fortnight. At least 27 deaths were caused by the horrific travel conditions.
At the final destination the relocated Ukrainians often discovered that most of the post-German buildings were already inhabited by Polish settlers, while those still vacant had been plundered or destroyed. What is more, food was scarce, since the deportees had left their crops at home and usually didn't have enough resources to prepare for the relocation. Moreover, people who fell victim of the operation "Vistula" were undergoing the process of forced Polonisation: family, cultural and religious contacts were limited and discouraged, and children were punished for speaking Ukrainian in public.

During the operation "Vistula" 140 662 people were resettled. The operation was terminated on 31 July 1947 but the relocations continued also after this date. Coming back to the fatherland regions was illegal and strictly forbidden; only few individuals risked returning in the early 1950's. Even the political thaw which started in Poland in 1956 and led to a reduced oppression against Ukrainian minorities did not encourage the deportees to come back. This void can still be observed in empty villages and destroyed churches slowly but steadily falling apart in the South-Eastern part of Poland.

After 1989 operation "Vistula" was condemned by the Polish Senate, intellectuals and the Polish President.

Text by Antoni Zakrzewski

Bibliography:

• Documents from the archives of the secret services, Łódź, Warszawa, Kijów 2012.
• Kazimierz Miroszewski, Zygmunt Woźniczka, Obóz dwóch totalitaryzmów Jaworzno 1943-1956. Materiały z konferencji naukowej "Historia martyrologii i obozów odosobnienia w Jaworznie w latach 1939-1956", Jaworzno 2007.
• Miroszewski Kazimierz, Centralny Obóz Pracy Jaworzno, podobóz ukraiński (1947-1949), Katowice 2001.
• Misiło Eugeniusz, Akcja „Wisła" Dokumenty i materiały, Warszawa 2012.
• Ukraińcy w Polsce 1944-1989, Walka o tożsamość, Warszawa 1999.

In 1917 a movement which started as rapid protests managed to disband the centuries-old tsardom in just a few days.

Down with the government! Down with the war! Comrades, arm yourselves with everything possible—bolts, screws, rocks, and go out of the factory and start smashing the first shops you find!
- unknown worker shouting to his colleagues day after the outbreak of Revolution

In the highly industrialized Petrograd, then capital city of the Russian Empire, workers' demonstration happened very often. And the third winter during the First World War was the harshest one yet. Due to low temperatures and snowstorms trains with food and firewood kept being delayed. It is no wonder then that during the winter months of 1916 and 1917 strikes were held in several workplaces, including the Putilov Plant where the revolution of 1905 started.

The day considered to be the beginning of the February Revolution was the International Women's Day, when female workers from the textile factory marched to the Nevsky Prospect to demand a bigger supply of bread. 23 February [8 March] began with street protests and disorders, demands for "Bread!"- recalled later Mikhail Ivanovich Tereschenko, one of the eye-witnesses of February Revolution*. – Political demands and slogans against the government were also heard: "Down with the Tsar!" and so on.

At first, it was fear of hunger which led many people to the streets, but with time their demands changed and evolved into political ones. Revolution spread and more people gathered on the streets. On the third day, protests turned into a regular fight. As Tsar was outside of Petrograd, Duma decided to replace policemen with soldiers. Most of them were young and unqualified cadets who openly agreed with protesters' demands. Instead of supporting the state, they joined the insurgents. On the next day revolutionaries managed to seize the arsenal, free prisoners and take over Petrograd Cartridge Factory which became their source of ammunition.

The situation was so serious that on 2 March 1917 [15 March 1917] Duma advised Nicholas II to abdicate. Tsar decided to cede power to his youngest brother Michael Alexandrovich who, however, declined the offer. The tsardom was dissolved. Ruling power was divided between two newly established institutions: Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (also known as Petrograd Soviet – representatives of the workers council) and the Provisional Committee of the State Duma. The latter constituted the Provisional Government which was led by the new prime minister prince Georgy Lvov.

This dual power solution caused a constant power struggle between Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet. Russia became a republic but economic and political problems kept mounting. The second revolution, known as the October Revolution, broke out only a few months later.

by Antoni Zakrzewski

*February Revolution actually started in March 1917. Its name derives from an Old Style calendar used at the time in the Russian Empire. In this article Old Style dates are accompanied by the New Style dates placed in brackets.

Bibliography:
Figes Orlando, Tragedia Narodu. Rewolucja rosyjska 1891-1924, Wrocław 2009.
Hasegawa Tsuyoshi, The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917, Seattle 1981.
Lyanders Semion, The fall of Tsarism. Untold stories of the February 1917 Revolution, Oxford 2013.

Armia Krajowa (Home Army) was probably the biggest resistance movement in Europe. What are its origins?

I pledge to resolutely keep secret whatever may happen to me. So help me God!
- the last lines of oath pledged by new soldiers of Home Army

After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and then Soviet forces in 1939, representatives of the Polish government decided to leave the country as they wanted to avoid being captured and forced to capitulate. Polish Government-in-Exile was created, based first in France and later in London.

During this time the Polish Underground State was also established. It consisted of many institutions mirroring state apparatus. The secret state, supervised by the Government-in-Exile, had its citizens, administration, press, and courts. One of the most important parts of the Underground State was its military arm which continued to fight for freedom against the occupiers.

At the beginning the military organisation was called Służba Zwycięstwu Polski (English: Service for Poland's Victory), but in 1940 the name was changed into Związek Walki Zbrojnej (English: Union of Armed Struggle), also known under the abbreviation ZWZ.

On 14 February 1942 Władysław Sikorski, the General Inspector of the Polish Armed Forces, ordered a further reorganisation of the Underground State’s military arm. Sikorski’s command is considered to be the birth of Armia Krajowa (AK – English: Home Army), though except for the new name the order did not entail any major changes in the organisation itself. The decision was supposed to help raise the profile of the service and boost coordination of all the actions conducted under General Stefan “Grot” Rowecki.

Armia Krajowa just like its predecessors remained an “umbrella organisation” which consisted of soldiers and civilians grouped in more than two hundred different political organisations and military units. In 1944, this powerful mass movement consisted of over 380 000 voluntarily soldiers – more than 10% of Polish citizens. Many historians consider it to be the biggest European partisan movement during the war.

AK soldiers made acts of sabotages like derailing trains and damaging locomotives. They were also responsible for the execution of SS general Franz Kutschera.

Special units performed verdicts of the underground court e.g. death penalty for treason. Different sections were devoted to the gathering and creating weapons, training of new members or contact with other movements.

What is more, AK had its own intelligence and counterintelligence services. One of their most spectacular actions was the interception of the V-2 rocket. It was hidden in the river Bug and later analyzed by the Polish engineers, before being smuggled in parts to London.

But the Home Army did not focus on the military actions only. A special section carried out information and propaganda activities. One of its most top secret projects was “Action N” – counterpropaganda aimed at German soldiers. To break their morals, AK published and delivered well-made fake leaflets which spread pessimistic predictions about the state of Nazi Germany signed by non-existing German underground organisations.

All this collective effort led to the most important action – Operation Tempest in 1944 with the Warsaw Rising as its apogee and a series of smaller risings against German occupiers. The aim was to defeat Wehrmacht and free Poland before the intervention of Soviet Union. On 19 January 1945, two days after Red Army took Warsaw, Armia Krajowa was dissolved by the order of last commander general Leopold Okulicki “Niedźwiadek” who officially disbanded AK and released soldiers from their oaths.

by Antoni Zakrzewski

Bibliography:

• Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, Courier from Warsaw, Detroit MI 1983.
• Stefan Korboński, Polskie państwo podziemne. Przewodnik po Podziemiu z lat 1939-1945, Warszawa 2008.
• Norman Davies, Boże igrzysko. Historia Polski, Kraków 2007.
• Wielka księga Armii Krajowej, Kraków 2015.
• Nr 284 gen. Sikorski do gen. Roweckiego: rozkaz o zmianie nazwy ZWZ na "Armia Krajowa" O. VI L. dz. 627/42. Dnia 14 lutego 1942 r. [w:] Armia Krajowa w dokumentach 1939-1945, t. 2, czerwiec 1941 - kwiecień 1943, Wrocław-Warszawa-Kraków 1990, s. 199.
• scienceinpoland.pap.pl

Remembrance should never be something cosy. Instead, it should be something uncomfortable, even painful. We need to remember not only the things that were done to us, but also the things that we did to others. We also need to remember how things look from other peoples’ points of view. Remembrance should be the bearer of truth, not of French truth, German truth, or Polish truth, but a complicated mixture of all our truths simultaneously. This is the kind of remembrance that is healthy. This is the kind of Europe that is healthy.

The following speech was delivered during the European Remembrance Symposium, Berlin 2013

Hello. Thank you. It is very nice to be here. Before I say anything else, I should, like everyone else, thank the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. Thank you for inviting me. Some of you may know that this is not the first conference at which I have spoken about remembrance. A few months ago I addressed the Euro Clio Conference in Erfurt where I spoke about the need for open hearts and minds when dealing with a history that involves other people as well as ourselves. Unfortunately, I was only at the Euro Clio Conference for a very short time, but was there long enough to notice one rather strange thing. The conference was quite busy, with delegates from all over Europe, and everyone was speaking in English as so often happens at these things. But, there was a distinct lack of English people there. I asked one of the organisers why this should be, ‘Where are all my countrymen?’ She simply shrugged and told me that it was always difficult to get British people along to these events.

I have to say that this does not really surprise me: Britain is not really very good at remembrance, particularly when it comes to events of the 20th century. And when I say the word ‘remembrance’ it has quite a specific meaning, especially for British people. It implies something sombre, something sad; remembrance is something you do during a minute of silence. But, British people do not like to remember things like the Second World War in silence. We like to shout about them! We like to celebrate them! Give us any excuse to sweep the dust off our Spitfires and fly them around and we’ll take it. Our novels and histories about the war regularly top the bestseller lists. We make TV dramas about the war, which often get the highest viewing figures. We sing songs about it, we create exhibitions and even make jokes about it. In fact, our jokes about the war, I think, are particularly revealing because we British take our humour very seriously, if that makes sense. It’s in our jokes that we often reveal our collective subconscious.

I heard a joke about the Second World War the other day that will give you an idea of what I mean. I have to warn you this is not a particularly funny joke, but it does demonstrate the point. It goes like this: ‘How many armies does it take to change a light bulb?’ The answer: ‘It’s at least six. The Germans to start it, the French to give up without really trying, the Italians to start, get nowhere and start from the other side, the Russians to do most of the work, but then smash everything up in the process, the Americans to finish the job off, but then claim credit for the whole thing, and the Swiss to pretend that nothing ever happened in the first place’.

I am quite surprised you laughed! Because actually, I think it is in many ways quite an offensive joke. You can tell immediately that this is a British joke because it criticises everybody except Britain. Everybody else has a reason to be ashamed of themselves because of the way they behaved during the war. But not us. We’re the heroes. The implication is that all of you Europeans are violent, treacherous or cowards, somehow. But, we British are superior in every way, not only because we are honourable, but because we won the war and you didn’t.

This is the way many British people, unfortunately, remember the war. Perhaps not intellectually, but it’s what we feel in our hearts. We have carefully constructed this mythology that allows us to think that we are better than everyone else. I think the equivalent joke about the British might go something like this: ‘How many British people does it take to change a light bulb?’ The answer: ‘Sixty million.’ Actually, the Russians and the Americans change the light bulb, but sixty million British people sit around and congratulate themselves on a job well done.

Now, I want to tell you a story about remembrance in Britain today. Last year, in 2012, the year that the Olympics came to London, we unveiled a brand-new memorial in the centre of the city. It was a memorial to the men of a bomber command, who flew airplanes over Germany, dropped bombs and so on in the Second World War. Now, there has never been a memorial for these men before in Britain because it has always proved too controversial.

Veterans of the bombing war were understandably a bit angry about this. Why should there be memorials to our sailors, soldiers, and fighter pilots, but nothing to remember the sacrifice of the men who flew the bombers? So anyway, nearly seventy years after the war they finally built this monument. This could have been an opportunity for greater reconciliation and understanding between Britain and Germany. It could have been a memorial to the 55,000 bomber crew who died, but also to the 500,000 Germans who also died under the bombs.

It could have been an opportunity to demonstrate to today’s generation how terrible war is, particularly that war. But, there was no mention of the bombing victims at all. In the end, it was just a monument to the British airmen, as if they were the only ones who had suffered. And I have to say that this is not a small monument, it’s huge: far bigger and grander than any of the other monuments that stand close by. I was expecting, when they unveiled this monument, that there would be some kind of controversy over it, especially since this was happening while the whole world was arriving in London to celebrate the Olympics.

At such a time it seemed like a very insular way of looking at our history. Besides, in the past there has always been controversy about whether Britain’s bombing war was justified. But, to my surprise this time around there was no controversy at all. The newspapers and radio covered the story, but there was almost no mention of the German victims at all. I myself wanted to write a piece for a newspaper asking why this should be the case, but my editor advised me against it. She said: ‘You won’t win any friends, but you will make lots of enemies.’ Nobody in Britain nowadays wants to hear about the victims of the war bombing. They only want to hear about the heroes, our heroes, British heroes.

So, this is the way that we tend to remember the war in Britain today. Where once we remembered the war as a shared catastrophe, a European catastrophe, we now refuse to acknowledge anyone but ourselves. We will remember our dead, but not yours. We will celebrate our dead as heroes and will not spare a thought for the people that we ourselves killed.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against a memorial to the men of bomber command. They were brave men and deserve to be remembered. What I object to, however, is that their sacrifice has been taken out of context. This, I do not think, is remembrance – at least not the proper, soul-searching remembrance that I would like to see. This is more mythology and it makes me profoundly uncomfortable.

That is the way much of Britain, unfortunately, is beginning to remember itself. But, how do we remember others? Let me tell you another joke. It’s a British joke, but you can probably tell it anywhere in Europe, certainly Western Europe, and it will be understood. ‘How many Germans does it take to change a light bulb?’ The answer: ‘Silence, Schweinhund. We are asking the questions here.’

Again, I am surprised; there is a slight titter there. I mean, that again is not a particularly funny joke. It’s quite offensive. I look at my wife over there and she looks horrified that I should come to Berlin and make a joke like that. It basically says that all German people are members of the Gestapo: this is a really offensive thing to say.

The thing about Germans is that they have had to put up with jokes like this for decades. And they have put up with them. It’s quite astonishing really. But the reason why Germans have put up with jokes like this is because, actually, they have no choice. The crimes that were committed in the name of Germany were probably the worst crimes in history. Since it is impossible to deny these historical crimes (although, as we know, there are some strange people who do actually deny them), there is really nothing that Germans can do but hold their hands up and to admit to them.

To their credit, this is something that Germans and Germany has been doing for almost seventy years now, mostly without complaint. In Germany, you call it Vergangenheitsbewältigung. In Britain, we can call it ‘taking it on the chin’. There is really something quite heroic about it. I think this quality – this willingness of Germans not to fight the subject, but to take our punches on the chin – has won Germany countless friends throughout Europe. No one in the rest of Europe can really imagine what it must have been like to live with this legacy.

I am reminded of the words of a Czech Jew interviewed by the Imperial War Museum in London. He was called Alfred Hübermann, who was liberated from Theresienstadt in 1945, and who said, I quote: ‘When I was first liberated, I thought that Germany should be wiped off the face of the map completely. There was a feeling that one would like to exterminate the whole German nation so this sort of thing could not happen again. But, as time went on, one realised that this was impossible. Whenever I met a German I thought: “What can I say to him?” I could only feel sorry to have to live with that on his conscience.’

It is no coincidence that this symposium is taking place in Germany. The last conference I went to about remembrance also took place in Germany. There are, of course, many reasons for this, but one of them is this German attitude towards remembrance. It is exactly the opposite of the British attitude. For the British, Vergangenheitsbewältigung is an irrelevance; we don’t even have an English word for it. But, for the Germans it is of supreme importance. Unlike any other country in Europe, all Germans are taught from a young age to appreciate their nation’s past sins. We are so accustomed to this that it is sometimes easy to take for granted. But, things are changing in Germany and there are now other forms of remembrance, other memories that are also emerging now.

Germans were not only perpetrators of the war; they were also victims. I was speaking a few moments ago about the British attitude towards bombings and this has begun to change. Well, the Germans’ attitude towards bombing has also begun to change. A few years ago there was quite a famous book by Jörg Friedrich called Der Brand: A History of the Bombing War, which in horrific detail described what it was like for German civilians to be bombed. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies here in Germany. It was actually on sale in Britain as well, but as you can imagine it only sold 3,000 copies. Surprise, surprise.

This is just one example. There are all kinds of other examples of the way that Germans are beginning to remember themselves as victims of the war. They remember the expulsions from other parts of Europe, they remember the rapes that took place here in Berlin when the Soviets arrived. And so on and so on. Now, this makes some people rather nervous; they don’t like the idea of Germans thinking of themselves as victims. Myself, I am not so worried. Of course, Germans suffered as a result of the war and should be allowed to remember that suffering as long as they also do not forget that they were the perpetrators. On the whole, I think that Germany generally gets the balance about right. What worries me more is the thought that some of the traditional German sincerity may be slowly draining away. Germans are tired of apologising for the war and their patience wears a little bit thinner every time outsiders like me make stupid jokes about the Germans being members of the Gestapo.

So let’s leave the Germans alone for just a moment and tell some jokes about other people. ‘How many Frenchmen does it take to change a light bulb?’ The answer: ‘Two. One to run away and the other one to telephone the Americans and ask them to do it instead.’ Actually, I have a lot of offensive jokes about the French. British people love this sort of thing: ‘Why did the French plant trees along the Champs-Élysées? So that the Germans could march in the shade.’ ‘Why don’t they have fireworks at Euro Disney? Because every time they fire them off, the French try to surrender.’ And did you hear about the new French flag? It’s a white cross on a white background. I could tell you dozens more. If you’re French, please do not be too offended, because when I was a child I used to spend my holidays in Italy and heard exactly the same jokes being told about Italians then. I daresay that we British tend to say the same jokes about the Dutch, Danes or Belgians if we are ignorant of those countries.

But, the French are a particularly good target. They were one of the world’s great powers before the war, so their embarrassment by Germany was all the greater. If there is one thing that we British enjoy, it is Schadenfreude; it may be a German word but, unfortunately, we British embrace it. Remembrance in France and indeed in much of Western Europe is much more complicated, I think, than in Britain and Germany. Once again, it is not made easier by outsiders coming and making stupid jokes about them. Almost every aspect of French remembrance is controversial, so I want to look at some of these aspects, in turn.

Firstly, when the French look back at the Second World War they remember themselves as victims. Half a million French people were killed in the war. Two million French men were taken to Germany as forced labour. The Nazis humiliated and abused French people and performed countless atrocities on French soil. The most famous symbol of French victimhood is the village of Oradour-sur-Glane.

If you remember, this was the village where one of the greatest atrocities took place: a German division came through and rounded up all the men and shot them. They then herded up all the women and children into a church and set fire to it. Nowadays the village of Oradour-sur-Glane is a national monument. It has been preserved exactly as it was on the day of the massacre as a memorial to French victimhood.

Even in this archetypal symbol, things are not quite straightforward. When the French investigated this atrocity in the 1950s they discovered that some of the SS soldiers who carried it out were not quite as German as they had thought. Some of them were actually from Alsace, which is a region of France. In other words, when you look at it more closely, the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane is not only a symbol of victimhood, but also of collaboration.

Collaboration is the dark shadow that lies behind every act of French remembrance. The French collaborated with the Nazis at every level of society – sometimes involuntarily, sometimes enthusiastically. Unsurprisingly, this is something that they do not often wish to commemorate.

I want to give you an example of this reluctance, this desire to forget. As is the custom in many countries, there is a tradition in France of naming streets and squares and boulevards after famous French heroes. In 1945, there were hundreds of streets named after the war-time leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain. This is not the equivalent of the German habit during the war of renaming every town square ‘Adolf Hitler Platz’. Philippe Pétain actually was a true French hero: he was the man who saved the nation during the First World War by repelling the Germans at Verdun. But, after the Second World War he was no longer a hero; he was a collaborator. So the French no longer wanted streets named after him and began renaming all of them. Today, there isn’t a single street in France bearing his name. I think the last ‘Rue Maréchal Pétain’ was in a village called Vinrin in northern France and it was renamed just this April.

All of this is quite understandable. To have a street named after you is a great honour and if you have acted shamefully you should have this honour withdrawn. But, there is also something else going on here. The French want to remember themselves as heroes, not as collaborators. When they drive down the Boulevard Général Leclerc in Paris or study at the Lycée Jean Moulin they remember their past as the past of heroes and martyrs. The collaborators, on the other hand, have been erased from public memory. Isn’t that just a little bit convenient? By erasing their names from streets and boulevards the French are removing the things that make them feel uncomfortable. It is much easier to pretend that collaboration did not really happen if you are not reminded of it everyday when walking down a street.

So you see, commemoration of the war in France is a much more complicated matter than it is in Germany or Britain. In Britain, we are all very happy to remember ourselves as heroes, regardless of what really happened in the past. In Germany, you are more resigned to remember yourselves as the villains, but in France they are somewhere in between – and it is difficult to define exactly where. On one hand, they are indeed victims and martyrs; on the other hand, they are heroes and resisters, but also obliged to remember some of the more uncomfortable things – the crimes they themselves committed and the way that many of them collaborated.

These are the shadows that lie behind every act of remembrance, not just in France, but in all of Western Europe. Incidentally, the French as we have heard collaborated not only with the Nazis. There was enormous sympathy with communists as well, which is another subject.

Let us get back to my terrible light bulb jokes (these are all real jokes by the way; I did not make any of them up and would have tried to make them funnier if I had!). The next one is this: ‘How many Polish people does it take to change a light bulb?’ The answer: ‘One. But it takes an entire Soviet division to make sure that he doesn’t go on strike.’

As you can tell, this is probably a joke from the 1980s and the first thing you notice is that it is not derogatory. The Pole in the joke is not a sadist or coward, or anything else bad. In fact, he is a hero: one Polish man holding down an entire Soviet division.

I would forgive you for thinking that this is slightly unfair. I have been rude about the French and Germans, so why can’t I also be rude about the Poles? Well, the answer is that I am not allowed to be rude about the Poles. Firstly, we British still feel guilty about what we did to Poland during the Second World War – or rather what we did not do.

When Stalin demanded the eastern part of Poland to become part of the Soviet Union, we did not stand up to him; we just rolled over and gave it to him. In compensation, of course, we then gave Poland a part of Germany and that caused all kinds of other controversies that are still raging today.

The second reason why we British cannot be rude about the Poles is that, frankly, we felt sorry for them. Not only had their country been invaded by the Nazis, but also by the Soviets. At the time when I first heard that joke in the 1980s, Poland still had to dance to the Soviet tune. Don’t worry, by the way, we no longer feel sorry for Poland and have all kinds of offensive jokes about them. But that is a different story.

My point is that if remembrance of the Second World War and its aftermath is complicated in Western Europe, it is much more complicated in Eastern and Central Europe. To begin with: what should be remembered? The problem of remembrance in Poland is not that of quality, but quantity: there is simply too much to remember. To start with, the Poles were the archetypal victims; invaded from both directions and brutally suppressed by two enemies. The entire country could be made into a memorial if we wanted to. Every street in Warsaw was the sight of some atrocity or other. All the main extermination camps for the Jews were in Poland and some of them also became infamous communist punishment centres after 1945.

But, the Poles were not only these archetypal victims. They were also archetypal heroes. Resistance to Nazi rule in Poland was massive and universal. Unlike in Western Europe, everyone really was in the resistance in Poland; there was a secret army there, a secret government, secret schools and universities. A whole network of resistance that encompassed not just thousands, but millions of people.

The Poles do not feel the need to be careful about the resistance myth like the French do. The Poles feel confident enough to shout about the resistance as proudly as they like. Of course, there was also a huge amount of resistance to Soviet rule. Not so much as against the Nazis, perhaps, but, as any Polish patriot will tell you, the last member of Armia Krajowa was not flushed out of the forest until the mid-1960s. That gives you a sense of the strength of feeling of these people.

So this is the way that Poles like to remember themselves. A bit like the British: they think they are all heroes and victims. If you go to Warsaw today, you will see a huge, brand-new museum dedicated to the Warsaw Uprising. And you’ll see the symbols of Polish war-time resistance – symbols from nearly seventy years ago – not only in the museum, but as graffiti on the walls and even stickers on the backs of people’s cars.

If the story stopped there, remembrance in Poland would be very easy. But, unfortunately, the story does not end there; of course it doesn’t. Poles were not only victims and heroes during the war, but were also perpetrators. Their treatment of Jews was nothing to be proud of and there are many places in Poland where Poles joined in with the Holocaust, sometimes enthusiastically.

Even more shamefully, this anti-Semitism continued after the war ended. In places like Kielce, for example, Jews continued to be attacked well into the late 1940s. As you can imagine, remembering this part of their history makes many Polish people very uncomfortable. Some people react to this discomfort simply by pushing it away, by trying to pretend to themselves that it did not happen or that it did not matter.

I can tell you a story that demonstrates this quite clearly. I was in Poland recently to publicise the Polish edition of my book. I must have been interviewed at least fifteen or twenty times and, as always happens with those interviews, a certain pattern began to emerge as to the sort of questions I was asked. Firstly, I was repeatedly asked by interviewers why Western historians always ignore the fate of Poland in their books. I did not really know how to answer these questions because – as far as I am aware – Western historians do not ignore Poland.

They talk about Poland all the time. In Britain alone, there are books about the invasion of Poland in 1939, books about the Warsaw Uprising, books about the Katyń massacre, the Soviet takeover, and about almost every act of the war in Poland. There are even books about individual PoIish airforce squadrons in Britain or about individual Polish army units. Some of these books are bestsellers in Britain. So, as far as I can see, in my country at least the West does not ignore Poland at all. But, for some reason this seems to be the way that Poles see things. Perhaps this is a hangover from the Cold War when Eastern Europe felt itself to be forgotten by the West. I honestly do not know. Perhaps Poles are so used to putting themselves at the centre of the story that they cannot quite under- stand why they are not at the centre of it in Britain and France and so on, too.

I think that in some ways some people feel that the West’s view of Poles is just not quite heroic enough and that our sympathy for the Poles is just not quite sympathetic enough for a nation of heroes and martyrs. The second question that I was repeatedly asked in Poland was why the West always insists on calling the Poles anti-Semitic. Again, I am not aware of any great Western belief that modern-day Poles are anti-Semitic. We do have a perception that many Poles during the war were anti-Semitic. But, even the most patriotic of Poles must acknowledge that anti-Semitism was widespread during the war and that evidence of it is overwhelming. This may not be a comfortable subject for Poles to acknowledge, but it is not an invention by Western historians.

One interview I had was particularly eye-opening in this respect. It was an interview with a national newspaper and for 45 minutes I was asked about why I talked about Polish anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the war. Didn’t I know that the Poles had helped the Jews, too? Didn’t I know that the Kielce pogrom was instigated by the communists? And so on and so on for 45 minutes.

I should explain to you that my book is not about Poles and not about Jews. It is about the whole of Europe in the aftermath of the war. It is full of atrocities, revenge killings, and stories of local civil wars that took place everywhere, from Norway in the north to Greece in the south, from France all the way through to Ukraine. The section about Polish anti-Semitism was about four pages long. Not only that, I was not particularly picking on the Poles. I actually spent far longer talking about anti-Semitism in Hungary and Slovakia, in Holland and France and so on. But this was the only thing he questioned me about for 45 minutes. That was the strangest interview I ever had.

It only dawned on me afterwards as to what really was going on here. This man was desperately trying to protect an idea. As far as he was concerned, Poles were victims and heroes during and after the Second World War; they were not the perpetrators. If some Poles were anti-Semitic during the war, it was not their fault; it was the fault of the Nazis. And if some Poles had been anti-Semitic after the war, that was not their fault either; it was the fault of the communists. I also asked this journalist at the time, who was it who beat those Jews to death in Kielce? It wasn’t the Nazis or communists, but ordinary Poles. And who were these communists who supposedly started the violence in Kielce? These communists were also Polish. This opens up a whole new problem for remembrance in Poland and indeed for the whole of Eastern Europe because Poles were not only victims and heroes, but occasionally the perpetrators of crimes. They were also collaborators.

Perhaps not collaborators with the Nazis – not so much in Poland, but certainly collaborators with the Soviets. In 1945, people in Poland joined the communist party in the hundreds of thousands. They helped the Soviets win control over the country. They even denounced resistance fighters to the authorities. This is not something that Poland particularly likes to remember now. Just like the memory of French collaboration during the Second World War, it remains a guilty shadow that simply will not go away.

Which reminds me of another joke: ‘How many communists does it take to change a light bulb?’ The answer: ‘None. Because the light bulb contains the seeds of its own revolution.’ I love this joke because, of course, the word ‘revolution’ in English also means ‘to revolve, to turn’, like when you’re screwing in a light bulb. But my point is that it was not only the Soviets who changed this light bulb in Europe, in Eastern Europe. The light bulb did a small part of the job, of the work, by itself.

Every nation in Europe has a different experience of the past. Some of us were never occupied by an enemy at all. Some of us were occupied by the Nazis, the communists, or by both. Some of us experienced fascism or communism as an outside force and some of us had our own home-grown versions of it. The idea that we can all see history in the same way is really just an impossible dream. All of us are simply too different from one another.

As I hope I have shown, in some respects problems in both East and West are exactly the same. We all want to remember ourselves as heroes and martyrs, but all have to face the inconvenient truth that we were also perpetrators in one respect or another. All of us are reluctant to face this because it hurts. Our problem is that we want our history to make us feel good about ourselves. So, we create nice cosy myths like pretty bubbles floating in the air. When outsiders come and pop these bubbles with their sharp and spiteful jokes, we do whatever we can to defend them.

In other respects, however, there are some very real differences between us. Not just between East and West, but between every single country. I have used France as an example of Western Europe, but the French situation is nothing like the situation in, say, Italy, Denmark, or Belgium. I have also used Poland as an example of Eastern Europe, but in many ways, actually, Poland was exceptional. The experience of both fascism and communism was very different in Romania or Hungary.

Every nation in Europe has a different experience of the past. Some of us were never occupied by an enemy at all. Some of us were occupied by the Nazis, the communists, or by both. Some of us experienced fascism or communism as an outside force and some of us had our own home-grown versions of it. The idea that we can all see history in the same way is really just an impossible dream.

All of us are simply too different from one another. So, is there anything at all that unites us? Well, yes, I believe there is and I can demonstrate this with another joke. Please, bear with me! ‘How many Jews does it take to change a light bulb?’ The answer: ‘It takes six million before the rest of the world finally sees the light.’ For the past sixty or seventy years, ironically, the Jews have been the unifying symbol in Europe. The Jews were unquestionably the greatest victims of the Second World War. Not only that, but we all acknowledge that we should feel guilty for what happened to them.

While the Nazis bear the ultimate responsibility for the Holocaust, we were all complicit: the French and Dutch administrators who gave out their addresses, the Italians and Belgian police who helped round them up, the Romanian and Hungarian railway officials who transported them, and so on. Even the countries that were not occupied by the Nazis during the war cannot escape the guilt because when the Jews came to Britain or Sweden or Switzerland for sanctuary, we turned them away.

The one act of remembrance that unites us all today is Holocaust Memorial Day. Indeed, this is probably the only time when my own countrymen shut up about how brilliant we are and join everyone else in respectful silence. Even that Polish journalist who questioned me so closely about anti-Semitism must feel sombre on Holocaust Memorial Day. It is a sacred day in our calendar. For non-Jews it is unique because, unlike virtually every other remembrance day, it is not a day to remember the things that happened to us. It is a day when we remember something that happened to others. I say ‘others’ here because there are very few Jews left in Europe today; less than one percent of the population.

But, actually in some way that is the wrong word to use because Holocaust Memorial Day also invites us to put ourselves in their shoes, to imagine what it would have been for us if we too had been Jewish. It is, therefore, simultaneously an act of contrition, sympathy and empathy.

There are hundreds of memorials to the Holocaust all over Europe and I would argue that these are the most important memorials we have. Not only do they remind us that this great war was not glorious, a terrible thing, but also of the horrors of extreme nationalism. They are a warning to all of us. More importantly they are also a warning that we all listen to.

So what is this warning? What is it trying to tell us? This is where I can finally put my finger on what I feel is one of the main differences between East and West. In Eastern and Central Europe, there is sometimes a perception that fascism and communism were somehow equivalent to one another. They were both totalitarian systems. They both committed terrible crimes. The wounds of fascism are old, but the wounds of communism are still fresh. So there is a temptation sometimes to remember the crimes of communism first and foremost. In fact, some people are tempted to remember the fascists fondly: since the fascists fought against the communists, they were the good guys, right?

But fascism and communism were not the same. For all their crimes, there was no communist equivalent of Auschwitz. There was no communist equivalent of the Holocaust. Sure, we should repudiate communism and what it did to Eastern Europe. But we should always remember to repudiate fascism more. I make this point only because I think that communism is all but dead now in Europe. However, fascism, in the form of radical nationalism, is still very much alive. This is a far bigger threat today than is communism. Extreme nationalism is an ideology that blames all our problems on outsiders. It promotes stereotypes that are not helpful: the sort of stereotypes I have been demonstrating in my stupid light bulb jokes. It poisons our memories with stories and false statistics that exaggerate our own victimhood and belittle the suffering of others.

This is why I think that remembrance, real remembrance, is so important. It should never be something cosy. Instead, it should be something uncomfortable, even painful. We need to remember not only the things that were done to us, but also the things that we did to others. We also need to remember how things look from other peoples’ points of view. Remembrance should be the bearer of truth, not of French truth, German truth, or Polish truth, but a complicated mixture of all our truths simultaneously. This is the kind of remembrance that is healthy. This is the kind of Europe that is healthy. It’s a hard, messy, and painful thing to do, but it is infinitely better than the pretty myths and fairytales that we would rather tell ourselves I am afraid that this is something that is potentially being lost today. Every nation in Europe is becoming more cynical of the European Union, more dismissive of neighbours more defensive about itself. We are all retreating to our own nationalist perspectives and own nationalist myths without ever bothering to look back on what it is we are throwing away.

Which leads me to one final joke: ‘How many ultra-nationalists does it take to change a light bulb?’ The answer: ‘None. Because they’d much rather sit in the dark.’

Thank you.

Keith Lowe is a British author and historian, who studied English Literature at the University of Manchester. For several years he worked as a history editor and in 2010 become a full-time writer. His first novel Tunnel Vision (2001) was shortlisted for the Author’s Club First Novel Award. Lowe has published two critically acclaimed history books about the Second World War and its aftermath. Inferno (2007) describes the firebombing of Hamburg by the British and American air forces in 1943. Savage Continent (2012), a history of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, covers the lawlessness, chaos, and unconstrained violence that gripped the continent from 1944 to 1949. It covers a variety of controversial issues such as postwar vengeance, ethnic cleansing and the many civil wars that took place across Europe. It won Britain’s Hessell-Tiltman Prize for history in 2013 and Italy’s Cherasco History Prize the following year. His books have been translated into 20 languages.

This article has been published as a part of the publication featuring the most significant texts from the annual European Remembrance Symposium, for the period 2012-16

>> Click here to learn more about the Symposium site

Scientific consultant: Professor Anna Engelking, Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences

“Were Europe to have its collective memory,
it is as diverse as Europe’s nations and cultures”
Claus Leggewie

Introduction

The project entitled “In Between? Searching for Local Histories in Borderlands of Europe” was born out of the need to experience local histories. In terms of its objectives, it is primarily an educational measure, and indirectly also a research and documentation effort. Its aim is to search for ways in which the past functions today. It is an attempt at looking at memory of the past in its individual dimension, between members of a single family (both as an intergenerational and intercultural experience), between various families within the same community or between various groups composed of communities with their often contradictory experiences and identities shaped by them.

The framework for this pursuit will be the in between category, broadly understood as being in between in terms of identity. The search for local histories will make it possible to enter an area of identity-shaping factors and activities, which consequently have an impact on shaping relations between people as members of various groups. Stories, recollections but also daily practices which may derive from past events will be the basis for reflexion on the local dimensions of the in between phenomenon.

The project is to be a pretext for young Europeans to experience the “borderland”, both in geographical or political and cultural, social and intergenerational terms. It will also be an opportunity to discover individual and collective memories, yet primarily to meet the “Other” and to listen to their story in the context of the dramatic events of the 20th and 21st centuries, resulting in reconfigurations of individual and collective identities. The places visited saw tragic events play out in the past (e.g. repressions, forced resettlement, the Holocaust), which affected not just individuals or families but entire communities and had a vital impact on the shaping of local identities.

We believe that by linking a research-oriented approach to the reality under observation (related to the carrying out of ethnographic field studies: participant observation and biographical interview) with historical examination of the past will help the participants of the "In Between?" project better understand the people they meet on their way.

During a week-long stay in one of four regions and meetings with specific families, the participants of the "In Between?" project will, in international teams, collect preliminary documentation, to let them express their subjective understanding of the notion of in between using their own voices. In December 2016, they will all convene at a summary seminar, to yet again look at their borderland experience acquired in the field.

Project objectives

Identity and in between

Identity is one of the key terms in the “In Between?” project. Understood as a sense of belonging to a certain group, it is created when in contact with the “Other” (Eriksen 2009). It must be remembered that everyone has got a number of parallel and not mutually exclusive social identities and it is only the context that determines which ones are activated/used at any given time. And so identity is not constant, but constantly created and negotiated in contact with others. According to Fredrik Barth, for ethnic identity to survive it must be solidified in social situations in which one participates. Such areas are most frequently religion, language, work or marriage (Barth 1969). This definition can be extended from the ethnic dimension to the universal understanding of identity, which can be perceived as a constant social practice in which individuals take part and through which they define themselves, and the in between state, being in a borderland, assumes in this case the existence of two or more social groups or spaces between which one is or happens to be. Such constant negotiations as to one’s belonging can be expressed by making specific choices or by specific daily practices.

In the “In Between?” project, there are many dimensions of being in between to be discovered by the participants. First and foremost, it will be the individual level. Then the family followed by relations between individual families (but also individuals) in a given region, and then between various groups: ethnic, religious, cultural, linguistic or social. The project is to be an attempt at finding an answer to the question what such being in between can be in particular local contexts. Work in international teams in specific spaces, primarily based on studying communities, their histories and contemporary practices of daily life, yet also referring to the participants’ knowledge and experience, will be an opportunity to jointly interpret the phenomenon in question. Meeting people who live in spaces “between” will not only facilitate a search for answers as regards the essence of the in between state but also show a multitude of possible interpretations, perspectives and experiences of the phenomenon in various European regions. This is also an opportunity to reflect on the “borderland” category. What can it signify today? Where can it be found in the dynamically changing reality where one has got a number of parallel coexisting and constantly negotiated identities? Whether and how can the notion of borderland be implemented in a transcultural world described by Wolfgang Welsch, where cultures are not homogenous or separate any more but constantly influence each other and merge? To what extent is transculturality a state of being in between? This is also a question concerning identity: who are we? Who are they and how do they define themselves?

Another category whose contemporary ways of functioning can be examined by implementing the “In Between?” project is “in-betweenness”[1] (Jackson II 2010), understood as a hybrid identity (Jorge 2008). It assumes that an individual with some migration experience in the post-colonial era exists between two national identities – the current one where he/she does not fully belong and the past one where he/she cannot return. The displacement experience equips the individual in recollections going beyond the narrow boundaries of national belonging. Can this term, created on the basis of post-colonial studies, serve as a tool for interpretation of the situation of individuals in Central Europe[2]? How can experiencing conflict and interaction between one culture and another (or a set of values, principles) function in heterogeneous communities? Can, and how, be this hybrid identity extended from individuals to families?

Another important notion behind the “In Between?” project is the “borderland” from its title. Europe means hundreds of various “borderland” spaces. Scholars call for a separate subdiscipline focusing on the issue (e.g. anthropology/sociology of borderlands). Researchers are moving away from the geographical meaning focusing on its cultural and social meaning. Grzegorz Babiński says that “contemporary borderlands, and now maybe only boundaries of national cultures, are often only subjective and symbolic in nature, as frequently there are not even linguistic differences there” (Babiński 1999). Andrzej Sadowski, in turn, claims that “borderlands are becoming increasingly subjective, symbolic, defined by the identities and identifications expressed by their inhabitants” (Sadowski 1999). In the context of the “In Between?” project, the perspective postulated by Justyna Straczuk is also inspiring, seeing borderland as a communication community, “which develops in the course of daily life, a cultural amalgamate which constitutes an integral entity with a wider repertoire of elements coming from traditions meeting” (Straczuk 2004). The project is going to be an opportunity to check how that “communication community” is shaped in different families. Is borderline, and how, subject to different interpretations made by members of different communities or groups? The project will also offer a chance to search for answers to the question “whether borderland man exist”. What shapes his identities6? How are relations built between borderland people? What role is played by past and current migrations, motivated by various factors, in shaping local identities?

The Past

“Each 'present' brings together movements of different origin and different rhythm. Today has its roots at the same time in yesterday, the day before yesterday, and some time ago,” wrote Fernand Braudel (Braudel 1971, p. 60) in his book Textes des ecrits sur l'histoire. The past and memories superimposed onto each other shape various identities which function in parallel. In order to discover that wealth and diversity of identities one must watch those individual and local memories in their qualitative and miniature (rather than global and quantitative) dimension.

With such objectives in mind, it seems useful to invoke the microhistorical approach postulated by Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni in 1979. Trying to grasp the reality of the historical world, they were looking for the “normally extraordinary” in the lives of ordinary people (Ginzburg, Poni, 1979, after: Domańska 2005). It was, on the one hand, moving away from great narratives, and on the other exploring history from the perspective of an individual or a small community. (Domańska 2005). Microhistory “tells a story of man thrown into the world, of human existence in the world, human experience of the world and ways to experience it. It is then a history of experiences, feelings and private microcosms. Man and his fate are encountered by means of cases, “miniatures”, anthropological stories which let one enter the daily reality like a probe” (Domańska 2005). Observing all that is ordinary and mundane lets one search for answers as to being in between in its most daily but also particular dimension. Culinary practices, religious practices, one’s relation with their body, educational or professional choices, language, matters of kinship – the in between state may be manifested in these and many other areas. Depending on the history of a given person or family, they can come into being in various configurations.

When exploring or documenting individual, familial or local histories, one must be aware of the relation between history and social memory as well as individual memory. In the “In Between?” project, “memory” will be treated not just as a tool for discovering knowledge about the past and knowledge about borderlands but manly as a source of knowledge about the in between state and the identities being discovered (Kaniowska 2003)[3], as it is memory that creates one’s identity. Memory is a source of knowledge about man, as it accumulates and consolidates his/her experiences (Kaniowska 2003 after: Ingarden 1995). A study of identity is a study of the memory (i.e. narrative about the past) of those who are at the same time the main characters and authors of the story and who fill that past with meaning through the need to remember it and transfer it on (Kaniowska 2003).

This is confirmed by the postulates put forward by Maurice Halbwachs, who has claimed that memory is no mechanical remembering of facts but their reconstruction in a certain framework offered by the community[4] one is a member of. “In society, man typically acquires recollections, recognises and locates them” (Halbwachs 2008) – without a group individuals would not attach to past events meanings which would allow to ascribe them the role of events worth remembering. Individuals remember when adopting a collective point of view – they remember what the group wants to be remembered. There are as many various memories as there are groups. At the same time, social memory (as memory of a group) materialises and manifests itself in individual memories (Halbwachs 2008).

Methodology

In the “In Between?” project we do not define areas – identities that we want to explore. We do not want to limit the search to one’s national, ethnic, religious or linguistic identity. This may also be an experience of migration or social roles. Assuming that identities are multidimensional and constantly constructed anew, we leave a space for the young researchers so that they can find themselves in between areas of most interest to them. While guided by the anthropological assumption of openness to what one meets in the field – we do not want to impose the study framework in advance.

The “In Between?” project will be carried out based on the “oral history” method, i.e. collecting stories about lives of ordinary people, participants of and witnesses to past events. This working method based on recording (audio or video) and making transcripts of the testimonies lets one see history and reality through the eyes of an individual. Listening to interpretations of particular facts, the researcher can appreciate the multidimensionality of phenomena which seems obvious at first. It also helps examine identity by exploring the conditions of one’s religious, cultural, territorial or social belonging. All those elements constitute the research area in the “In Between?” project.

In the case of this method, the descriptive dimension is not less important. Interviews are not merely dry declarations of belonging or participation. They are narratives, which facilitate sketching out a context and introducing reality of daily practice and actions.

One must obviously be aware of the controversy surrounding this mode of work. Memory is not just a list of facts but an internally and externally conditioned interpretation of the importance of events and individual experiences. However, what may be a disadvantage to some, should be treated as a gain in this case. Traditional historical methods based primarily on analysis of found sources appear to be less effective in search of individual experiences of the in between state than induced sources. The use of audio and video recordings will allow the project participants to work creatively on the interpretation of the materials collected.

We want to search for the essence of in between mainly in individuals and families, hence our focus on memory in these two dimensions. We are going to talk about both important events in the history of individuals and families and about daily life (also understood as annual and family festivities). We would also like to know the impact of the sense of being a cultural minority or holding the official status of a minority on the sense of being in between. What problems does it entail? What privileges? How does an individual/family function in relations with authorities (locally but also in terms of the state)?

The search for an answer as regards the ways of being in between will be a combination of the oral-history method with ethnographic and anthropologic methods. These will not be, however, classic, long-term stationary studies of a local community but rather qualitative studies based on interview (biographical, autobiographical narrative interviews and interview by questionnaire) and analysis of family memories or local/group memories, and remembrance practices. The essence of anthropology is a detailed understanding of a phenomenon through field research treated as the most important source of knowledge (Eriksen 2009). The in between state is just such a phenomenon the project participants will strive to become familiar with and comprehend.

As remembrance practices we understand various activities undertaken in order to preserve, transfer and manifest the past. In the familial dimension, this may be collected archives and keepsakes. Interesting and inspiring activities may be performed with photographs or objects attributed sentimental/personal/family value. They can be collected in albums, displayed at home or for various reasons handed over to museums, halls of remembrance or archives. They can also be symbolically destroyed in an attempt to sever one’s ties with the past. At group level, these may be various activities performed in the public space or virtual space. This is confirmed by Pierre Nora, who claims that memories are rooted in specific group contexts – in specific places, practices, gestures, images or objects (Nora 2009). Such diverse activities may also be the starting point for a search for different variations of the in between state.

In memory studies, a major role is played by the division into different types of memory – primarily that into individual and collective memories. What also matters is the role of the family and intergenerational memory transfer. This is pointed out by Jan and Aleida Assmann, German memory researchers. Jan Assmann has made the distinction between communicative memory and cultural memory, the former based on experience and biographical and factual in nature. It is shared by a single (participating or witnessing) generation which can emotionally transfer it to its children (as successive generations). So transmitted, it can last 80-100 years, with the family playing the key role in the process. In time, the need appears to institutionalise that communicative memory transferred through generations. Then its preservation in a specific form becomes important. To that end, archives and museums are set up, and various performing arts appear which lend specific forms to memory of the past. In this way, cultural memory develops (Assmann 2008).

Aleida Assmann, in turn, differentiates between individual memory and that of generations (the latter appearing as a result of experience transfer within the family, i.e. between generations) as well as collective (national-political) memory and cultural (archival) memory (Assmann 2013). The two first mentioned could be classified as communicative memory and the other two as cultural memory according to the division postulated by Jan Assmann. In the “In Between?” project, the young researchers will be able to both focus on one of the proposed memory dimensions and explore the relations developing between various memory dimensions in specific communities. This may be particularly interesting in the context of accounting for the power relations between the dominant group and a minority group which can compete or support each other in remembrance practices in many different ways.

In the case of becoming familiar with local memory/history of the twentieth century, particularly in trauma-affected communities, it is worthwhile to take into consideration the category of “postmemory” (a term coined by Marianne Hirsch). This marks an important distinction between the memory of a direct witness or participant and the memory of successive generations, not so clearly highlighted in Jan Assmann’s notion of communicative memory. In the case of postmemory, the contemporary generations are not/have not been witnesses to the most tragic events of the twentieth century. They are more of recipients and transmitters of mediated content – both in the form of direct accounts and – mainly – texts of culture/products of culture (films, books, museums, monuments, etc.). This is mediated memory, “a relation linking the generation that participated in the experience of a cultural or collective trauma with the successor, which ‘remembers’ it only thanks to stories, images and behaviours making a context for their growing up. This experience has been transferred to them in such an emotional manner that it appears to be a foundation of their own memory.”(Hirsch 1993)

Summary

For us, this physical and intellectual (research-related) discovery of borderlands and the in between phenomenon has a dimension of experiencing otherness to it. Apart from showing that life can be different, being on the periphery and meeting “Others” makes us conscious of being immersed in our own culture. In turn, microhistory – qualitative and miniature, not global and quantitative (Domańska p. 244) – lets us hear polyphonic diversity (Hans Medick). Such an approach shakes us out of the safe position of the only legitimate narrative leading on to a path of dialogue-based memory, which makes it possible to accommodate in one’s own memory not just one’s own suffering but also that of others (including that caused by ourselves) (A. Assmann 2011). This resembles the agonistic mode of remembering[5], which makes it possible to draw on experiences of many different event participants (victims and perpetrators of violence as well as observers). It offers a possibility to express the multitude of past experiences and accept them. Both approaches let us build the foundations of solidarity with others on the basis of reflexion and dialogue.

The project participants are free to choose the forms in which to eventually present their interpretations of the in between phenomenon. These may be texts, but also video-notes, audio recordings, photo documentation or animation-performance acts. Thanks to the diversity of the media and the participants’ competences, we wish to showcase the multidimensionality of experiencing the in between in individual, family, group, local, but also intercultural, intergenerational and European dimension.

References

Andrade Fernandes, Jorge Luis. Challenging Euro-America's Politics of Identity: The Return of the Native. London: Routledge, 2008.

Assmann, Aleida. Miedzy historią a pamięcią. Antologia [Between History and Memory. Selected Texts]. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2013.

Assmann, Jan. Pamięć kulturowa. Pismo, zapamiętywanie i polityczna tożsamość w cywilizacjach starożytnych [original:Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination]. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2008.

Babiński, Grzegorz. “Pogranicza etniczne i kulturowe” [Ethnic and cultural borderlands]. Marian Malikowski, Dariusz Wojakowski (eds.), Między Polską a Ukrainą. Pogranicze – mniejszości, współpraca regionalna. Rzeszów: Mana, 1999.

Braudel, Fernand. Historia i Trwanie [original: Textes des ecrits sur l'histoire]. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1971.

Cohen, Anthony. Symbolic Construction of Community. London, NY: Routledge, 1985.

Domańska, Ewa. Mikrohistorie: spotkania w międzyświatach [Microhistories: meetings in interworlds]. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2005.

Eriksen, Thomas. Małe miejsca, wielkie sprawy [original: Small Places – Large Issues]. Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza Volumen 2009.

Halbwachs, Maurice. Społeczne ramy pamięci [original: Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire]. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2008.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning and Post-Memory. Discourse. 15, no. 2 (1992 – 1993) (1993).

Jackson II, Ronald L. Encyclopaedia of Identity. London: SAGE Publications, 2010.

Kaniowska, Katarzyna. “Antropologia i problem pamięci” [Anthropology and the notion of memory]. Konteksty. Polska Sztuka Ludowa, LVII 2/3, pp. 57-65 (2003).

Pierre, Nora. “Between the memory and history: Les Lieux de Mémoire”. Working Title: Archive, no. 2, pp. 4-12, 2009.

Sadowski, Andrzej. Tożsamość. Identyfikacja. Pogranicze” [Identity, Identification. Borderland]. Sadowski Andrzej, Mirosława Czerniawska. Tożsamość Polaków na pograniczach, Białystok: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Białostockiego, pp. 11-32, 1999.

Straczuk, Justyna. Cmentarz i stół. Pogranicze prawosławno-katolickie w Polsce i na Białorusi [The cemetery and the table. The Orthodox-Catholic borderland in Poland and Belarus]. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2006.

[1]Individuals who experience „in-betweenness” face continuous negotiations between being here and there, themselves and others, thereby creating their hybrid cultural identity.

[2]Whose history can also be examined from the perspective of post-colonial criticism.

[3]According to K. Kaniowska, in anthropology memory plays various roles: of a source, a subject and a tool.

[4]A family can be perceived as a community.

[5]The modes of memory were discussed by David Clarke during the conference “Genealogies of Memory” organised by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity in Warsaw in December 2015.

“The guardianship of the Holocaust is being passed on to us. The second generation is the hinge generation in which received, transferred knowledge of events is transmuted; into history, or into myth.” (Hoffman 2004, xv)

INTRODUCTION

I am the child and grandchild of Holocaust, and what I call Diaspora, survivors. The effect of these traumatic events on my life is becoming more apparent as I get older until it became clear that I would have to trace their origins from the time of my parent's childhood up until now and begin to expose these hidden life-long feelings. The impetus for this journey began as an answer or explanation as to why I almost never say the words, 'I love you'. During my grandparent's war-torn generation the ability to express affection almost disappeared. It was as if expressing words of love after the horrors they had faced would somehow demean the enormity of the tragedy. If you could love again, then how bad could it have really been?

Innumerable stories have been written, and continue to be written even at this late stage, about the Holocaust and dramatic survival. As the population of original survivors is gradually disappearing, it becomes even more important for the next generations to gather as much of the factual information before it is too late. I have come to realize that not only had my mother’s family survived the Holocaust; but that my father's family had also 'survived' in pre-WWII Poland, living through anti-Semitic pogroms, emigrating to Palestine where they suffered enormously, eventually leaving for the United States, arriving in 1929 the year of the Great Depression.

All of them had experienced forced abandonment of the known to enter the unknown; changes in homeland, languages and names due to the historical, wartime events that were not in their control. These affected my parents and grandparents, and ultimately my generation as well. It is my purpose here to discuss the trans-generational traumatic effects that these experiences had had on a specific population, family being just one example. Eventually, we, the children and grandchildren will be required to come to terms with our ancestor's pasts as best as we can, incorporating them into our own lives; present and future.

It is my hope to begin this process as an intergenerational and international discussion. Many of us alive today have been affected by the Holocaust in some way; Jewish or not, survivors and their families or not, and yet we continue to relate to the Holocaust as if it had begun only recently. Unbelievably, we are a mere seventeen years from the centennial anniversary of the Nazi party's initial rise to political power in 1932. Any attempt to break the near-pervasive silence that has been the norm in war-torn, twentieth-century America, Europe and the world may hopefully yield positive results in unifying the global village of today.

Original Holocaust survivors hold a unique responsibility to continue to tell their own stories for as long as they can. One example of this is the autobiography, "Once We Were Eight" published when the author was 85 years old. In it he expresses his motivation for telling his own tragic story of survival including the loss of six out of eight members of his own family:

"'Zachor' – Remember. This has become my mission. I grab every opportunity that comes my way to share my history so that the Holocaust is not forgotten. One day, in the not too distant future, there will be no survivors to tell their stories, so it is imperative that I, and others like me, share their Holocaust experiences so that no one can ever doubt that the Holocaust happened. My goal is to educate students, and all who I encounter, so that they in turn will educate others. The history of the Holocaust must not die when survivors are not here to tell first-hand what happened during that terrible chapter in history. To me, it is still unbelievable and inconceivable that these horrific crimes were committed by civilized nations in the 20th century". (Fishler 2014, 156)

The Unter-Stanestie/ Vivos (Vivis) Pogrom: July 5-6, 1941

My mother and grandparents survived a pogrom which took place on July 5th and 6th, 1941 in the small village of Unter-Stanestie and in its tiny, neighboring, almost unknown, unmentioned village of Vivis (Vivos) in Romania (now Ukraine). A summary of the events are detailed below as part of a concise and accurate article:

“In Stanestii de Jos, a village east of Czernovitz…the locals organized a Ukrainian national committee to take control of the village ‘arresting’ the Jews and holding them in the mayor’s office or the saw mill. The Ukrainian nationalists soon began to murder their prisoners, and when the Russian army reached Stanestii de Jos, the pogrom was intensified. Upon his arrival, the Romanian gendarmerie’s commander put a stop to the blood bath, but by that time between eighty and one hundred and thirty Jews had already been killed. The fact that a local gendarmerie commander could stop a massacre underscores the fact that the impetus for pogroms often came from below... The Jews barricaded themselves in their homes, and the Ukrainians ‘patrolled’ usually armed with agricultural tools, for firearms were not widely available. The Ukrainians then decided to ‘fetch’ the Jews from their homes and concentrate them in one place. A list was compiled from which the names of the Jewish men were read out one by one, after which these were led away… Most of the Jewish men were beaten to death- only a few were shot….Chana Weisenfeld, who was …from Stanestii de Jos, related how Ukrainian neighbors rampaged through the village armed with hammers and sickles. According to Weisenfeld, more than eighty Jews were killed in the pogrom. Close to the village, local perpetrators killed a pregnant woman and beheaded her… The massacres of Jews by the local population sometimes seem especially puzzling because the perpetrators are civilians and the victims are their neighbors…. Later when it became clear that it was possible to murder with impunity, people murdered so that no one would be there to remember the stolen property.” (Geissbuhler 2014, 434-439)

The pogrom, like many others that occurred that summer of 1941, represented the Romanian's attempt to “cleanse the terrain” of its’ Jewish population. (Solonari 2010, 160) No Jews remained in Stanestie. My family’s survival was close to miraculous after my grandfather was captured and escaped. ChanaWeisenfeld, mentioned above, is my mother’s first cousin, aged 82 today. The pregnant woman, beheaded in the forest of Vivis, was my grandmother’s sister and my mother's aunt. Her name was Chaika. I am her namesake in Hebrew; Chaya, and in English; Carol.

Transnistria

After the pogroms, survivors travelled for several months, from July until October 1941, on foot or by wagon, surviving typhoid and horrid conditions, under constant Romanian guard until they reached the Transnistria concentration camps. My mother’s family survived. My great-grandfather did not. There, life under the harsh hands of the Ukrainian/Romanian/Nazi guards was exceedingly difficult.

Aharon Appelfeld, the prolific Israeli author, was born in Stanestie in 1932 like my mother. He survived the pogrom in which his mother perished and was sent to Transnistria. He describes life in the camp and the unendurable silence there. “During the war, one did not talk… Whoever was in the Ghetto, the camp and the forests, knows silence from within…The war is a hothouse of listening and of silences. Extreme hunger, quenching thirst, the fear of death makes words redundant. As a matter of fact, they are unnecessary. In the Ghetto and the camp only those who lost their sanity talked, explained and tried to convince. The sane did not talk.” (Appelfeld 1999, 95)

The history of the Holocaust in Romania is not well-known and even less well understood. This lack of clarity was due to the historical "unfolding of events…The fate of its Jews varied depending on the geographic areas where they lived …[and] the fact that Transnistria was not a part of the territory of Romania, but only under its administration, changing political circumstances and erratic government policies.”(Nizkor Project 1991, 1) This confusing geopolitical status ultimately led the survivors of Transnistria not to “talk about their tragedy because they were too traumatized…Their experiences were trivialized because Transnistria had not been publicly acknowledged for the tragedy it really was." (Bernhardt 1997, 1) As of 2004, a total of “between 45,000 and 60,000 Jews …were killed in Bessarabia and Bukovina by Romanian and German troops in 1941. Between 105,000 and 120,000 deported Romanian Jews died as a result of expulsions to Transnistria." There, "between 115,000 and 180,000 … Jews were killed.” (ICHR 2004, 306)

Politanki, Ukraine

Sometime soon after their arrival in Transnistria my mother's family received a reprieve of sorts that more than likely saved their lives. The Russian owner of a melon farm bribed guards to release 40-50 laborers from one of the camps. They were taken to a barn, each family to a room, and there they lived for close to three years near the tiny Ukrainian village of Politanki. They lived a mini-Schindler existence; hard labor in exchange for life, food, and advance notice if the Nazi or Romanian army approached. If they did, they were sent deep into the forest; food sent out to them and then brought back after the danger had passed. The farmer had been offered the highest award for saving Jews by the Israeli government; but he refused to accept it. Perhaps he had worried about future repercussions in his own country it became known that he had helped Jews and gone against his own government during WWII.

After the Holocaust

After the war ended, my grandparents returned briefly to Stanestie. There, killers roaming the forests were searching for and murdering any potential witnesses to the pogroms that had been carried out by local, non-Jewish villagers. Warned by a kindly neighbor, after spending a few hours at her home, they left before dawn, never to return. No wonder my grandparents left Romania as quickly as they could and ran to Germany, empty-handed. Nobody there was going to take responsibility for Jews who had survived anyway. The rapidly changing borders had made it convenient for many countries to say, ‘They aren't ours’. The lack of facts may be useful for those who say the Holocaust never happened on a large scale. As the last original survivors pass away, the voices of those who perished without gravestones will be extinguished forever. No, this concept is not new; but because of it I continue thework, to pay homage to members of my close family who I know had existed in Romania and Poland until July 1941.

PRESENT

Post-memory

Three-quarters of a century have passed since the beginning of WWII and we may ponder the continuing widespread interest in the Holocaust and its outcomes. Many of us are looking for connections to our pasts by trying to fill in the empty holes of what we have never known; the truth about the histories of our own families. It could be that I, like many of the group called second and third generation survivors of the Holocaust are cursed to go on a personal quest for answers, and were so cursed the moment we were born. Discussed by Eva Hoffman in her autobiography, she describes being the child of Holocaust survivors and what this may mean to her and others like her. She proposes that, “If I wanted to understand the significance for those who come after, then I needed to reflect on my own and my peers’ link to that legacy, to excavate our generational story from under its weight and shadow-to retrieve it from that ‘secondariness’ which many of us have felt in relation to a formidable and forbidding past.”(Hoffman 2004, xi)

I can use myself as an example of one who has experienced this search for knowledge and answers; the Holocaust as a 'rumor' or word that has no meaning, turned into a black hole of silence, sadness, depression, of those around me with no explanation. How could I be completely happy? I never felt like I truly fit in; now at least I know why. I may have been born in America, but my parents and grandparents were all of Eastern European, Austro-Hungarian background, mentality and culture; most having accents. I had always been proud to be American, but my 'Jewish-ness', 'child-of-Holocaust-survivor'-ness had always held a subconscious grip off-stage.
In order to explain what had motivated me to understand my mother's experiences during the Holocaust, we can examine the groundbreaking article, “The Generation of Post-Memory", where Hirsch purports the concept that memory of the Holocaust may be transmitted almost directly into the minds of the children of survivors:

"Post-memory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of stories, images, and behaviors. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and effectively as to ‘seem’ to constitute memories in their own right…To grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation. …These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present. This is, I believe, the experience of post-memory.”(Hirsch 2010, 106)

We must continue to examine the impact that the Holocaust is having on the ‘next’ generations; how a child’s identity can become almost secondary to the heroic fact that their parent has survived the Holocaust. What achievement can rate next to that? It may come as no surprise that we, second generation Holocaust survivors, describe ourselves as such, as if wearing our own badge of courage. Self-esteem and identity have somehow been created out of their heroism. Hirsch and Miller describe the creation of the second generation’s self-identity through over-identification with the survivor parent and grandparent and reveal that “along with many other American Jews of our generation [we] have … devoted the last several years to the recovery of our own family stories and the search for lost Jewish worlds in Eastern Europe.” In addition, they suggest, “the legacies of the past transmitted powerfully from parent to child within the family…shape identity and …’post-memory’ can account for the lure of second generation’s …over-identification.”(2011, 4)
I can say that the Holocaust has had an incredible impact upon me even though I had never been part of it. I was born in a totally different country, environment and culture than my mother and my grandparents who had survived. As Hirsch explains, "post-memory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right."(2010, 103) Yet there have been several instances in my life when I mistakenly used the first person to describe things that had happened to my mother during the Holocaust, and instead said they had happened to me. Hirsch wonders if as children of survivors we may "adopt the traumatic experiences of others as experiences that we might ourselves have lived through, inscribe them into our own life story… [and have a] frustrated need to know about a traumatic past." (2010, 114)

Silence

It could be that the ‘Second Generation Survivor Syndrome’ begins in infancy. Halasz describes how the “second generation offspring witnessed that silence… those exiled moments when he, the infant was hungering for relatedness. Instead he met the survivor parent's ‘fated exile’, a wall of silence.” He adds, "there may be unexamined danger in being named after deceased relatives, in that parents may only see the dead relatives in their children and therefore not ever really see or know their own child…For the second generation survivor, this may mean that the child in turn may grow up having a blurred or undefined identity.”(2002, 217) I began to be interested in learning about the Holocaust at an early age. I now believe that having been named after an aunt killed during the Holocaust may have been the basis for this early onset.

Post-memory may have also played a role in my early life with much of the transmission conducted in silence. There were no discussions of the events that had taken place; not at the dinner table, not in the living room, not as I grew older. It was my own personal curiosity that led me to start searching; in college, on the Internet and later, on trips to every major city in Europe which had had a Jewish history beginning after the Inquisition. For example, Lily Brett, a second generation author, describes her relationship to her mother, a Holocaust survivor, in an interview entitled "Walking Among Ghosts". She explains, "I wanted to be one of them …I didn't want to be separated from [her] by this enormous gulf." (Giles 2000, 56)

I had grown up with the loud silence of knowing that there was something out there, but what? A loud, earth shattering scream of nothingness, that reverberated in my ears from the time I was born. I knew nothing, and continued to know nothing for years. I never got the message or information from the original source itself. This now is very frustrating, because I would like to have heard my grandfather tell me the story at least once in his own words, to hear his fear and feelings. I would have liked to hear my grandmother speak, even once, about anything at all, or about the day they left their hometown without my grandfather. What this must have felt like I can only imagine. My mother has written her story, and although now she will answer questions if I ask, it is still a bit like prying open a can of sardines. Is this why I keep so much inside?

In a contribution to "Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators" the second-generation writer Lisa Reitman-Dobi relates her feelings, which are eerily similar to mine:

"all my life I've felt a tremendous weight on me, something that I could not understand, although I knew it had something to do with the Holocaust….I knew that the war, the Holocaust specifically, was a topic that had been relegated to the topmost shelf, something that wouldn't be addressed. By the time I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I was aching to know details… I craved more information…. I was not completely ignorant. On the contrary, it was because I knew a fair bit about the war that my curiosity was piqued. I had always known about the Holocaust. I had always known about the concentration camps. I can't say how. It's as if I were born with a degree of information that had been genetically installed, like my brown hair and brown eyes. I knew that an isolated, distant horror, something that could never happen again, mind you, had severed the past from the present without a trace. I knew that my mother's family had been shattered by the war but….I had never seen her mourn or cry or show any anger at the injustice during her childhood. I sensed that I was required to appreciate the rich childhood that had been denied my mother. But instead of happy, I felt sad. I felt sad for my mother, sad for everyone, and then guilty for feeling sad…. The reality was that I was in a perpetual state of mourning for that which I had never known, as much as there was to know." (A. Berger and N. Berger, eds. 2001,16-19)

We, the second generation, have been relegated to remember the Holocaust as if in a virtual time-machine; almost as if we had been there ourselves. This may not happen to every survivor’s child, but similar to a gene, like alcoholism or diabetes; some of us have the predisposition to be the carrier of the message. This might be set off by incidents in our own lives or perhaps this is learned behavior, gleaned from the sad, introspective, smile-less face; slow movements or hunched-over shoulders of our grandparents; physical exhibitions of their own never-released inner traumas. As our own middle age encroaches, we may be able to reveal the truth.

Yes, indeed, without a doubt, our own identities were formed by their connection to that horrible, historical anomaly; duly transcribed and reported in every tiny, minute detail by the Nazis; the Holocaust. This is what we had to compete with. Is it any wonder that we have been spoiled almost to death? We, call us what you will, the second, third, next, future generations are bearing the brunt of the anger, sadness, unknowable, untellable loss that our parents and grandparents had suffered. We, connected to them by blood and sorrow, must build on this and move forward with the same type of strength and courage as it took for them to be able to survive. Whatever has happened to them is done. They will not tell us any more than we already know. It is this silence that the second generation has endured that has made it so important to get the facts straight now before it is too late.

Alan Berger and Naomi Berger ask two simple questions; "What is the second generation's connection to the Holocaust? Their parents suffered, but what have been the effects on the offspring?" (2001, 1) The painful answers that have been shut away for decades have been seeping out slowly in books and films during the past ten or twenty years. Whatever has been locked away by the power of silence and fear of exposure is making its way to the surface. And exposing what exactly are we talking about here? My grandparent's fear of being discovered to have survived the Holocaust while millions of others had not? Hey, you guys, you were the victims here. Remember? The fact is perhaps they had not wanted to talk about being victims of the most heinous crime against humankind known to man; keeping silent for most of their lifetimes. It could be that the survivors themselves were trying to maintain their pride as well as protect us from the knowledge of what they had gone through. Hirsch adds that in their creation of a "protective shield particular to the post-generation, one could say that, paradoxically they reinforce the living connection between past and present, between the generation of witnesses and survivors and the generation after." (2010, 125)

Possibly my grandfather had felt that if he maintained his silence, it would be as if what had transpired during those terrible years during the war had never happened at all. In her extraordinary analysis of Lily Brett's autobiographical story, "Things Could Be Worse”, Catalina Botez examines the function that silence fills for Holocaust survivors. She claims "that silence can equally 'voice and hush traumatic experience', that it is never empty, but invested with individual and collective meaning. Essentially, I contend that beside the (self) damaging effects of silence, there are also beneficial consequences of it, in that it plays a crucial role in emplacing the displaced, rebuilding their shattered self, and contributing to their reintegration, survival and even partial healing." (2012, 15)

I can apply her theory to my grandfather, who never spoke about his own personal trauma to me as a child or young adult. Did Silence help him create a new life in America, raise two children, and build a successful business? I suppose that the key word is ‘partial’ when describing the amount of healing a person can go through after incredible trauma, losing half of his siblings and his parents while he, himself, survived. My grandfather was a lovely man, generous, caring and always wanted the best for his family. His children and grandchildren were proof of his strength throughout the untold horrors he had faced during WWII. But the scars were deep, and in all the years that I knew him, except perhaps toward the end of his life, his expressions of warmth were minimal. I knew that he loved me very much. He never said so.

I cannot explain even to this day what caused this withholding of information; to keep one of the major catastrophes in the history of mankind inside; not shared with members of your own family. Botez suggests that "silence is never empty or devoid of meaning, but 'inhabited' by poignant content pointing to trauma, loss and an inability to understand or cope with … loss".(Botez 2012, 17)20 Would they have been able to tell their stories without breaking?
It was that exactly; that inhabited silence; the practically void, brief, uncompleted lives of my grandparent's sisters and brothers; and the Unmentionables, the Unborn; the brothers and sisters of my mother and my uncle, who cry silently without tears. THIS is the epicenter of our sad melodrama, those almost forgotten souls. Overdramatized? I don’t think so. This is the Truth as I know it. It is what we do with the knowledge now that is essential, not only for me and individuals like me, but as a jumping off point for universal discussion and repair. As in a court case where thousands are represented; so shall it be here.

Stanestie/Vivos 2007

Something changed in me after I visited Stanestie in 2007. It is clear to me that not much has changed there; only the universal shame, guilt and pain in the local citizens has remained. The residents who were born after the war feel somehow responsible for the actions of their parents and grandparents even though they had nothing to do with them. As the book title suggests, the “sins of the fathers” have stayed with them; with tears in their eyes. (Woods 2013) One man around my age leads us through the Christian cemetery to the collective gravesite for the Jewish victims of the pogrom, shaped like a Star of David with a small commemorative plaque written in English, Romanian, Russian and Hebrew; we comfort him.

Politanki 2015

Recently, I made a personal and very difficult journey to the Ukraine, whose goal had been to reach the tiny village of Politanki where my mother had been in hiding from October 1941 until the end of WWII. I was finally able to begin to understand what Transnistria had been at that time. In the words of a middle-aged Ukrainian woman who we had met there; she described to my barely-Russian-speaking cousin what had been told to her by her grandmother many years before. “Eleven kilometers from here there were ghettoes that were run by very bad Romanian Fascists." She added, “Here, there were Romanians too, but they were not so bad”. Trying to figure out if there had once been a melon farm in the area seemed a bit too much for our language barrier to cross.

This trip made by one child of one Holocaust survivor, travelling nearly a quarter of the way across the globe, on roads that were not roads, at border crossings that could not be imagined; an impossible, impulsive drive to find the truth and see it with my own eyes. Not because I did not believe that it had happened; but because it had never been truly explained to me in words; only in shadows and sketchy outlines that left no room for imagination. Reality, in all its glory, sadness, emptiness, colors of pale green endless wheat fields, nothingness, had been registered and claimed! I had come to the most complete understanding of what my mother had gone through that any survivor’s child could; only after an incredibly hard and unusual trip, involving chance coincidences, other people, several countries, diplomatic assistance and Russian translation of information that probably couldn't even be found on the English language World Wide Web. This, I was able to do, with thanks to those know who they are. Now that I have seen first-hand where it all took place, can I say that post-memory has become my memory, too? I am not sure. But, the fact is, I was able to put in the last piece of the puzzle; and the puzzle has been solved!

FUTURE

Today, nearing 80 years since the beginning of the Holocaust; the largest organized mass murder in history, we continue to ponder the source of its inception; the root of the wasted intelligence on an evil plan developed only to try to eradicate one of the most ancient peoples known to mankind, and there is no end in sight to our conversations.

However well-adjusted my mother was in her adopted country of America, the shadowy phantom of Eastern Europe still lingered above her, as it did all survivors. She may have tried to escape the vestiges of the Holocaust by losing her accent; feeling at home in the United States; working; getting married and raising a family. But, "their children, whom they have proudly raised in a free country carry their parent's burden of traumatic memories, not always sure of the extent of their harmful grasp." (Botez 2012, 24) There is no question that my mother was unaware of the potential influence that her own Holocaust experiences might have had on her children. It is this late knowledge and recent understanding that we are dealing with here, and must find the correct path on which to send the message out to the world. It has taken me fifty-eight years to get to this point of self-analysis and self-understanding. It is not for the lack of trying, many times, and many ways. Is it better late than never? You bet, especially for my children's sake and perhaps others as well. Perhaps writing it all down will lead the revelations in the right direction.

One of the main reasons that I don’t say ‘I love you’ often is because it wasn’t said to me by my mother as I was growing up. It could be said that wartime isn’t exactly the proper atmosphere for giving affection. ‘Normal’ emotional involvement of a parent to a child in expressions of endearment are reduced to a minimum or eliminated completely when the threat of death hangs over you daily like a tiny dew drop dangling from the edge of a blade of grass at sunrise. You know it will fall; it’s just a matter of time.

My mother told me that what she remembers of her early childhood before the war was happy go-lucky. She didn't have any young friends, but she remembers playing with workers in the lumber mill and enjoying herself. This must have come to such an abrupt, unexplained and unexplainable stop that whatever happiness she had enjoyed as a child had been buried forever, never to be retrieved even later on in life. How can a person who has suffered trauma like this be expected to raise a child herself in a traditionally 'normal' way, and so on in the following generations? This is the question being raised here.

At a recent book-signing event for my book,“I love you, they didn’t say", (Elias 2015) in which I deal in part with the lack of verbal affection from my mother toward me as a child; my mother, for the first time, began to understand what had had happened to her during the Holocaust.She described to visitors at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. how she had experienced an almost complete emotional black-out for approximately three years, from her parents towards her, and from herself towards the outside world. It was quite a cathartic, heart-wrenching and heart-warming experience for me to hear her speak, when at first she could not understand why I had entitled my book this way.

I don’t need results from studies on psychological responses in children of Holocaust survivors; I just have to look at myself and my brother as a two-case sample study. We are two specimens of a unique twentieth-century phenomenon and whichever way we have turned out will continue on and on until we stop it or at least try to. I know where this detached demeanor comes from and even though I do, I cannot change it. Maybe this work, which started out as a way of organizing the stories of my mother’s survival, has now turned into something much, much more. Those who had lived through hell and come out on the other side could not have possibly comprehended the effect it had had at the time and would have on them later on. They could not have imagined the effect it would have on their offspring, and on the children of their offspring.

This article may open the doors for discussions, NOT necessarily for the survivors themselves, but for those who have come after them. We have to start to breathe. I am not guilty, nor is my mother, father, grandparents, nor are any of them. The world is a dangerous place and becoming more so every day. God says we are supposed to stay alive under any circumstances. Life is sacred in its most natural form; it is what matters. Without humanity we cannot continue to report the progress of mankind to each generation that follows. This is our mission; our purpose: to learn, grow, teach; to educate those that are here with us today and will pass on the memories to those who will come next; our own future generations.

REFERENCES
1. Appelfeld, Aharon, “The Story of a Life”, Keter, Jerusalem, 1999.
2. Berger, Alan and Naomi Berger, eds. "Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of the Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators", Syracuse University Press , New York, 2001,
3. Bernhardt, Zvi, 'Introduction', "Transnistria: Lists of Jews Receiving and Sending Support", Jewish Gen, 1997-2015
4. Botez, Catalina, ""The Dialectic of Silence and Remembrance in Lily Brett's "Things Could be Worse"', Babilonia Numero Especial, 2012, pp. 15-29
5. Elias, Carol, "’I Love You, They Didn't Say’- Holocaust and Diaspora Survival : the Next Generations”, Orion Books, Israel, 2015.
6. Fishler, Raymond, "Once We Were Eight", http://www.thebookpatch.com. 2014
7. Geissbuhler, Simon, "'He Spoke Yiddish Like A Jew' - Neighbors Contribution to the Mass Killings of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia in July, 1941". "Holocaust and Genocide Studies", 28, no.3, Winter, 2014, pp. 434-449.
8. Giles, Fiona, "Walking Among Ghosts: An Interview with Lily Brett", Meanjin, Volume 59, no.1, 2000, pp. 54-69
9. Halasz, George, "Can Trauma be Transmitted Across the Generations?" in "The Legacy of the Holocaust: Children and the Holocaust", eds, Zygmunt Mazur, Fritz Konig, Arnold Krammer, Harry Brod, Wladylaw Witalisz, Jagellonian University Press, 2002, pp. 209-223.
10. Hirsch, Marianne, "The Generation of Post-Memory", Poetics Today- International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication, Spring 2008, Vol. 29 (1), pp. 103-128
11. Hirsch, Marianne and Nancy K. Miller, "'Introduction'- Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory", New York Columbia University Press, 2011
12. Hoffman, Eva, Introduction, "After Such Knowledge: Memory: History and the Legacy of the Holocaust", Public Affairs: Persus Books Group, 2004, pp. xv
13. ICHR, “Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania”, http://miris.eurac.edu/mugs2/do/blob.pdf?type=pdf&serial=1117716572750
14. The Nizkor Project, "Shattered! 50 Years of Silence: History and Voices of the Tragedy in Romania and Transnistria: The Unknown Killing Fields of Transnistria."
15. Reitman-Dobi, Lisa, "Family Ties: The Search for Roots: Once Removed", in A. Berger and N. Berger, eds. “Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of the Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators", Syracuse University Press, New York, 2001
16. Woods, James, "The Sins of the Fathers", www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/22/sins-of-the-father

The author about herself:
I am a fifty-eight year old woman who has been living in Israel for the past twenty-three years. I have two children, both who have served in the Israel Defense Forces. My son finished his service last year and is now studying Graphic Design. My daughter, who is an officer in her third elective year, is a liaison between injured soldiers and the Army, and regularly visits families who have lost loved ones while. I hold a Masters and Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from major universities in New York State. I worked as a Guidance counselor in New York City before moving to Israel and raising a family. I attained a permanent Teacher’s license in Israel, where I have been an educator and supervisor for over twenty years.

‘The spirit of the time left its stamp on these works ’: Writing the History of the Shoah at the Jewish Historical Institute in Stalinist Poland

ABSTRACT

The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw was probably the only research institution in the Soviet Bloc and one of very few that undertook research on the Shoah during the 1950s. This article analyses the institute’s research and working conditions against the background of the general political regime under Stalinism in Poland. It argues that despite sometimes heavy-handed political biases in its publications, the institute made an important contribution to research on the Shoah. Its work also came to the attention of Jewish centres outside the Soviet Bloc, though it was seen through the prism of the Cold War.

Introduction

Das Amt und die Vergangenheit [The Ministry and the past] (2010) summarizes the work of an international research group, which studied the involvement of the German Foreign Ministry in the mass murder of European Jews over several years. The findings, which attracted wide public attention, erased the myth that the Auswärtiges Amt [German: Federal Foreign Office] had been a clandestine refuge for Nazi opponents. Instead, it exposed the active participation of the Foreign Ministry in preparations for and its conduct during the Holocaust (Conze et al. 2010). In 1953 Artur Eisenbach had revealed the involvement of the Foreign Ministry in the Holocaust in the Nazi policy of extermination of the Jews though this work was not as comprehensive (Eisenbach 1953). His study is also one of the first monographs ever published on the Shoah. ¹ Although forming the larger part of the research on the Shoah conducted at the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI: Yidisher historisher institute/Żydowski Instytut Historyczny) during the first half of the 1950s, ² Eisenbach’s book received little attention. The reasons for this are many. The institute published in Polish and Yiddish, and both these languages were little known in the West outside East European Jewish émigré circles. Also, interest in the Holocaust had been fading after an initial phase of intense interest in the late 1940s. The most important reasons are, however, the political distortions of Stalinism and the thoroughly Marxist methodology, especially in Eisenbach’s case. ³ During the Cold War such politically biased texts were read with hostility by readers in the West. The Yiddish press in the United States and Israel thus called the Warsaw Jewish historians derogatively ‘Yevsec historians’ or ‘Stalinist slaves’ whose work consisted more of a falsification of history than of history writing. Such assessments, which neither considered the political context of the JHI’s publications in the first half of the 1950s nor assessed their scholarly value, using the political jargon of the time, found their way into the Western historiography of the Shoah⁴ and can still be found in recent publications. A telling example is Sven-Erik Rose’s 2011 article on the perception of Yehoshue Perle’s ‘Khurbn Varshe’ [The destruction of Warsaw] in the early 1950s. In his illuminating contribution on Perle’s radical witness account of the mass deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto in summer 1942, Rose refers to the JHI historians as ‘Jewish Stalinists’, ⁵ and so overlooks the vast literature on the situation of Jews in Stalinist Eastern Europe (Grüner 2008; Rubentstein and Naumov 2001).⁶

In this article I provide such a contextualization and discuss the potential and boundaries of research on the Shoah in Stalinist Poland. I begin with a short introduction on the JHI and its formation in the early post-war years. Then I shed light on the Stalinization of the institute in 1949–50 and analyse the impact Stalinism had on the activities and the publications of the JHI, against the background of general developments in Poland and how this was perceived in the West, especially in the Yiddish context. Finally, I examine the repercussions of anti-Semitism in the late Stalinist period for the JHI researchers and publications.

The emergence of the JHI

The JHI came into being in October 1947, when the Central Jewish Historical Commission [Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna] was transformed into a permanent research institution. The commission had been founded in late 1944 in Lublin by the Jewish historian and Holocaust survivor Philip Friedman (Grüss 1946, 6).⁷ In 1945 it was relocated to Łódź and then to Warsaw in spring 1947. Its purpose was to document and research the mass murder of Polish and European Jewry. To that end, the commission began to gather and assemble ‘all printed, handwritten or other materials, photographs, illustrations, documents and exhibits’ before the end of the war.⁸ The commission also drew up sources that documented the Jewish perspective on the German Occupation of Poland: interviews with thousands of survivors, both adults and children, were recorded. Today, more than 7,000 testimonies are stored in the JHI archive.

The best-known and most valuable collection is the secret archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, produced by the Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum and his underground Oyneg Shabes group. It is in two parts; the first was unearthed from the ruins of the Ghetto in September 1946.⁹ This served as an important impetus not only for the Commission’s work but also for the transformation of the Central Jewish Historical Commission into a permanent research institute.¹⁰ A year after the first part of the Ringelblum Archive was found, the Central Committee of Jews in Poland [Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce],¹¹ a self-governing body of the then quasi-autonomous Jewish community in Poland, made the decision to turn the commission into the JHI.¹² This took place in a period of relative political liberalism in Poland – at least as far as the Jewish community was concerned. Many Polish Jews that had survived the Shoah in German-occupied Poland or the Soviet Union still believed it was possible to restore Jewish life in Poland. Many Jewish institutions, such as Yiddish theatres and schools, newspapers and a printing house, were established at that time.¹³ In this context, the JHI could have filled the role of a scholarly institution of and for the Polish Jewish community. As such it would research the whole history of Polish Jews from the early Middle Ages onwards. However, the central topic of the work would remain the documentation of the Shoah.

The first public opportunity for the JHI to present itself was the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising in April 1948. The anniversary was an international event, attended by many Polish, Polish-Jewish and international officials as well as by delegations from Jewish institutions. The festivities, which were prepared with the support of the JHI staff, began with the opening of the institute’s Museum of Jewish Martyrdom and Fight [Muzeum Martyrologii i Walki Żydowskiej] on the eve of the anniversary, and closed with the unveiling of Natan Rapaport’s monument dedicated to the Heroes and Martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto the next day (Kobylarz 2009, 39 f.).¹⁴ Also in 1948 the JHI began to publish its Yiddish journal, Bleter far geshikhte [Folios for history],¹⁵ which addressed an international, Yiddish-speaking readership. However, in the second half of 1948, the political situation became tense. Within a year, the façade of Jewish quasi-autonomy of Jewish in post-war Poland was dismantled. Jewish activists from the Polish Workers’ Party (known from late 1948 as the Polish United Workers’ Party, PZPR) took over the Central Committee of Jews in Poland and all larger Jewish institutions. Other active Jewish parties were marginalized and subsequently dissolved (Grabski 2015, 199–202, 226–48). In summer 1949 the director of the JHI was sacked and the pre-war communist journalist and PZPR member Ber Mark was appointed to replace him.¹⁶ As a result, many former staff members, among them Nachman Blumental, the first director of the institute, and Rachela Auerbach, one of the few survivors of Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabbes group, decided to emigrate.¹⁷

The transformation of the JHI into a Marxist‑Leninist research institute

As the Stalinist grip on Poland tightened including within the Jewish sphere, Mark speeded up the ideological redirection of the institute. The aim was to catch up with the process of ideological transformation, which had begun in Polish universities and research institutions two years earlier (Górny 2011, 43 f.). Mark quickly steered the institute on to a course that clearly followed the party line. This was characterized by an open adherence to Marxist-Leninist theory in historical research as well as the use of history as propaganda – especially of the Second World War and the Shoah – to legitimize communist rule in Poland and the position of the Soviet Bloc in the confrontation with the West. To underscore his commitment to communist ideology, Mark published a programmatic statement in the newly established Yiddish information bulletin of the JHI. In ‘Our Aims’, published in November 1949, he emphasized his ambition to transform the JHI into a Marxist-Leninist research institution: ‘The Jewish Historical Institute in Poland has the ambition not only to be the scientific centre of research on the most recent period of our history, the period of unprecedented annihilation, heroic resistance and rebirth, but also to become a centre of Marxism-Leninism applied in research on Jewish history.’¹⁸ This also meant, as the text continues, that the situation in the ghettos had to be analysed from the perspective of class struggle, and the character of the mass murder of Jews by the Germans in turn had to be explained as a consequence of the capitalist order in its imperialist guise.¹⁹

Mark’s articles suggested that his appointment as director was a radical break in the JHI’s work. However, although it was certainly a break, it was not especially radical. Mark, who was alleged to have a ‘too friendly attitude to people’ to become an influential communist functionary in post-war Poland,²⁰ did not purge the ranks of the JHI. All staff members, including those who chose to emigrate, were allowed to keep their positions until they left and they remained on good terms with Mark after their departure. In September 1950 Mark exchanged letters with his predecessor, Nachman Blumental, and the former vice director, Józef Kermisz, who had settled in the Kibbutz Lohamei haGettaot. When they informed him of their plans to continue their research work in Israel, Mark congratulated them and assured them of his willingness to cooperate.²¹

Most of the historians who remained were members of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR). Besides the directors – Ber Mark and Adam Rutkowski – there were Artur Eisenbach, Fraim Kupfer and Tatjana Berenstein. The only nonpartisan senior researcher who remained at the JHI was Szymon Datner, but Danuta Dąbrowska and Albert Nirensztein (Aaron Nirenshtayn in Yiddish), who joined the institute in 1951, were nonpartisan too.

It is also worth noting that although Mark had been a member of the Communist Party of Poland (KPP; Komunistyczna Partia Polski) since 1930, he had never been considered among the ideologically unimpeachable Jewish Party activists. Especially in the Soviet Union, where he spent the war years, he had been treated with suspicion by the authorities and also by some of his Jewish comrades. Shortly after he secured a position as a staff writer at Eynikayt [Unity], the official organ of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, Mark was accused of ‘Jewish nationalism’ and fired, something that made his situation precarious.²² After he returned to Poland in 1946, holding important functions within Jewish social life, Mark faced similar accusations. The most serious was at a meeting of the Jewish Fraction of the Polish Workers’ Party in October 1948, when Szymon Zacharisz – the leading figure among the Jewish Communists and architect of the Stalinization of Jewish life in Poland – accused him of being tainted by ‘national-Jewish ideology’.²³ That Mark became director of the JHI at all underscores the lack of trained personnel among the Jewish Communists. For Mark, however, it was a chance for probation; he certainly did not want to fail.

JHI Publications during Stalinism

The politicization of the institute’s publications was in line with general developments in Polish historiography at this time. Shmuel Krakowski, head of the institute’s archive from 1966 to 1968, described the situation in the 1950s:

[U]ntil 1956 there was a quite stringent interference by the Party and others, and the course this took is called Stalinist. So it is natural that tight limits were imposed on Jewish – and not only Jewish – historians. But not only were certain limits imposed, which one was not allowed to exceed, there was also a certain language and methodology [...] I would even say a certain party dialect – with very harmful ramifications for scholarly work. Another method was to simply force historians to falsify history and accept certain non-existent facts in order to exaggerate the importance of the Communists. ²⁴

The elements mentioned by Krakowski were typical of Polish – and not only Polish –historiography during the Stalinist period. This meant quoting frequently from Stalin’s and Lenin’s works, the use of Marxist- Leninist terminology, which often appeared artificial, and drawing a clear line between ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ elements in history (Stobiecki 2007, 58 f.). Notably in works on the Second World War, the Soviet Union and especially the Red Army had to be praised as liberators and the Communists as the main pillars of resistance. Typical of the intensifying confrontation between the two power blocs were also commentaries on current political developments, such as the Korean War and the colonial conflicts.²⁵

In its scholarly publications the JHI under Mark was under pressure to meet the political requirements. This was demonstrated in several ways. For example, in the Yiddish Bleter far geshikte translations of methodological articles by Soviet historians,²⁶ such as Arkady Sidorov and Piotr Tretiakov, appeared, which emphasized the importance of Stalin’s works for historiography. Both had been members of a delegation to the Congress of Polish Historians in 1948.²⁷ Szymon Zachariasz also submitted ideological articles to Bleter far geshikhte, among them a tribute to the life and struggle of Feliks Dzieryżyński, a non-Jewish Pole, who founded the Soviet secret police, the Cheka. Another emphasized the role of the KPP in the defence of Polish independence (Zakhariash 1951 and 1952). Neither article was related to Jewish history. However, the translations from Soviet scholars constituted a basic feature of East-Central European academia under Stalinism. They had also been published in Polish and many other languages spoken in the Soviet Bloc.²⁸ Zacharisz’s contribution in turn served to emphasize the ideological reliability of the JHI and the fact that the institute was not drifting into ‘Jewish nationalism’. Equally, it was surely a concession by Mark to his critic Zacharisz.

The principles of Stalinist-style history writing were also applied to the institute’s own research publications. The communists in the ghettos were portrayed as the driving force of Jewish resistance. Uprisings in ghettos and camps were described as the Jewish contribution to the ‘great liberation war against German fascism’. The situation in the ghettos was described as a specific form of class struggle where the collaborators of the Judenrat suppressed the working masses and the resistance movement. On the Bialystok Ghetto Mark wrote: ‘There was a clear division [...] in the ghetto: Judenrat and resistance. There was [...] no compromise and no “third way” between these two forces, which were mutually exclusive’ (Mark 1952b, 4). The insurgents were, needless to say, ‘brought up in the best traditions of the workers’ movement, in the struggles of the KPP, in the revolutionary ideas of Marxism-Leninism’.²⁹

The exaggeration of the communists’ role in the resistance is especially blatant if one compares Albert Nirensztein’s article on the resistance movement in the Kraków Ghetto, which appeared in the third issue of the Biuletyn, in 1952, and a publication of the Central Jewish Historical Commission, which had appeared six years earlier. In his article, Nirensztein claims: ‘There were two principal groups in the Kraków underground: the communist (then PPR) and the members of the Akiba; the latter recognized the indisputable political supremacy of the communists’ (Nirensztein 1952c, 184 f.). Referring to members of the underground movement, Betti Ajzenstajn described the situation somewhat differently. In The Resistance Movement in Ghettos and Camps, she writes:

The mentioned organizations [Akiba and the PPR] cooperated in a number of anti-German actions, despite the fact that there was huge ideological gap between them (which more than once produced frictions and disharmony) (Ajzenstajn 1946, 82).

The corrections, which aimed to harmonize history with the ideological foundations of the PZPR, also affected source editions, which made up a large part of Bleter far geshikhte, the Biuletyn and other JHI publications. The best known example is Emanuel Ringelblum’s notes from the Warsaw Ghetto. They appeared in a Yiddish edition in 1952 and as a Polish translation in the Biuletyn (Ringelblum 1952a).³⁰ In both, passages critical of the Soviet Union or of Polish–Jewish relations were deleted, as well as references to religious aspects, Zionism and non-communist resistance. While data that emphasized the conflict between the Judenrat and the ‘Jewish masses’ did appear, other parts which did not fit the class-struggle paradigm were omitted, for instance, corruption in the house committees of the Ghetto. What was omitted, however, differed in the Polish and the Yiddish versions. This was especially true of what Ringelblum wrote about Poles attacking Jews, which was included in the Yiddish paper but not the Polish. But similar differences can also be found in cases that might have been disadvantageous from a Jewish perspective. While in the Yiddish version the collaboration of certain Jews with the Gestapo was noted, it was left out in the Polish version.³¹ In the introduction to the Polish version the editors – most probably Mark and Eisenbach – stated that ‘notes and expressions that were unclear or not significant for the topic of the research’ were omitted, ³² but to anyone willing to read between the lines, this was an indication that the significance for research might have been dependent on the political situation.

Another publication from the second part of the Ringelblum Archive, unearthed in December 1950, sparked a fierce debate within the Yiddish community and across the Iron Curtain (see below). This was Yehoshue Perle’s report ‘Khurbn Varshe’ [The destruction of Warsaw]. Perle described the situation in the Warsaw Ghetto during the mass deportations in summer 1942 and harshly criticized the Judenrat and the Jewish police for assisting the Germans. He also criticized the victims themselves for their lack of resistance (‘Khurbn Varshe’ 1951, 101–40). Whether the text, which had been published anonymously as the author had not yet been established by the JHI’s researchers, had undergone a similar editing process remains unclear.³³ It appeared roughly a year after it was found in late 1951 or early 1952, as the editorial introduction mentions the ‘American aggressors, who for seventeen months have been murdering the Korean people’.³⁴

Such comments can be found in many JHI publications, as well as in other scholarly journals in Poland between 1950 and 1954. The introduction to ‘Khurbn Varshe’ [The destruction of Warsaw] is an especially rich example, as it refers not only to the Korean War but also to the negotiations between German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Nahum Goldman, president of the World Jewish Congress, which began in December 1951 and would result in the Luxemburg Agreement in 1952 on reparations from Germany to Israel. In an allusion to this, the editorial mentions the ‘non-Jewish and Jewish agents of imperialism, who make pacts with yesterday’s Nazis [...] those who are repeating the traitorous politics of the Jewish councils’³⁵ Elsewhere one can find critical comments on colonialism and discrimination against blacks in the United States (Mark 1951a, 25; Nirensztein 1952a, 184–89). In a similar vein, the exhibits in the JHI’s museum link the history of the Shoah and the Warsaw Uprising with a call for the struggle against imperialism (Rutkowski 1951, 127–29).

As we have seen, in the early 1950s JHI publications were punctuated with references to Marxist, and often more bluntly Stalinist, methodology and political biases. They had – especially in the case of sources – undergone a process of censorship in order to make them fit current political needs. While praise of Stalin’s genius and attacks on supposedly Western warmongers make these publications read like a caricature from today’s perspective, such a readiness to adjust the history of the Shoah to the party line was the only way possible for the JHI to publish its research at all³⁶ and to make documents like those of the Ringelblum Archive accessible outside the institute.³⁷

The JHI’s reception in the Yiddish world

Despite the ‘party dialect’ which dominated the publications of the JHI after late 1949, they continued to be read in the West, especially those in Yiddish. Mark’s earliest statements in the Yedies in November 1949 were closely monitored. The Wiener Library Bulletin (WLB) wrote in early 1950:

The recent far-reaching changes in the structure of Polish Jewish organizations, now taken over by nominees of the Government, are reflected in the journal of the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw [...] A programmatic statement makes it clear that from now on research will be proceeding exclusively along Marxist lines [... T]he tragic story of Polish Jewry, under German occupation in particular, is now going to be presented from the point of view of ‘class warfare in the Ghetto’.³⁸

This was nevertheless a neutral description of the institute’s work in a non- Marxist Western journal. The WLB had committed itself never to comment on political matters. Even when Albert Nirensztein attacked the WLB and accused it of ‘only pretending to be progressive, while in fact they do not unmask the true sources and forces of the neo-Nazism in Western Germany, but abide by the principle of old, bankrupt bourgeois ideology’,³⁹ the WLB did not respond. However, it vigorously refuted Nirensztein’s assertion that the journal would ignore research literature from outside the Western hemisphere. The dispute resulted not only in an exchange of letters,⁴⁰ but finally in a comprehensive report on the JHI’s activity in the next WLB issue.⁴¹ This example shows that the JHI, despite its political comments or even attacks on Western institutions, was keen to stay in contact with such institutions, as it clearly sent all its available publications and detailed information to the WLB. It stands to reason that the main intention in criticizing the WLB in Bleter far geshikhte was to justify to the Polish authorities its subscription to the Western press.⁴²

However, in the Yiddish press in the United States or Israel, the JHI could not count on the same sensibility the WLB showed. Distrust of Jewish scholars in communist Poland was deeply rooted on the other side of the Atlantic. This is not hard to understand considering anti-communist sentiment there at the time and the pro-American orientation of the vast majority of American Jews on the one hand and the anti-American propaganda, which infiltrated the institute’s publications, on the other. When in December 1950 the second part of the Ringelblum Archive was unearthed from the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, the news soon spread around the Jewish world. But while the London-based Jewish Chronicle reported the fact in almost neutral terms,⁴³ in New York’s Morgen zhurnal Aaron Tseytlin’s commentary was far more critical. In his view, it would have been better if the material had never been found than falling into the ‘unkosher hands’ of Warsaw’s ‘Yevsec historians’, as it would only give them fresh material for their ‘absurd horror story that a class struggle took place behind the Warsaw Ghetto Wall’ (Tseytlin 1951). Similar comments could be found in Tel-Aviv’s Di naye velt, Arbeter-vort [The new world, worker’s word] from Paris, Ha-Dor, the mouthpiece of the Israeli Mapai Party or the Bulletin of the New York Jewish Labour Committee, as ‘Arkhivarius’⁴⁴ lamented in Warsaw’s Yidishe shriften [Jewish scriptures]. It made him especially embittered that, as he wrote, the critics do not even wait for the publication of material in the Bleter far geshikhte before they start to criticize the supposed falsifications of the institute (Arkivarius 1951).⁴⁵

However, even when Western reviewers read the JHI’s publications and attested to their scholarly value, it did not mean that they spared criticism of the institute. This can be seen in a review of Ringelblum’s Notitsn fun varshever geto [Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto], which appeared in the Bundist Lebns-fragn [Vital Issues], Tel-Aviv. For almost half the text the author, Eliahu Shulman, dwells on the fact that ‘the [Jewish] Historical Institute has been bolshevized – and the whole history of the Jews during Nazi occupation is falsified’ (Shulman 1953, 17). He even attacked the JHI’s researchers without exception. ‘After all, Berl Mark, Efraim Kupfer, [Artur/Aaron] Eisenbach and the other staff members of the institute are Stalinist slaves – and if their communist lord commands them to falsify – they will falsify’ (Shulman 1953, 18). However, his review of the book with Ringelblum’s notes was very constructive. Shulman called it authentic and a ‘principal historical and human document of the Ghetto period in Poland’ (Shulman 1953, 18).

The review gives a good insight into the misconceptions on the part of readers, or rather reviewers, outside the Soviet Bloc, who received publications on the Shoah produced at the JHI. In the political climate of the Cold War all publications from the other side of the Iron Curtain came under a general suspicion that they were falsified. Such falsification was perceived as a complete and willful distortion of the ‘historical truth’ in order to meet the political requirements of the Polish government and Soviet camp. This, however, was based not so much on a highly critical study of the JHI’s publications but on political – mainly anti-communist – convictions. However, the falsification of sources and the misrepresentation in historical interpretation functioned differently. The publications appeared within a framework of Stalinist academic methods, censorship, self-censorship and political control. Even so, there were no fixed boundaries on what could be written and published. The publication of a source that touched politically controversial or sensitive issues – as Ringelblum’s diary did – was unfeasible without deleting or editing those parts that obviously contradicted the political ‘truths’ of the day. The aim of such manipulations was not to send a politically correct message, but to get the writing published at all. Thus, they usually did not change the author’s overall intention and remained subtle enough that any such change was not immediately apparent.⁴⁶ That is why, despite many changes, the text remained ‘authentic’ for Shulman and many others. His strident condemnation of JHI staff as ‘Stalinist slaves’ who falsified whenever they had to, however, shows his inability to acknowledge that an institution he regarded as politically hostile could nevertheless make a valuable scholarly contribution.

As mentioned above, another source from the Ringelblum Archive – ‘Khurbn Varshe’ [The destruction of Warsaw] – sparked a debate in the Yiddish press in 1952. After the text, published in Bleter far geshikhte accompanied by a strongly politically biased editorial, reached the West, the Yiddish poet and journalist H. Leyvik bluntly accused the JHI of having fabricated the document. In his article in Der tog, he denounced ‘Khurbn Varshe’ as ‘blasphemous nonsense’ (Leyvik 1952).⁴⁷ What angered Leyvik were the many accounts of the part the Jewish Ghetto police and the Judenrat played in the deportations. In his opinion, all Jews murdered in the Shoah were martyrs, while, as he passionately wrote, the author of ‘Khurbn Varshe’ depicted that ‘what took place in Warsaw was a thoroughly self-inflicted Jewish extermination’. ⁴⁸ In his view, such a text, published in the Soviet Bloc and written by an anonymous author, must have been a forgery.⁴⁹

Leyvik’s attack not only sparked a debate in the American Yiddish press,⁵⁰ but also prompted a reaction from Mark himself. In a lengthy reply titled ‘Judenrat love of Israel’, Mark proved the authenticity of ‘Khurbn Varshe’ [The destruction of Warsaw], referred to a similar account of the Jewish councils by Ringelblum and others in his group and identified its author as Yehoshue Perle, a well-known pre-war Jewish writer. In Mark’s view, Leyvik’s understanding of universal Jewish victimhood had the intention of whitewashing the Jewish councils and Ghetto police, thereby concealing ‘the internal treason in the ghettos’ (Mark 1952b, 114).⁵¹ In an allusion to the Luxemburg Agreement, Mark called Leyvick one of ‘all those in the United States, who require the rehabilitation of the Judenräte [...] for their current politics’ (Mark 1952b, 114).⁵² Mark’s article was not only a reply to Leyvik, it also addressed the Jews in Poland and served as another proof of its political correctness. Therefore, it was published not only in Bleter far geshikhte but also as a four-part series in the Polish Yiddish newspaper Folks-sztyme [People’s voice],⁵³ which had a much greater readership among the Jews in Poland. Only a couple of months later, the Folks-sztyme text would play a role in the denunciation of Mark and the JHI.

The JHI – a threshold of Jewish nationalism in People’s Poland?

In autumn 1952 it seemed that late Stalinist anti-Semitism, with the Soviet campaign against rootless cosmopolitism and the imminent Slánský trial in Prague, was about to reach Poland. The fear that Warsaw too could become the venue of a show trial against a supposed Zionist conspiracy was escalating among the Polish Jews, and it was not unfounded. After Slánský had been arrested in late 1951, accused of leading a ‘Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionist’ conspiracy, the pressure on the Polish government to ‘uncover’ a Zionist conspiracy in its ranks increased. Although the Polish President, Bolesław Bierut, continued to resist such pressure,⁵⁴ in November 1952 investigations within the power apparatus began. During these investigations, the Polish security service visited the JHI and took articles from the Western Yiddish press, written by high-ranking members of the state administration (Rayski 1987, 173–80). On 26 November, as the Slánský trial was coming to its conclusion, an employee of the Israeli Embassy was arrested, accused of espionage (Szaynok 2012, 219). All these events were not directly connected to the JHI. Nevertheless, Mark, who must have known that many of his former colleagues from the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee had disappeared in the late 1940s, was well aware that the Institute and especially he himself could soon become a target in the search for Zionist conspirators. His worries proved well founded.

On 24 November, A. Sztark Wrocław, a correspondent of Folks-sztyme in Lower Silesia, obviously encouraged by the newspaper coverage of the Slánský trial, sent a hand-written letter and a densely typed eight-page report on the ideological foundation of the JHI to President Bierut. Sztark wrote that after lengthy consideration, he had decided it was his duty as a party member to inform him about the ideological transgressions of the JHI.⁵⁵ In the report, however, it became clear that Sztark’s motivation was personal not political: Mark had reviewed and rejected a manuscript written by Sztark for the publishing house Yidish bukh [Jewish book]. The principal point of Mark’s critique was that the Jewish Council and its chairman were referred to in Yiddish terminology as Yidn rat and Yid elterer, which he considered was wrong, as Sztark quoted the opinion that ‘this institution was not Jewish but an enemy agency’.⁵⁶ Sztark presented this to Bierut as proof of Mark’s ideological deviation: in his view, the Jewish councils had been as Jewish as the Pétain government in France was biased, both representing a certain sector of their respective societies.⁵⁷

Referring to Mark’s answer to Leyvik in Folks-sztyme, he wrote:

The dispute between comrade Mark and the American Jewish reactionary H. Leyvik is limited to the following: while the reactionary Leyvik embraces all Jews murdered by the Nazi occupants with a holy Tallit [prayer shawl ...] Mark shows in his four articles mentioned above that the members of the Yidnrat and Jewish policemen in the ghettos were heinous traitors of the Jewish people, and this is why we have to denounce them and throw them out from among the holy Jewish Tallit. ⁵⁸

Sztark thus accused Mark of adopting only a slightly modified model for interpreting the Shoah than Leyvik. In his view, a proper analysis of the class struggle in the ghettos would include the role of other bourgeois Jewish parties and non-communist actors. According to Sztark, Mark also ‘tries to featherbed the fight of Zionists against the communist resistance and reduces its importance’. ⁵⁹ In his view, the most important task in the history of Polish Jews and Jewish ghettos in Poland during the Nazi occupation is to bring to light the full activity of Jewish bourgeois parties of all hues, with their clerical, Zionist and Bundist ideologies and their mercantilist, brutally egoist world views. They prepared the ground among the Polish Jews before the occupation and during the occupation they made millions of Polish Jews walk to the slaughter with their wives and children under the guidance of the Yidn-rat and without offering resistance, despite the heroic fight of the communists and the groups they mobilized. ⁶⁰

Sztark accused Mark of being unable to correctly analyse the situation in the ghettos from a Marxist point of view and even more dangerous for the latter, of Jewish nationalist views and pro-Zionist sympathies. There is no doubt that he was aware of the serious implications this could have for Mark during a show trial against alleged Zionist conspirators in Prague.

Sztark’s attempt nevertheless failed to initiate a purge in the JHI. The office of President Bierut forwarded his letter to Szymon Zachariaz, who worked in the organizational department of the Central Committee of the PZPR and was responsible for Jewish affairs. Though Zachariasz had also been critical of Mark’s proximity to Zionist views in the past, he had decided to protect him. He replied to Sztark in a long letter, dismissing his critique in detail. Zachariasz however did add: ‘We don’t want to say that there had not been any mistakes in the works of the authors grouped around the JHI, including those of comrade B. Mark’, ⁶¹ but,

the publications [...] which have appeared in recent years are constantly aligning the old, false [political – St. St.] line [...] An important step forward in correcting the falsifying mistakes [falszywych bledow] will be the new work on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which will appear on its tenth anniversary. ⁶²

When Zachariasz wrote to Sztark – on 22 December 1952 – he was taking care that Mark’s new book on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising would fulfil this promise. It is unclear how much Zachariasz told Mark about what was going on. The publications of Mark and the JIH, which appeared in spring 1953, however, are proof that he at least passed on the reality of a serious threat. Abruptly, in no time, the JHI had been added to the anti-Zionist propaganda of the Soviet Bloc, at least in its Polish publications. In the second issue of the institute’s Bulletin of 1952, which appeared in early 1953, the density of anti-imperialist key words, references to Stalin and Lenin and attacks on the ‘American supporters of the Jewish councils’⁶³ and ‘the Zionist government of Israel [...] supporting the genocidal plans of the Anglo-American Aggression Bloc’ are apparent (Eisenbach 1952, 304). One article in the journal, F. Kupfer’s ‘On the Genesis of Zionism. A Contribution to the Problem: Zionism in the Service of Imperialism’, ⁶⁴ was a condemnation of Zionism. From the correspondence between Mark and Szymon Datner, it becomes clear that Mark put pressure on his employees to introduce such phrases into their articles, ⁶⁵ just as he was under pressure from Zachariasz and recent developments. On 13 January 1953 the Soviet News Agency TASS had announced the arrest of ‘murderer-physicians’ which, on behalf of the ‘foul Zionist espionage organization’⁶⁶ Joint, had attempted to assassinate members of the Soviet government, ⁶⁷ it alleged; the Warsaw Folks-sztyme reported the news on 14 January. ⁶⁸ So Mark added Joint to the list of those to be attacked and included such an assault on Szymon Datner’s article, without the author’s knowledge or consent. ⁶⁹ When Datner protested and demanded a correction in April 1953, he was immediately fired from the JHI with a note stating that, regarding his ‘ideological strangeness’, he was incapable of intellectual work. ⁷⁰

Mark’s book on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had been copy-edited by Szymon Zachariasz and went to print on 15 January 1953, ⁷¹ two days after the doctors’ conspiracy had been made public. Its lengthy introduction not only contained portrait photographs of Stalin and Bierut, ⁷² it is also full of praise of Stalin, who, as the text suggests, almost single-handedly defeated Nazi Germany. At the same time it vehemently condemned Israel and Western Jewish organizations, especially the Luxembourg Agreement:

One of the most disgusting scenes [...] is the rehabilitation of the neo-Nazi regime of Konrad Adenauer by the World Zionist Organization, by the Jewish-nationalist organization Joint and by the reactionary government of the State of Israel. The leaders of global Zionism and the reactionary government of Israel desecrate the memory of six million victims, murdered by the genocidal Nazi murderers and disgrace the holy memory of the Ghetto insurgents, acting as lackeys of the American imperialists (Mark 1953, 12 f.).

Throughout the text all references to Zionist activists in the underground movement were deleted, even though they were known to Mark. In the Yiddish edition of the book, which appeared in 1955 and which has an identical structure, their names do appear, while the strident attacks on the Israeli government and the Joint, as well as the many references to Stalin and his character, disappeared from the Yiddish edition. It contains only one insignificant quotation from Stalin in the introduction (Mark 1955). ⁷³

It seems that Mark intentionally withheld the Yiddish edition of his book until it became possible to publish it without anti-Zionist remarks, not least because the JHI’s contribution to the anti-Zionist propaganda of 1952–53 is restricted to its Polish publications. The last issue of Bleter far geshichte of 1952 does not contain any such statements. In order to express the JHI’s loyalty, it contains a Yiddish translation of Stalin’s article on economic questions (Stalin 1952). The article was obviously added to the issue only after typesetting had begun, since it uses Roman numerals in its pagination. The first issue of 1953 in turn is dedicated to a Yiddish translation of the minutes from the Warsaw trial of Jürgen Stroop, who had commanded the German forces during the Uprising. ⁷⁴ It seems that Mark was attempting to withhold the anti-Zionist slogans of Western Jews, who did not understand the political situation in Poland at the time.

This is mirrored in the reaction of a foreign visitor to the JHI’s exhibition of the Uprising, which had also been reorganized in early 1953. The last part of the exhibition was meant to present the ‘ideological legacy of the insurgents’, which Adam Rutkowski, co-curator of the exhibition, characterized as ‘the hate of genocidal imperialism, the struggle for a free, powerful and independent People’s Poland [Polska Ludowa], the fight against warmongers for permanent peace’ (Rutkowski 1953b, 224). When in 1954 Ian Mikardo, a British Labour MP, visited Warsaw, he also went to the JHI. He described his tour of the museum for the Jewish Chronicle:

At the moment the two top floors at the Jewish Historical Institute are occupied by a magnificent exhibition recounting the story of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Uprising. When you get to the end of it there is a series of panels (which the director did not appear anxious for me to see) based on the theme that the post-war warmongers are behaving in exactly the same way as the pre-war warmongers. In juxtaposition with pictures of the Nazi leaders, Franklin Roosevelt, and Neville Chamberlain there are pictures of Eisenhower, Churchill, Ben- Gurion, and Sharett. The centrepiece is a mural representing ‘warmonger’ Harry Truman receiving the gift of a Sefer Torah from warmonger Chaim Weizmann. ⁷⁵

Soon after Mikardo’s visit, and possibly even before his report in the Jewish Chronicle appeared, this part of the exhibition had been removed after a formal complaint by the Israeli embassy, because it had become ‘politically obsolete’ (Szaynok 2012, 266 f.). Taking Mikardo’s report into account, Mark was not unhappy about this. Indeed, when in the second half of 1954 the political situation in Poland was relaxed – the anti-Zionist campaign had stopped soon after Stalin’s death – politicized comments disappeared from the institute’s publications altogether. In the revised Polish edition of his book, which appeared in 1958, Mark even made a vague allusion to its political bias in the introduction: ‘However, the spirit of the time left its stamp on these works. Some insufficiencies and ground topics gave the works of 1953 and 1954 a certain one-sidedness’ (Mark 1958, 9).

Conclusion

There is surely no period in the history of Socialist Poland when history – and scholarly research in general – were more politicized and politically exploited than during Stalinism. Many of the writings that appeared in this period contained severe political distortions, which from the outside can even seem absurd. In Poland during the early 1950s, however, everyone, even those who had not been committed communists, knew how to read the texts, written in the ‘party dialect’ and sometimes containing ‘non-existent facts’, as Shmuel Krakowski put it. Even after Stalinism ended, Polish researchers knew how to handle texts written in this period. In 1957 the historian K. M. Pospiechalski from Poznań’s West Institute (Instytut Zachodni) wrote to Artur Eisenbach that for one of the publications, he wanted to refer to a passage from Eisenbach’s Hitlerowska Polityka Eksterminacja Żydow. However, since he suspected that Eisenbach would have written this passage differently now, after the end of Stalinism, he decided to ask him to, removing the strong political bias. ⁷⁶ Readers outside Poland often did not know about the situation of Polish academia and lacked an understanding of the political demands placed on historical research. For that reason, the reputation of the JHI had been severely undermined by its publications of this period, which has been reproduced in historiography and even today compromises researchers like Ber Mark.

When evaluating the historiographic value of the JHI’s publications, the political circumstances should be taken into account. Despite many shortcomings and biases, these works are an important contribution to early Holocaust historiography. Without using classic Stalinist propaganda their works could not have been published. This is also true for important sources on the Shoah, originating in the Ringelblum Archive and other sources. Furthermore, if Mark and his colleagues had not adapted to the political situation, it would probably have placed the existence of the institute at risk. Without the JHI, however, its archives would have been uncertain and it is doubtful that they would have been made accessible to the public.

Acknowledgement

The research for this article was supported by grant no. 16–01775Y, ‘Inclusion of the Jewish Population into Postwar Czechoslovak and Polish Societies’, funded by the Czech Science Foundation.

Stephan Stach

Stephan Stach is a postdoctoral researcher and member of a research group at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague which is examining the reintegration of Jews into Czechoslovak and Polish society after the Second World War. He is currently preparing a monograph on the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and knowledge about the Shoah between 1947 and 1989. In 2015 he presented his PhD thesis on interwar Polish nationality policy at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. He co-edited Gegengeschichte. Zweiter Weltkrieg und Holocaust im ostmitteluropäischen Dissens [Counter-history. Debates on the Second World War and the Holocaust in the dissent of East Central Europe] (with Peter Hallama, Leipzig, 2015) on the recollections of East and Central European dissidents.

ENDNOTES

1 The first was Leon Poliakov, Le Bréviaire de la haine. Le IIIe Reich et les Juifs [The harvest of hate. The 3rd Reich and the Jews] (Paris, 1951).

2 Inter alia on the role of the Wehrmacht, the exploitation of Jewish workers in the ghettos or on the Holocaust in the Reichsgau Wartheland, see Datner 1952, 86–155; Brustin-Berenstein 1953, 3–52; Dąbrowska 1955, 122–84; Pohl 2010, 165 f.

3 Eisenbach’s Hitlerowska polityka eksterminacji Żydów was based on his dissertation, supervised by Stanisław Arnold, chairman of the Marxist Historians’ Union.

4 See Dawidowicz 1981, 100 f.

5 Rose 2011, 184 f. Similarly, David Roskies ignores the political situation in Poland, calling Ber Mark a ‘loyal servant’ of the Polish communist regime, see Roskies 2012, 89.

6 On Poland, see Grözinger and Ruta 2008.

7 On the commission, see Jockusch 2012, 84–120; Aleksiun 2007, 74–97.

8 Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego [Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute, hereafter AŻIH], signature 303/XX, folder 1, n.p.

9 On Ringelblum and Oyneg Shabbes, see Kassow 2007.

10 Such plans had already been launched by Philip Friedman in the early days of the commission, see AŻIH, 303/XX, folder 3, Statut Centralnej Żydowskiej Komisji Historycznej w Polsce przy Centralnym Komitecie Żydów Polskich [Statute of the Central Jewish Historical Commission at the Central Committee of Jews in Poland], § 6.

11 On the committee, see Grabski 2015.

12 AŻIH 303/I, folder 8, minutes of the board meeting of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, 27 September 1947.

13 On the Jewish cultural life in post-war Poland, see Grözinger and Ruta 2008.

14 AŻIH, signature 310, folder 8, n.p., minutes of the JHI board meeting, 9 January 1948. The archive collection of the JHI is currently being reorganized. The files referred to in this text with the signature AŻIH 310 might now be found in another folder.

15 The title Bleter far geshikhte [Folios for history] is a reference to a journal edited by Emanuel Ringelblum before the war, which bore that title.

16 AŻIH, signature 303/1, folder 17, minutes of the board meeting of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, 29 July 1949.

17 For more details on this period, see Stach 2008, 402–14.

18 ‘Undzere tsil’ [Our aims], Yedies: Byulletin fun yidisher historisher institut in poyln [News: Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland], November 1949, 1. The statement is not signed, however, there is little doubt that it was by Mark.

19 Ibid.

20 Sommer Schneider 2014, 244.

21 Kibbutz Lohamei haGettaot Archive, holdings registry 14859,6, Mark’s letter to Blumental and Kermisz, 30 September 1950.

22 Nalewajko-Kulikov 2010, 205–26, on the Soviet Union, 211–15.

23 Ibid., 218.

24 Interview with Stefan [Shmuel] Krakowski, Oral History Archives of the Oral History Department of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University Jerusalem (0050)0031, 7.

25 Such elements were also present in the exhibition at Auschwitz-Birkenau, see Hansen 2015, 208–22.

26 These were Sidorov 1950, 3–28; Pankratova 1950, 135–61; Tretiakov 1950a, 162–86 and Tretiakov 1950b, 187–97.

27 Górny 2011, 82.

28 Kwartalnik Historyczny [Historical Quarterly] published extensive digests of Tretiakov’s articles, regretting that these texts had already been published elsewhere in Polish; see Kwartalnik Historyczny 1950–51b, 3–12; Kwartalnik Historyczny 1950–51b, 13–38.

29 Ibid., 267.

30 In Polish ‘Notatki z warszawskiego getta’ [Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto], BŻIH, vol. 2 (1951), 81–208 and BŻIH, vol. 3 (1952), 46–83.

31 On the differences between the Polish and the Yiddish versions see Person 2012, 59–76, especially 70–4; Nalewajko-Kulikov 2013, 385–403.

32 Translation: Person 2012, 69.

33 The editorial introduction noted that the document could often not be deciphered; see ‘Khurbn Varshe’ 1951, 101.

34 As the Korean War was declared in late June 1950, the editorial must have been written in December 1951; ‘Khurbn Varshe’ 1951, 101, English translation, Rose 2011, 186.

35 Ibid. Contrary to Sven-Erik Rose’s assertion that the Jewish parties involved in the Luxemburg Agreement reiterated the policy of the Jewish councils, this was not unique to communist propaganda, but was widely used in Israeli politics, including by the political right parties; see Michman 2010, 316.

36 As Katarzyna Person points out, some of these publications are still the only accessible ones on these matters available in Polish; see Person 2012, 68.

37 The available English and French translations of Ringelblum’s diary are both based on the Institute’s Yiddish edition of 1952 and not on the more comprehensive and less censored edition of 1961–63. Furthermore, Jacob Sloan’s English translation (on which the French is based) contains many unnecessary errors.

38 ‘Jewish Historical Research in Communist Poland’, Wiener Library Bulletin, vol. IV, no. 1 (January 1950), 4.

39 Nirensztein 1952b, 169–75. Quote from the English abstract at XIV.

40 See criticism from the East, Wiener Library Bulletin, vol. VII, nos. 3–4 (May–August 1953), 16; ‘The Wiener Library Bulletin under Fire. Strictures in a Warsaw Learned Journal’, Wiener Library Bulletin, vol. VII, nos. 3–4 (May–August 1953), 127.

41 ‘The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw’, Wiener Library Bulletin, vol. VII, nos. 5–6 (September–December 1953), 39.

42 A similar article appeared in the Polish Biuletyn, Rutkowski 1953a, 53–72.

43 It only briefly acknowledged that the material might have been distorted for political reasons; ‘The Warsaw Ghetto Archives. List of Traitors Found’, Jewish Chronicle (6 January 1951).

44 The pen name Arkhivarius was apparently used by one of the institute’s employees. It might have been Artur Eisenbach, then director of the institute’s archive.

45 Thanks to Agnieszka Żołkiewska for drawing my attention to this text.

46 Kermish (1953) and Blumental (1953) recognized the changes only due to their broader knowledge of the original. Both had taken part in the preparation of Ringelblum’s diary before their emigration from Poland in 1950.

47 English translation of the quote is from Rose 2011, 187.

48 Ibid., 209.

49 On the controversy, see ibid.; for a shorter but more balanced portrayal of Mark’s role in the dispute, see Schwarz 2015, 118–20.

50 For a discussion, see Rose 2011.

51 Translation: Rose 2011, 188.

52 Ibid., 188.

53 Mark, ‘Yudenratishe “ahaves yisroyl” (an entfer oyfn bilbl fun H. Leyvik)’ [Judenrat ‘Love of Israel’ (A reply to H. Leyvik’s Defamation)], Folks-sztyme, vol. 125 (6 August 1952), 127, (9 August 1952), 128, (12 August 1952), 129, (13 August 1952). The text appeared in both the journal Bleter far geshikhte and the newspaper Folks-sztyme under the same title. In Folks-sztyme it appeared in four parts.

54 Shore 2004, 42 f.

55 Archiwum Akt Nowych [Archive of New Documents – AAN], Komitet Centralny PZPR, Kancelaria Sekretariatu, 237/V-98, 73.

56 Ibid., 74.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., 77.

60 Ibid., 78 f.

61 Ibid., 87.

62 Ibid.

63 Datner 1952, 153.

64 Kupfer 1952.

65 AŻIH, Szymon Datner, personal file, 76.

66 This description was used by Izvestiya in her article of 13 January 1953; Rapoport 1991, 79.

67 An English translation of the TASS statement can be found in ibid., 74 f.

68 Folks-sztyme, 14 January 1953.

69 AŻIH, Szymon Datner, personal file, 74.

70 Ibid., 79 and information supplied by Datner’s daughter, Helena Datner.

71 This date is mentioned in the imprint, see Mark 1953, 4.

72 Stalin is situated between pp. 8 and 9, Bierut between pp. 12 and 13.

73 The only Stalin quote is on p. 10.

74 The trial was held in Warsaw in July 1952 and ended with a death sentence, which was carried out on 6 March 1953.

75 Jewish Chronicle, 22 October 1954.

76 AŻIH 310/184AR, 201–300 K. M. Pospiechalski, letter to Eisenbach, 16 February 1957, n.p.

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Zakhariash, Shimon (1951) ‘Feliks Dzherzhinski – zeyn lebn un kamf (tsu zeyn 25-ter yortseyt)’ [Feliks Dzierzyński – his life and struggle (on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of death), Bleter far geshikhte, vol. 4, no. 2, 3–30.

— (1952) ‘Di KPP in shpits fun der farteydikung fun poylns umophengikeyt’, Bleter far geshikhte [The Communist Party of Poland in the vanguard defending Poland’s independence], vol. 5, no. 3, 3–31.

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‘Purchasing and bringing food into the ghetto is forbidden’: Ways of Survival as Revealed in the Files of the Ghetto Courts and Police in Lithuania , 1941–44

ABSTRACT

The article focuses on the importance of work in the supply of food into the ghettos of Lithuania. Files of the ghetto courts and police reports used in this paper shed light on the reality of ghetto life and illustrate how individuals dealt with the situation and tried to get additional food. It is obvious that micro-networks (family, neighbourhoods and co-workers) were an important means of support for the individual within the context of ghetto societies. Normality and everyday life therefore reflect the reality of a forced society whose social differentiation was primarily based on a single criterion: access to food.

The idea of a ghetto still connotes the idea of a zone hermetically sealed off from the outside world, where people are fully separated from their previous environment. It has been repeatedly pointed out in recent decades that a special form of everyday life and normality existed in this extreme situation (Dieckmann and Quinkert 2009, 9–29). Research has increasingly followed this approach in recent years, as several publications have been added to existing memoirs of everyday experience, which are devoted in the form of anthologies to daily life in the German Reich (Löw 2014) and Eastern Europe (Hansen 2013). Monographs have also been added: Andrea Löw describes the situation in the ghetto of Litzmannstadt (Löw 2006), while this author has dealt with everyday work in the ghettos of Lithuania (Tauber 2015). The following may prove the potential of addressing such everyday issues and once again show that the history of the ghettos in Eastern Europe still has certain gaps that need filling. The genesis of this particular form of normality is closely tied to work of the Jewish population provided for its German masters. In most ghettos such work was performed outside the ‘Jewish district’, so it was possible for many Jews to establish contact with non-Jewish people in the immediate vicinity. At the same time, Jewish councils, appointed by the Germans or selected by the Jews on Germans’ orders, formed an infrastructure to regulate and control labour and its internal management within ghettos.

This development also took place in the three major ghettos in Lithuania. Since extensive resource materials exist in Yiddish, Lithuanian and German, traditions can be described relatively well (except for the ghetto in Šiauliai). Deep insights into ghetto life can also be found in the diaries of Herman Kruk in relation to Vilnius (Kruk 2002) and Avraham Tory with regard to Kaunas (Tory 1990). In addition, early reports and accounts (Fun letztn Churbn 7 and 8; Gar 1948; Balberyszki 1967; Dworzecki 1948; Shalit 1949) have particular significance and contributions in a two-volume memoir (Sudarsky 1951) are also important. There are complete histories of the three ghettos in the encyclopedias of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem. They contain research on the ghettos in Lithuanian, Israeli and German (e.g. Bubnys 2014a and b; Kaunas 2014; Vilnius 2013; Porat 2009; Levin 2014; Dieckmann 2011; Tauber 2015). The histories of the Jewish councils by Isaiah Trunk (Trunk 1972) and the emergence of the ghettos by Dan Michman (Michman 2011) remain the seminal works on this subject.

After the mass murders of late 1941, survivors were put to work in the ghettos in Kaunas, Vilnius and Šiauliai where the interests of the German administration and armed forces, as well as those of the Jewish councils, were mutually dependant: the former were interested in labour of all kinds by those willing and capable, whereas the latter, in turn, saw work as a means of survival, guaranteeing the ghettos’ continuing existence. Moreover, Jewish labourers in Lithuania had to be paid by their ‘employers’, enabling Jewish councils to provide at least some form of rudimentary aid through taxes or direct salary deductions to those who were either too old or too ill to work.

Work also offered a way for those in forced labour to improve their own wretched living conditions. Naturally everyone was interested in obtaining more food or goods for their families or themselves through official allocations in order to relieve their misery. Inevitably activities clashed with the regulations of the occupying forces; sometimes they involved fraudulent behaviour or sparked conflicts with Lithuanians or other ghetto residents. Such incidents are evident in the criminal investigations of the ghetto police or in the files of internal ghetto courts that meticulously documented their inquiries and judgements in German, Lithuanian and Yiddish. These materials, which are now housed in the Lithuanian Central State Archive, shed light on the reality of ghetto life and illustrate how individuals sought to cope with the situation. Here I present some of these files, supplemented with memoirs and documents, and place them in a broader context.

All ghetto inhabitants were, as I stated, keen to work because the evidence of activity increased an individual’s food-ration entitlement, e.g. in Kaunas the ration was doubled (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 35, p. 236). Especially desirable were positions in work brigades that allowed you to leave the ghetto because you could then transact with locals. However, it did not always go as planned. In the spring of 1943, the head of the investigation section of the ghetto police, Giršas Volpertas, wrote a report on a related incident involving fraud. Baruchas Kovenskis, a member of a work brigade in Kaunas, reserved 5 kilograms of butter with a Lithuanian woman and wanted to pay and take it the next day. When he appeared on 1 May she stated that his colleague, who she believed had come on his behalf, had already picked up the butter. Since the woman did not want to issue the goods, Kovenskis’s supposed colleague finally left her RM 325 and disappeared with the butter (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 145, p. 35). The Lithuanian woman believed the claim of the man because he personally knew Kovenskis and his statement that Kovenskis could not come because he had to work that day at Aleksotas airport was a commonplace occurrence in the assignment of brigades. Often, people from city brigades were indeed divided up at short notice for hard work at Aleksotas outside the city (Tauber 2015, 190–95). On the basis of a testimony by Ilija Kaganas, a member of Kovenskis’s work brigade, it turned out that the fraudulent buyer was Arkadijus Buršteinas, who Volpertas summoned for interrogation (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 145, p. 35).

Buršteinas, who was questioned on 4 May, did not deny the incident, but believed to be in the right as he had already negotiated with the Lithuanian woman in front of Kovenskis, but failed to agree on a price: he offered RM 62 per kilogram, whereas she demanded RM 65. Having failed to force down the price, he left. Kovenskis witnessed this and ultimately paid the woman her desired price, but only because he wanted to snub Buršteinas. Enraged, Buršteinas had then taken a portion of the butter, but stated that he could not recall whether he had claimed to have come on Kovenskis’s behalf. However, he was only able to sell 2 kilograms in the ghetto and make a profit of RM 40, which he donated to a good cause.

The investigator recorded his findings and conclusions. Kovenskis had bought a total of 15 kilograms of butter in Kaunas, but only took 10 kilograms and wanted to pick-up the remaining 5 kilograms the following day (despite bribable German, Lithuanian and Jewish ghetto guards, the smuggling of food into the ghetto was officially forbidden and entailed considerable risks, as discussed below). Even if Buršteinas had to pay the purchase price owed to the suspicious Lithuanian, it was nevertheless assumed that he had wanted to acquire the goods fraudulently. This assumption is also supported by the fact that it was very difficult to find food in the city in the week of the incident between Easter and 1 May. The fraudster also made a profit. The investigators reached the conclusion that what mattered to Buršteinas was his own enrichment rather than settling a personal score with Kovenskis (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 145, p. 35 f.).

These events provide initial insights into ghetto reality. The quantities reveal that the above incident not only concerned the purchase of food for the buyer’s own use, but that the butter was bought with the intention to resell it in the ghetto (Gar 1948, 119 f.). The fact that the Lithuanian seller was not prepared to budge from her price showed there was a demand. Finally, it seems that Kovenskis was able to smuggle 10 kilograms into the ghetto in a single day, even though returning work gangs were searched at the ghetto gate. The way Buršteinas’s fraud was recorded shows that such events were by no means an exception, but reflected an everyday aspect of food procurement and survival strategy. The fact that trade between Jewish workers and the Aryan populace was a mass phenomenon is evidenced by urgent instructions of the German civil administration passed through the Kaunas ghetto police to work gang leaders in July 1943, that is for ‘workers not to leave their work places and engage in trade und hoarding’ (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 19, p. 126). The regularity of purchasing additional food is also clear in memoirs written after 1944:

Early in the morning, after the night shift, they ordered us to walk back to the ghetto [...] farmer wives sold their own grown vegetables there [at the former Jewish fish market outside the ghetto]. Whenever the opportunity arose, we stole away from the column, disappearing quickly between the stalls and grabbing a cabbage or other vegetables in exchange for some money before rushing back into the procession’ (Faitelson and Widerstand, 53).

M. Chevasztein in Vilnius had similar experiences:

I used the lunch break or other free moments to make purchases. For this purpose, we ran into the next Polish huts. We bought bread, cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, etc. at a fairly high price [...] After work, we returned home with these purchases. We gradually got to know the guards and they allowed us to buy something (EK 3 Legal Proceedings, vol. 4, p. 1571, German translation of the book Geopfertes Volk – der Untergang des polnischen Judentums [Sacrificed people – the demise of Polish jewry] by M. Chevasztein).

Jozif Gar, who already reported on the events in Kaunas in the 1940s, emphasized that work outside the ghetto was the best and safest of all possible ways of procuring cheap ‘food’ (Gar 1948, 103, 118). In the summer, there was another option, as work in the countryside gave opportunities to forage for food and procure fresh vegetables and fruit (Gar 1948, 118). In this respect, the call for reflection at harvest time published in late September 1942 in an editorial of the Vilnius ghetto newspaper In diesem Moment has a special double meaning: ‘We should not stop lifting our eyes to the sky’ (Feldshtein 1997, 137).

While such procurement practices were commonplace, they could quickly lead to trouble. Even when Salomon Baron had permission to make purchases from the Local Commissioner of Kaunas, something soon went wrong:

On my arrest on 12 December the [...] Kaunas police took my money – approximately Rbl. 1,200 – as well as a brown leather wallet, pocket knife and a pocket watch. On my release from prison on 20 December, these things should have been returned to me, but the officer was not there at the time and I could not have them.

Baron was not the only one affected, which he made clear in his request to the chief of the ghetto police: ‘the money is from aircraft wage [meaning: work at the airfield in Aleksotas] for my family. I kindly ask you to fulfil my request because we have been left without money’ (LCVA R-973, ap. 1, b. 9, p. 24, front and back page). Such family networks were an important structural feature of the ghettos, as only cooperation and loyalty within a narrow (family) circle gave people the strength to cope with life in the ghetto. Tight communities were also formed through forced cohabitation with others in crowded houses or working closely in a brigade.

At times, people received small rewards or gifts from supervisory personnel within the ghetto, as did Ida Kaganaitė, who nevertheless had the misfortune of being found with two loaves of bread and a lemon during a check at the ghetto gate by her German masters. Meticulous findings of the ghetto police eventually led to the following conclusion:

I established that she is engaged in clean-up work at the airfield. Above all, this is laundry work for workers or general construction foremen [...] it has repeatedly come to the fore that also soldiers [...] brought her laundry for washing [sic.] and that she received bread or small packets of baking soda – lemons – as a reward’ (LCVA R-973, ap. 2. b. 19, p. 124).

Thus, the Jewess was spared the punishment imposed on other apprehended smugglers, which was usually work on Sunday (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 19, p. 129). Also, the 47-year-old Pesė Perkienė fell into the hands of the ghetto police under German security police’s orders because she had brought food several times at a shop in Kaunas and was denounced. Not only were Jews forbidden to visit a ‘normal’ food store, but it seems that Perkienė was not wearing the Star of David. In another case, a Jewess was punished by being held under arrest for four days or fined RM 20 for merely ‘walking without a Star of David’ (LCVA R-973, ap. 3, b. 52, p. 340). When questioned on 12 May 1942, Perkienė claimed not to have taken off the Jewish star or to have paid anything for the food. Rather, she repeatedly referred to her former Lithuanian neighbour, Dainauskienė: ‘She sold me no [food], but out of pity gave my children some potatoes, cereals, bread and cabbage. I have no money to buy food and was therefore forced to beg from my previous neighbours’ (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 69, fol. 90). A Jewish woman under arrest summed up the reality of food procurement in a single sentence: ‘I only know that my children are starving and that I had to get some food for them’ (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 69, p. 90, back page). The woman questioned by the ghetto police had four children, the youngest an eight-year-old boy, a fourteen year old, and two over the age of sixteen who were obliged to work.

The treatment of people from the ghettos varied, as the examples of Ida Kaganaitė and Pesė Perkienė show, depending on their place of work and how they were supervised. Access to food and trade with the local populace were directly linked. Bolt, an engineer at the construction company Grün und Bilfinger in Kaunas, made a name for himself as a Jew hater: ‘There was very heavy work and people could exchange things only under extremely difficult conditions, as Bolt always watched and then took food away from the people or notified the Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security Service) or City Commissioner’ (EK 3 Legal proceedings, vol. 3, 817). In turn, Oskar Schönbrunner, a paymaster at Field Headquarters 814 in Vilnius, was honoured as a Righteous Among the Nations in 1977, as two survivors testified after the war: ‘Schönbrunner helped the Jews working for him by providing benefits that were punishable by the SD; these included support through food, wood and other items of daily use. Schönbrunner also improved the living conditions of the Jews by building additional factory kitchens’ (EK 3 Legal proceedings, vol. 4, p. 1455). Another way of food procurement associated with work in cities was particularly dangerous. As the people’s misery was immense, there were those such as Jona-Dovydas Rubinas, who was caught stealing at the army-catering store on 30 December 1942. The upper paymaster of the army-catering store in Kaunas reported the theft to the SD (Security Service) and the ghetto police and requested that the thief be punished (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 19, p. 243). In his interrogation, Rubinas outlined the reasons for what he did:

I have worked at the army-catering store for about two weeks. I previously worked at the airfield. During my entire time at work I have never done anything wrong. I have performed heavy work the whole time and had to support myself with my primary and supplementary rations. Today, I worked at my job as usual [...] loading food. Given the poor nutrition of my family, I succumbed to the temptation to take two tin cans from the load. I did not know what was in them. I just knew that there was food’ (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 19, fol. 244).

Nothing more is known about the punishment of Rubinas, but in similar cases beatings, additional work and the temporary withdrawal of reference cards were imposed (Tauber 2015, 294–313).

Finally, the attempt to provide food could also prove fatal as in the case of Nachmanas Srokas (aged twenty-six) and Joselis Fridas (aged forty-five), who were shot at Aleksotas airport by German guards on 23 May 1942. They ostensibly sought to leave the area in order to buy food (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 33, p. 15, back page). It was also life threatening to smuggle food through the ghetto fence, and not through the ghetto guard post. On 28 February 1942, the Jewish ghetto police reported in its daily report to the chairman of the Jewish Council: ‘I report to you that yesterday, on 27 February at 20:00, citizen Balkindas Jankelis was shot at the intersection of Stulginskis and Linkuva Streets outside the ghetto limits, as facts show, while pulling a small sledge with food.’ The Lithuanian guard justified his action by stating that the deceased fled after his call and also that he did not respond to several warning shots (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 33, fol. 300, p. 305).

However, a contact zone at the ghetto fence was soon created. The situation in Vilnius was especially pragmatic because here the ghetto was in the middle of the city:

an agreement was reached with non-Jewish neighbours whose windows faced the ghetto and trade began. Initially, this trade was very simple: a noose was lowered from a window and ghetto inhabitants tied money, valuables or clothes to it. The neighbours took it on themselves and lowered goods [meaning: food] on the same rope into the ghetto [...] Later the trade was done on a larger scale. Dozens of loads were smuggled night after night with all kinds of goods through the attics of 21 Dajtsche Street [...] through the Maline [underground hideout] on 3 Straschun Road (Sutzkever 2009, 97).

Also, in Kaunas, a kind of professional trusteeship evolved: anyone who wanted could give goods to middlemen, who then sought to sell them to the Lithuanian population at the fence. Berelis Migancas was one of the negotiators. He was sentenced in the autumn of 1941. The 21-year-old was withdrawn from work at Aleksotas airport as well as in a city brigade because he drifted elsewhere: ‘when questioned in court he admitted that he used free time when he was neither at the airfield nor in the city to trade items for food for other people at the fence and for profit’ (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 51, p. 65). This example shows that individual trade was punished within the ghetto when it conflicted with the ghetto community’s group obligation to work. The German masters punished such offences less than the ghetto authorities. In the case of Migancas, the ghetto court gave a harsher punishment, since the young man lived alone and did not have to provide for a family.

Such trade was also brisk in Vilnius, hence, the officer for Jewish affairs of the Lithuanian city administration proposed resuming strip corridor patrols along the ghetto to the German occupiers at the regional station in December 1941: ‘it has also been noticed that the Jews even use twilight [sic.] for the receipt and delivery of different goods from unauthorized persons through the insulation [meaning: the fenced-off ghetto border]’ (LCVA R-643, ap. 3, b. 194, p. 167). Shalom Eilati, born in 1933, watched in Kaunas as his mother traded with a Lithuanian woman:

across from us [...] stood a Lithuanian woman, seemingly without purpose. My mother would wave her hand or flap a woollen skirt or a colourful towel up and down to arouse her interest [...] The gentile woman would [...] begin waving her own items of trade – eggs, butter and meat. Then the vocal transaction would begin. They haggled over the terms of exchange. When they agreed, both would look hastily left and right, spring simultaneously to the fence, trade the goods in their hands in an instant and retreat to their starting corners. Sometimes the lengthy bargaining would end without a result (Eilati, River 32 f.).

Such form of ‘intermediary trade’ between the ghetto and the ‘Aryan’ environment was no exception. During the first months of the ghetto, a certain kind of ‘working from home’ also developed in Kaunas. Its success depended on goods being transported backwards and forwards between their ‘manufacturer’ and non-Jewish customers. It was based on demand for most basic commodities, such as headscarves, aprons and hats that the Lithuanian population lacked. Bed sheets or white linen, which had often been dyed to make them more attractive, were sought after. Repairs and alterations were also common (Tauber 2015, 251 f.; Gar 1948, p. 121). Another possibility was the skilled craft works of German and Lithuanian masters, which led to a warning sign being posted in the ghetto on 13 May 1943:

Lately, Jewish workers have taken various items from their work posts such as shoes, watches and other items for repair in the ghetto [...] Jewish workers are forbidden to take any items from their work posts into the ghetto for repair. If such repairs are proposed, Jewish workers are to be politely told that the acceptance of such work is strictly prohibited (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 1, fol. 22).

The early involvement of young people in the work process had special strategic importance. The Jewish Council in Kaunas reported in its ‘overview of the activities of the council of elders’ in June 1942: ‘a new development in work is the presence of more than 200 young workers gardening outside the ghetto [...] This young group has proven itself and does a good job’ (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 40, p. 73). It was crucial that also one half of these children received additional food as workers. Since work offered the possibility to trade and to better food, there were also volunteers such as the fourteen-year-old son of the aforementioned Pesė Perkienė, who was hired at the dreaded Aleksotas airfield.

No one was immune to terrible consequences, even those who supposedly had easier access to food. This was the case of the Jewish cart-driver Jankelevitz, who on 1 May 1942 was reported missing by his wife after being arrested fourteen days earlier in the courtyard of the Lithuanian meat cooperative Maistas. The 36-year-old, as told by a ghetto resident who accompanied her husband, reported that the stolen meat was discovered during a cart search and that her husband was then arrested. In reality, the other riders wanted to exchange the meat for a dress and that her husband had nothing to do with the entire affair. However, interrogations of the Jews involved in the ride to Maistas painted a rather different picture. The meat was bought from an unknown Lithuanian, who was also at the court with his team. Three kilograms were traded, as there was not enough money for more. The deal went smoothly until Jankelevitz was denounced and accused of theft by a Lithuanian employee at Maistas (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 69, fol. 39 f.).

Jankelevitz and his colleagues were in a privileged position because they were officially allowed to leave the ghetto regularly and move about to provide social welfare for the ghetto, with the permission of the German ghetto guards. It was certainly part of their regular activity to procure additional food by visiting Maistas, especially to meet Lithuanian farmers, who were not averse to trade, in the courtyard. Also interesting in this context was the task of the Jewish drivers. They brought feathers to Maistas (there was a feather-sorting section at the ghetto) and exchanged them for bones, which were then brought into the ghetto to make soup for the needy (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 69, fol. 41). All ghettos in Lithuania had soup kitchens and other social institutions – albeit makeshift – to provide warm soup or essential material resources (e.g. firewood in winter; Tauber 2015, 285–6).

Cooperative relationships existed beyond the already-noted micro-networks found within a family environment, as with the soup kitchens, but they were mostly limited to those belonging to the same status group or class. The work brigades entrusted one person to execute large orders on behalf of them all. The advantage of this large-scale food procurement was usually a lower unit price, less risk of discovery and being able to rely on the middleman’s good contacts. But disagreements could also arise, as recorded in documents of the ghetto police. The 37-year-old worker Dovydas Tamše, who offered to buy sugar for members of his brigade, was considered suspect in the autumn of 1942. An investigation revealed that Tamše was likely to have embezzled money because Tamše’s claim that his Lithuanian partners hit him on the ear was hardly credible. The initiation of proceedings by ghetto authorities took place under the force of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Republic of Lithuania with the telling note that such offences must be especially prosecuted under ‘current ghetto conditions’ (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 145, p. 92 f.).

The benefits of work for individuals outside the ghetto meant that it was hard to be a permanent member in a city brigade. It was the brigadier who decided on who worked in the group, and thereby had access to obtaining food; he was the ‘spokesman’ and foreman of the group, who was the primary contact for Germans and Lithuanians at a workplace as well as for the internal ghetto organization. Isak Rozalsky, a merchant in Kaunas before the war, noted that the brigadier of a well-established brigade for constructing garages in Kaunas often selected even more workers for his group at the ghetto gate (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 69, fols 77 ff.):

In September 1941, I noticed Tomašauskas at the ghetto gate [...] who came from town. At my request, he temporarily hired me as a worker at the garage building in Kauen [...] Since I always wanted to work in this brigade, I offered Tomašauskas my brand new suit that I estimated to be worth RBL 1,500 for a price of RBL 600. Tomašauskas agreed, took my suit and gave me two RBL 200 notes. He has not paid me the rest to the present day.

Testimony gathered by investigating bodies in the ghetto repeatedly showed that Tomašauskas did not only cheat Rozalsky, he initiated a change of workers in order to receive payment to work in the brigade (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 69, fols 80 ff.). Such behaviour was far from the rule. On the contrary, many brigadiers were willing to accommodate their workers and also to cover for them. The incensed Kaunas ghetto police summed it up: ‘Inspections revealed that persons listed as not working on given days showed a note from the column head or a work card as evidence that they did indeed work on such days. Such evidence cannot reflect reality’ (LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 52, p. 141). Evidence of work was vital for every ghetto resident: better accommodation and remuneration depended on entries in work documents and the employer payroll (Tauber 2015, 226–48).

The above networks for transporting food to the ghetto were of great importance. Passing the ghetto gate was always a gamble: smuggled goods could be confiscated here. The situation was particularly problematic if Germans inspected the Jewish ghetto guards. This always had direct impact on the precarious economics of the ghetto. In good times, the price difference between ghetto and city goods was relatively small so that many people gave up smuggling and bought directly in the ghetto (Gar 1948, 118 f.). However, goods from outside the ghetto usually came via the ghetto gate. Officially, representatives of the Jewish labour office aided by the ghetto police were responsible for the collection and control of departing work columns. Jews, as already mentioned, were not allowed to return to the ghetto with any food or other items (Gar 1948, 340). As a result Jewish gate guards played an essential role and could keep some of the goods back for themselves. This limited smuggling opportunities for individuals: they could only hide food on their body and in their clothing (body-binding, so-called compresses, or hiding items in their shoes were popular in their attempt to bypass a superficial search). Dishes that were allowed to into the ghetto for on-site feeding could have a double bottom in which a piece of bacon, butter or margarine could be concealed (Gar 1948, 103). The great number of returnees each day (several thousand in Vilnius and Kaunas) made it impossible to search every individual (Gar 1948, 103, 340 f.). The Jewish councils were well aware of the occasional questionable behaviour of Jewish gate guards. In April 1942, Fried, the chairman of the Jewish council in Vilnius, filed a fiery complaint against the ghetto police chief, Gens: ‘Incidents occur during ghetto entry involving gate guards and those entering. Frequently, they are not caused by formal matters, but by careless dealings and improper edginess of gate guards’ (Balberyszki 1967, 430). However, smuggling opportunities made city work particularly appealing. Such work, as Jozif Gar states, ‘made the ghetto Jews privileged and secure [...] allowed them to eat better and to always have a few spare Marks [in the sense of freely available]’ (Gar 1948, 104).

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that professional smugglers soon organized themselves in the ghetto, offering their services for a commission. A black market thus developed, which now operated on a grand scale in which all ghetto institutions, including the Jewish council (for the soup kitchens), as well as German and Lithuanian guards participated (Tauber 2015, 257 f.). Hermann Kruk, the chronicler of the ghetto in Vilnius, summarized it succinctly: ‘So, the smuggler has the possibility of smuggling and the ghetto has the possibility of getting bread’ (Kruk 2002, 287).

A certain grey area appeared in the context of ghetto societies, which was a constant cause of great distress and danger to individuals. The acquisition of food outside the ghetto was so important as a strategy of survival that it always entailed many uncertainties: this could be a denunciation or the intervention of a zealous Lithuanian police officer, German engineer or employee of a meat cooperative. Or, it could be a close inspection at the ghetto gate, in particular, by German ‘authorities’ or it could involve fraud or theft inside or outside the ghetto. Normality and everyday life, therefore reflected the reality of a forced society whose social differentiation was primarily based on a single criterion: access to food.

Translated from German into English by Edward Assarabowski

Joachim Tauber

Joachim Tauber obtained his PhD from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 1989. He has served as the director of the Nordost-Institute Lüneburg (IKGN) at the University of Hamburg since 2010. He read modern history at the University of Hamburg, where he was appointed as a private lecturer upon completion of his postdoctoral qualification with a monograph about the Jewish working force in Lithuania 1941–44. His research interests include the history of German–Lithuanian relations, the German occupation of Eastern Europe in the First and Second World Wars and the Holocaust in the Baltic States. He has published many articles, and his most recent book is: Arbeit als Hoffnung. Jüdische Ghettos in Litauen 1941–1944 [Work as hope. Jewish ghettos in Lithuania 1941–1944] (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2015).

List of References

Sources

Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden. Dept. 461.32438, EK 3 (Legal proceedings).

LCVA R-626, ap. 1, b. 4, p.12 (Quote in the title of this article)

LCVA R-643, ap. 3, b. 194 (City administration of Vilnius, correspondence with Jewish councillors).

LCVA R-973, ap. 1, b. 9 (Correspondence of the Kaunas ghetto police).

LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 35 (Weekly reports of the Jewish ghetto police in Kaunas).

LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 19 (Enforcement orders of the Jewish ghetto police – Central Office, Kaunas).

LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 33 (Weekly reports of the Kaunas ghetto police).

LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 52 (Correspondence of Kaunas ghetto work brigades).

LCVA R-973, ap. 3, b. 52 (Work area of the Kaunas ghetto).

LCVA R-973, ap. 2, b. 145 (Interrogation logs of the head of the investigative section, ghetto police of Kaunas, May 1942–July 1943).

Literature

Balberyszki, Mendel (1967) Shtarker fun eisn [Stronger than iron]. Tel Aviv: Hamenora (Yiddish).

Bubnys, Arūnas (2014a) The Kaunas Ghetto. Vilnius: Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, 2014.

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Levin, Dov and Zive A Brown (2014) The Story of an Underground. Jerusalem and New York, NY: Gefen Publishing House. Low, Andrea, Doris L. Bergen and Anna Hajkova (2014) Alltag im Holocaust. Leben im Großdeutschen Reich 1941–1944 [Daily life during the Holocaust. Life in the German Reich 1941–1945]. Munich: De Gruyter/Oldenbourg. Low, Andrea (2006) Juden im Ghetto Litzmannstadt. Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung, Verhalten [Jews in the Łódź ghetto. Living conditions, introspection and behaviour]. Göttingen: Wallstein. Feldshtein, Tzemach (1997) ‘At this Moment. Dr. Tzemach Feldshtein’s Editorials in the Vilna Ghetto, 1942–1943’, Yivo-Bleter, New Series, vol. III, 114–205 (Yiddish). Gar, Yozif (1948) Umkum fun der jidische Kovne [Untergang des jüdischen Kaunas] [The demise of Jewish Kaunas]. Munich: Rubinstein (Yiddish). Kruk, Herman (2002) The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps 1939–1944, ed. and intro. Benjamin Harshav. New Haven and London: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Sutzkever, Abraham (2009) Wilner Getto 1941–1944 [The Vilnius ghetto 1941–1944]. Zurich: Ammann. Tauber, Joachim (2015) Arbeit als Hoffnung. Jüdische Ghettos in Litauen 1941–1944 [Work as hope. Jewish ghettos in Lithuania 1944–1944]. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.

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ABSTRACT

The research project ‘Wirtschaftliche Ausplünderung der jüdischen Bevölkerung in Württemberg und Hohenzollern’ [The Economic Plundering of the Jewish Population in Württemberg and Hohenzollern] is a joint project by state archives, memorial societies and individual researchers in the Federal German State of Baden-Württemberg. It examines National Socialist policies and actions to show the various participators and perpetrators in the economic plundering of German Jewish citizens. It provides an insight into how commercial and ideological interests, as well as state legislation and actions, were intrinsic to the discrimination, disenfranchisement and persecution of Jewish people in this part of south-west Germany.

Introduction

Economic measures against Jewish businesses were an important component of the discrimination, disenfranchisement and persecution of Jewish citizens during the ‘Third Reich’ [German: ‘Drittes Reich’]. ¹ The boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933 marked the beginning of Nazi policies against Jews. It was followed by the Nuremberg Laws [Nürnberger Gesetze] of 1935, which marked an important step in anti-Semitic legislation. Actions such as ‘Aryanization’ [‘Arisierung’] – the forced sale, well below market rate, of Jewish property and businesses to the members of the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ – ‘the People’s Society’ – did not begin until after the Crystal Night of 9 November 1938; rather, the economic disenfranchisement of Jewish business-owners was among a protracted sequence of actions. ‘Wirtschaftliche Ausplünderung der jüdischen Bevölkerung in Württemberg und Hohenzollern’ [The Economic Plundering of the Jewish Population in Württemberg and Hohenzollern] examines Nazi policies and actions in what is today the German state of Baden-Württemberg. It is a joint project of the Central State Archives of Stuttgart, ² Ludwigsburg State Archives, ³ Sigmaringen State Archives, ⁴ the Association of Gäu-Neckar-Alb Memorial Societies [Gedenkstättenverbund Gäu-Neckar-Alb e.V.] ⁵ and individual researchers from local archives and memorial societies.

The project examines a variety of businesses, from textile manufacturing to livestock dealers and law firms once located in cities in the region of Württemberg-Hohenzollern, from the university town of Tübingen and rural Rexingen to the urban and industrial city of Stuttgart, the location of the main tax and revenue office of the region. The aim is to show the involvement of various participators and perpetrators in the economic plundering of German Jewish citizens, including members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party [NSDAP; German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei], government tax and revenue officials and ‘Aryan’ business competitors. It will also provide an insight into how commercial and ideological interests, state legislation and actions were intrinsic to the discrimination, disenfranchisement and persecution of Jewish citizens in this region of Germany.

After a short overview of the current research concerning the economic plundering of German Jews between 1933 and 1945, this work-in-progress report traces how the project is run. It then presents a preliminary outline of the planned publication.

State of the research ⁶

The first German study to deal with the exclusion of Jews from economic activity in the Reich was Helmut Genschel’s Die Verdrängung der Juden aus der Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich [The expulsion of Jews from the Third Reich’s economy] (1966). Over the course of the next thirty years, there were, with the exception of Avraham Barkai’s Vom Boykott zur Entjudung: Der wirtschaftliche Existenzkampf der Juden im Dritten Reich 1933–1943 [From boycott to dejudaization: the economic struggle of Jews in the Third Reich] (1988), which took a national perspective, only a few, mostly regional and local studies tackled this topic; these included Barbara Händler-Lachmann and Thomas Werther’s Vergessene Geschäfte – verlorene Geschichte. Jüdisches Wirtschaftsleben in Marburg und seine Vernichtung im Nationalsozialismus [Forgotten business – forgotten history: Jewish economic life in Marburg and its annihilation during National Socialism] (1992). Frank Bajohr’s seminal study ‘Arisierung’ in Hamburg: Die Verdrängung der jüdischen Unternehmer 1933–1945 [‘Aryanization’ in Hamburg: the expulsion of Jewish businessmen 1933–1945] (1998) was a beacon in an era of more thorough research that continues to this day. Bajohr set the local example of Hamburg in the wider context of anti- Jewish German discriminatory and exploitative policies. However, works in the years that followed, such as the 2002 edited volume ‘Arisierung’ und Restitution: Die Rückerstattung jüdischen Eigentums in Deutschland und Österreich nach 1945 und 1989 [‘Aryanization’ and restitution: reimbursement of Jewish property in Germany and Austria after 1945 and 1989] and the 2003 edited volume Raub und Restitution: ‘Arisierung’ und Rückerstattung des jüdischen Eigentums in Europa [Robbery and restitution: ‘Aryanization’ and reimbursement of Jewish property in Europe] look at the topic from an international and comparative position. Case studies of the history of individual Jewish businesses, such as Simone Ladwig-Winters’ Wertheim – ein Warenhausunternehmen und seine Eigentümer: Ein Beispiel der Entwicklung der Berliner Warenhäuser bis zur ‘Arisierung’ [Wertheim – a department store business and its owners: an example for the development of department stores in Berlin up to the era of ‘Aryanization’] (1997) and the involvement of individual German companies and financial institutions, such as the edited volume Profiteure des NS-Systems? Deutsche Unternehmen und das ‘Dritte Reich’ [Profiteers of the Nazi system? German businesses and the ‘Third Reich’] (2006) were also published. A recent example of a local study is Christina Fritsche’s extensive Ausgeplündert, zurückerstattet und entschädigt: Arisierung und Wiedergutmachung in Mannheim [Plundered, reimbursed and restituted: Aryanization and compensation in Mannheim] (2013). Also published in 2013, Christiane Kuller’s Bürokratie und Verbrechen: Antisemitische Finanzpolitik und Verwaltungspraxis im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland [Bureaucracy and crime: anti-Semitic fiscal policy and administrative practice in National Socialist Germany] focuses on the role of the German tax and revenue offices.

As these works reveal, ‘Aryanization’ is a thorny topic (e.g. Goscher and Lillteicher 2002, 10; Rappl 2004, 17–30), not only because it is a Nazi term but also, according to some, because it denotes only certain aspects of the economic plundering of German Jews. This is examined in the introduction to the final edited volume of ‘The Economic Plundering of the Jewish Population in Württemberg and Hohenzollern’. A good definition of ‘Aryanization’ and how it can encompass the various Nazi measures taken against German Jews and the economic plundering of them as envisaged by the project is presented in the introduction of the 2004 edited volume München arisiert: Entrechtung und Enteignung der Juden in der NS-Zeit [Aryanized Munich: disenfranchisement and dispossession of Jews during the National Socialist era]:

‘Aryanization’ is the comprehensive and systematic theft of a certain sector of a civic society in modern history. The National Socialist state, by means of its party organizations, public authorities and a network of private and public interested parties, seized every type of Jewish asset – properties, companies, craft businesses, cash, financial stocks, life insurance certificates, furniture, antiques, precious metals, books, art works and much more. The result of this plundering was not only an ‘Aryanized’ and ‘Jew-free’ Munich but also many citizens, companies, institutions and administrative bodies who actively promoted the expropriation of their Jewish neighbours, Jewish companies and Jewish competitors or who knowingly profited from this process [...] The term ‘Aryanization’ was introduced by National Socialist administrative agencies in the 1930s and was – formally and bureaucratically – used to account for a process that transferred Jewish property into ‘Aryan’ hands. In hindsight, we now know the precise circumstances and the vast scale and consequences of these concerted actions against Jewish Germans, and we understand ‘Aryanization’ as the expulsion from the economic realm, the deprivation of rights, the misappropriation, the plundering and, finally, the extermination of Jewish citizens and their livelihood (Baumann and Heusler 2004, 10 f.). ⁷

Moreover, as the studies cited above and titles like that of the edited volume ‘Arisierung’ im Nationalsozialismus: Volksgemeinschaft, Raub und Gedächtnis [‘Aryanization’ during National Socialism: people’s community, robbery and memory] (2000) show, the often problematic restitution of Jewish property after the war is now also under investigation, not least because this tells us something about how Germans have dealt with this aspect of their history (Baumann and Heusler 2004, 15).

The economic plundering of the Jewish population in Wurttemberg and Hohenzollern ⁸

The proposal for the research project had been mooted for years and began in earnest in 2014. Since then, most of the participants have been meeting from time to time in the Central State Archives of Stuttgart, while smaller groups, such as the participants from the Association of Gäu-Neckar-Alb Memorial Societies, have got together more regularly to discuss their methods and findings.

The research project wants to add to the discussion of the economic plundering of German Jews, the legal framework, how it was undertaken and the participators – both perpetrators and victims – involved. The region investigated is the NSDAP party administrative district [Gau] of Württemberg- Hohenzollern, ⁹ and the cities represented range from Bad Mergentheim in the north to Rottweil, south of the Prussian province of Hohenzollern, and from Schramberg in the west to Ulm in the east. This encompasses the large industrial city of Stuttgart which, as the state capital, was also an important administrative centre; medium-sized cities, such as the university town of Tübingen; and small rural villages, such as Rexingen. The Jewish businesses considered are also wide-ranging, from livestock dealers to law firms and manufacturing companies.

The participators are looked at from different perspectives. The perpetrators – NSDAP party organizations, local authorities, administrative offices and private individuals deemed part of ‘the People’s Society’ [‘Volksgemeinschaft’] – participated in the economic plundering of their fellow Jewish citizens on varying, but often interlinked levels. The research project also sheds light on the response, and lack of response, of the victims.

The sources used for the most part are held in the State Archives of Baden- Württemberg. The State Archives of Ludwigsburg, for example, houses tax and revenue office records from Bad Mergentheim, Heilbronn and Schwäbisch Gmünd as well as from the regional tax and revenue office [Oberfinanzdirektion] of Stuttgart up to 1945. These files are invaluable because many records were destroyed in the war. The documents provide insight into how the disparate processes functioned and who the revenue officials involved were. For the years after 1945, the State Archives of Ludwigsburg houses records on restitution cases – almost a whole kilometre of recompensation [Wiedergutmachung] files alone. Other sources are located in the Sigmaringen State Archives: these include the tax and revenue office records of Horb. Here, as well as in Ludwigsburg, denazification records [Spruchkammerakten] are available, although these have to be examined very critically as many of the testimonies have been whitewashed. Moreover, the sources used include first-person files, largely from the victims’ point of view, such as autobiographies ¹⁰ and interviews. Contemporary sources, such as newspapers ¹¹ and municipal registers of land ownership, have also also been taken into consideration.

The final publication opens with a preface by the editors setting out the basic processes of the economic plundering of German Jews in Württemberg- Hohenzollern as well as giving an overview of the major participators. It also defines the concepts used, and explains why the term ‘Aryanization’ is not used. The introductory chapter by Martin Ulmer (Gedenkstättenverbund Gäu-Neckar-Alb e.V. and Geschichtswerkstatt Tübingen e.V.) ¹² summarizes völkisch [nationalist] and NSDAP ideology and agendas before 1933, with a special focus on the 1920 NSDAP party manifesto as well as calls for boycotts of Jewish businesses and legislative initiatives taken before 1933. Another introductory chapter written by Martin Burkhardt (Economics archives of Baden-Württemberg) ¹³ outlines the economic status of Jews in Württemberg and Hohenzollern in 1933, providing data on the range of professions and trades they practised and the percentage of Jews in selected professional fields. The main chapters are organized in five parts in chronological order. Opening sub-chapters elaborate on the larger context of anti-Jewish practices in the ‘Third Reich’, followed by respective case studies.

The first part deals with the time period from the Nazi seizure of power [‘Machtergreifung’] on 30 January 1933 to the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935. Nicole Bickhoff (Central State Archives of Stuttgart) provides an overview of the legal actions taken by the National Socialist government during this time period. The new regime was able to add to the laws and ordinances issued by the Weimar Republic, such as the 1931 Reich Flight Tax [Reichsfluchtsteuer], which attempted to stem the flight of capital, but it also introduced its own legislation, such as the April 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service [Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums]. Another summary is planned to be written by Martin Häusermann (Ludwigsburg State Archives) on the topic of the immediate National Socialist actions that the Nazi government took against Jews as soon as they came to power in 1933. These included the exclusion of Jews from local councils [Gemeinderäte] and registered associations [Vereine] in addition to the 1 April 1933 boycott of Jewish shopkeepers, lawyers and doctors.

The first local case study is a jointly co-authored article by Hartwig Behr (Bad Mergentheim) ¹⁴ and Barbara Staudacher (Träger- und Förderverein Ehemalige Synagoge Rexingen e.V.) ¹⁵ who detail the sudden expulsion of Jewish butchers from the Württemberg meat market because kosher butchering was outlawed by the 21 April 1933 Law on the Butchering of Animals [Gesetz über das Schlachten von Tieren]. Jochen Faber (Ludwigsburg) sheds light on the economic demise of Jewish agriculturalists in Hoheneck, near Ludwigsburg. Benedict von Bremen (Geschichtswerkstatt Tübingen e.V., Initiative Alte Synagoge Hechingen e.V. ¹⁶ and Träger- und Förderverein Ehemalige Synagoge Rexingen e.V.) provides a comparative analysis of the destruction of small Jewish textile merchants in Tübingen, Hechingen, Horb and Reutlingen. Irene Scherer and Welf Schröter (Löwenstein Forschungsverein e.V. Mössingen) ¹⁷

present their findings on the Pausa textile company of Mössingen. Plans for taking over this enterprise were in place before 1933; putting these into effect after 1933 resulted in the early flight of the owners, the brothers Arthur and Felix Löwenstein and their families into exile in Britain. Winfried Hecht (Verein Ehemalige Synagoge Rottweil e.V.) investigates the rapid liquidation of the Schwarzwälder Bürgerzeitung [Black Forest citizen’s newspaper] in Rottweil. He describes the Bürgerzeitung’s loss of status as the official register of Rottweil and the following swift collapse of its economic basis. Carsten Kohlmann (Schramberg) looks into the acquisition of the Schramberg cinema, founded by Hollywood pioneer and Schramberg native Carl Lämmle by NSDAP members and the role of film as an important Nazi propaganda tool. The situation of Jewish lawyers is examined by Martin Ulmer, taking the examples of Dr Simon Hayum (Tübingen), Dr Manfred Scheuer and Dr Siegfried Gumbel (both Heilbronn), and other practitioners in Stuttgart. The first part ends with Gisela Roming’s (Verein Ehemalige Synagoge Rottweil e.V.) paper on the dissolution of the Jewish community in Rottweil between 1933 and 1940 and how they were excluded from the city’s economic and social life, resulting in their early flight into exile.

The years between the passing of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and mid 1938 and the further radicalization of anti-Jewish Nazi policies is the subject of the second part. Nicole Bickhoff ’s introductory sub-chapter surveys the legislative foundations, such as the 1935 Law of the Reich Citizen [Reichsbürgergesetz], introduced under the Nuremberg Laws, which categorized German citizens as Reich citizens [Reichsbürger] of ‘German’ blood or other citizens of ‘foreign’ racial status, and also an inventory of all Jewish-owned property as the basis for the full-blown deprivation of rights and theft from German Jews to come. The pivotal role of the NSDAP and the mediation centre [Vermittlungszentrale]¹⁸ in making the German economy ‘Jew-free’ and in the forced sale of large corporations as well as the participation of trade associations and the auditing firm Swabian Trustee Inc. [Schwäbische Treuhand AG] ¹⁹

are the focus of Martin Ulmer’s paper. Peter Müller (Ludwigsburg State Archives) examines the role played by the Economic Bank [Wirtschaftsbank] foundation in the economic plundering of Jews.

The local case studies open with Doris Astrid Muth’s (Sigmaringen) paper on the expulsion from Hechingen of the three leading textile manufacturing companies – Julius Levi & Co., Karl Löwengart, and Hermann Levi – and their subsequent ‘Aryanization’. ²⁰ Karl-Heinz Rueß (Göppingen) also looks at textile manufacturing in his study of A. Gutmann & Co. GmbH, a spinning and weaving company based in Göppingen. A different sector of the economy is examined by Martin Ulmer in his paper on the liquidation and forced transfer of Jewish-owned banks in Tübingen, Horb and Stuttgart. Claudia Kleemann’s (Stuttgart) account of the Landauer (Stuttgart, Ulm and Heilbronn), Schocken (Ulm and Pforzheim) and Hermann Tietz (Stuttgart) department stores provides insight into the boycotts and forced sales and transfers in the commercial sales sector. Susanne Rueß (Stuttgart) writes an article on the fate of Jewish medical practitioners in Württemberg. How three female Jewish women – a department store owner, a social worker and a bourgeoise of independent means – from Stuttgart fared is Fabienne Störzinger’s (Stuttgart) subject. ²¹

Martin Ritter (Freundeskreis ehemalige Synagoge Affaltrach e.V.) ²² investigates the Adler-Brauerei [Eagle Brewery] in Heilbronn. The section is anticipated to end with Amelie Fried’s (Munich) research on the Pallas footwear store and how its Jewish owners, Fried’s relatives, fought to save their business. ²³

The third part covers the years 1938–1941 with the registration of all Jews, the 1938 pogrom, the start of the Second World War and the ghettoization of the German Jewish population. The introductory paper discusses preparations for and enactment of the November 1938 terror and its implications. The capital levy on Jewish Germans [‘Judenvermögensabgabe’] played an important part in funding Nazi Germany’s preparations for war. Jews were banned from carrying out independent economic activities. Other anti-Jewish decrees, such as wearing the yellow Star of David, Jewish-only shops, obligatory residence in Jews’ houses [‘Judenhäuser’] and forced relocations continued and exacerbated discrimination against Jews.

The first paper is co-authored by Hartwig Behr and Barbara Staudacher, who describe the economic demise of all Jewish cattle merchants in the region. ²⁴ Jupp Kleegraf (Stuttgart) examines the ghettoization of Jews in Stuttgart’s ‘Judenhäuser’, ‘the attitude of ‘Aryan’ landlords and potential purchasers of Jewish property as well as the role played by the city of Stuttgart in the ‘Aryanization’ and restitution of Jewish-owned real estate. The forced sale of the Schramberger Majolika-Fabrik [Maiolica Factory, Schramberg], the flight of its owners, the Meyer family, and the company’s restitution after 1949 are the subjects of Carsten Kohlmann’s contribution. Another paper is expected to deal with the role of the Stuttgart, Heilbronn and Laupheim municipalities in the forced expropriation and eventual sale of Jewish property. Bettina Eger (Verein Ehemalige Synagoge Rottweil e.V.) closes this section with the history of Max Blochert’s and Wilhelm Wälder’s businesses as examples of the forced transfer of Jewish property in Rottweil.

The fourth part deals with preparations for and execution of the deportation and mass murder of Jews. The years from 1941 to 1945 signalled the final phase of economic plundering, ending in the financial (and often actual) death of Jewish citizens. Martin Ulmer surveys the part played by the state tax and revenue office [Oberfinanzbehörde] ²⁵ in Stuttgart and the local tax and revenue offices [Finanzämter]. Cooperation between the state tax and revenue office, a local tax and revenue office, and the secret state police, or Gestapo, are exemplified by Heinz Högerle (Gedenkstättenverbund Gäu- Neckar-Alb e.V., Träger- und Förderverein Ehemalige Synagoge Rexingen e.V.) with the example of Horb, depicting the participators and profiteers of Jewish deportations from state agencies, Nazi party organizations and, through direct sales and public auctions, the local populace. Hartwig Behr examines the role of Gottlob Belzner, a tax and revenue officer from Bad Mergentheim. A topic that came to the attention of the German public in 2013 following the case of the art collector Cornelius Gurlitt is the Nazi theft of works of art. Concentrating on Stuttgart art historian and arts dealer Dr Morton Bernath, Anja Heuß (Stuttgart) deals with this aspect of economic plundering. ²⁶ Joachim Hahn (Plochingen) ²⁷ has been asked to provide an article on the forced sale of synagogues and the appropriation of Jewish cemeteries.

The fifth and final part deals with the years after 1945. The first paper introduces the concepts and realities of restitution and compensation. The early post-war years saw uncoordinated restitution for concentration and death camp survivors. Heinz Högerle shows how the tax and revenue office in Horb acted on this in 1945 and 1946. Barbara Staudacher also provides examples from Horb of the failure of restitution: the Wälder family returned from exile in France but had no chance of restitution, while the Esslinger family’s case failed because evidence was withheld. It is planned to give an example of a successful case of restitution as well.

Next

The research phase of this project is scheduled to end in 2017, with the publication of its findings in an edited volume planned for 2018. An accompanying travelling exhibition of the project is planned to begin shortly afterwards.

Benedict von Bremen

Benedict von Bremen studied Modern History and American Studies at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. He has published articles and given talks on memories of war in Germany, recollections of the American Civil War and aspects of the conventional arms race between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. He works for the Initiative Alte Synagoge Hechingen e.V. and the Träger- und Förderverein Ehemalige Synagoge Rexingen e.V. He is a member of the Geschichtswerkstatt Tübingen e.V. and the Verein für ein Lern- und Dokumentationszentrum zum Nationalsozialismus e.V. T übingen as well as an associate of the Gedenkstättenverbund Gäu-Neckar-Alb e.V.

ENDNOTES

1 ‘Drittes Reich’ [‘Third Reich’], ‘Arisierung’ [‘Aryanization’] and ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ [‘the People’s Society’] are National Socialist terms. In this article National Socialist terms have been placed within quotation marks.

2 Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg. Accessed 18 January 2016: http://www.landesarchiv- bw.de/web/49689/

3 Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg. Accessed 18 January 2016: http://www.landesarchiv- bw.de/web/49677/

4 Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg. Accessed 29 February 2016: http://www. landesarchiv-bw.de/web/47267/

5 Gedenkstättenverbund Gäu-Neckar-Alb e.V. Accessed 18 January 2016: http:// www.gedenkstaettenverbund-gna.org/

6 For an extensive historiography of research on ‘Aryanization’ and other National Socialist economic measures against German Jews, see Fritsche 2013.

7 English translation of original German text.

8 I am indebted to the minutes taken by Bettina Eger, Fabienne Störzinger and Martin Ulmer at various meetings of the project, as well as to Martin Ulmer for compiling the list of articles for the Table of Contents.

9 Before 1945 Württemberg was a German state and Hohenzollern was part of Prussia.

10 One example is Tübingen lawyer Dr Simon Hayum, see Hayum 2005.

11 For example, ‘Hechingens Marktplatz judenfrei’, Hohenzollerische Blätter [‘Hechingen’s market square now Jew-free’, Hohenzollern Papers] (Hechingen), 10 November 1938, quoted in Otto Werner, Deportation und Vernichtung hohenzollerischer Juden [Deportation and extermination of Hohenzollern’s Jews] (Hechingen: Verein Alte Synagoge Hechingen, 2011), 29–30.

12 Geschichtswerkstatt Tübingen e.V. Accessed 2 November 2016: http://www.geschichtswerkstatt- tuebingen.de/

13 Universität Hohenheim, Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg. Accessed 18 January 2016: https://wabw.uni-hohenheim.de/

14 See the website on Bad Mergentheim in Alemannia Judaica for references to Hartwig Behr’s previous research: Joachim Hahn, Alemannia Judaica. Accessed 18 January 2016: http://www.alemannia-judaica.de/synagoge_mergentheim.htm

15 Träger- und Förderverein Ehemalige Synagoge Rexingen e.V. Accessed January 18, 2016, http://www.ehemalige-synagoge-rexingen.de/

16 Manuel Werner, Synagoge Hechingen. Accessed 25 November 2016: http://altesynagoge- hechingen.de

17 Löwenstein Forschungsverein e.V. Accessed 18 January 2016: http://www.initiativeloewensteinverein. de

18 The Stuttgart Vermittlungszentrale worked for the government of Württemberg, the city of Stuttgart, the NSDAP and individual companies. It was present at negotiations with the Jewish owners of larger factories and properties, determining in large part the terms of sale, the buyer, purchase price, and so on. Martin Ulmer’s email to author, 2 February 2016.

19 The Schwäbische Treuhand AG appraised and rated Jewish-owned companies. Martin Ulmer’s email to author, 2 February 2016.

20 See Muth 2013, 47–64.

21 See also Störzinger 2016.

22 Freundeskreis ehemalige Synagoge Affaltrach e.V. Accessed 2 February 2016: http:// www.synagoge-affaltrach.de/synagoge.html

23 See also Fried 2008.

24 See also Kaufmann and Kohlmann 2013.

25 The Oberfinanzbehörde was the regional intermediate authority between the Reichsfinanzministerium [Reich tax and revenue office] in Berlin and the local tax revenue offices of the local administrative county districts (known as Oberämter until 1937, then Landkreise). See Martin Ulmer, email to author, 2 February 2016.

26 See also Heuß 2008, 68–81.

27 Joachim Hahn, Alemannia Judaica. Accessed 19 January 2016: http://www.alemannia- judaica.de/

List of References

Bajohr, Frank (1998) ‘Arisierung’ in Hamburg: Die Verdrängung der jüdischen Unternehmer 1933–1945 [‘Aryanization’ in Hamburg: the expulsion of Jewish businessmen 1933–1945]. Hamburg: Christians.

Barkai, Avraham (1988) Vom Boykott zur ‘Entjudung’: Der wirtschaftliche Existenzkampf der Juden im Dritten Reich 1933–1945 [From boycott to deiudaization: the economic struggle of Jews in the Third Reich]. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.

Baumann, Angelika and Andreas Heusler (2004) ‘Einleitung’, in München arisiert: Entrechtung und Enteignung der Juden in der NS-Zeit [Aryanized Munich: disenfranchisement and dispossession of Jews during the National Socialist era], ed. Angelika Baumann and Andreas Heusler. Munich: C. H. Beck, 10–16.

Fried, Amelie (2008) Schuhhaus Pallas: Wie meine Familie sich gegen die Nazis wehrte [Pallas footwear department store: How my family stood up to the Nazis]. Munich: Heyne.

Fritsche, Christina (2013) Ausgeplündert, zurückerstattet und entschädigt: Arisierung und Wiedergutmachung in Mannheim [Plundered, reimbursed and restituted: Aryanization and compensation in Mannheim]. Ubstadt-Weiher: Regionalkultur.

Genschel, Helmut (1966) Die Verdrängung der Juden aus der Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich [The expulsion of Jews from the Third Reich’s economy]. Göttingen: Musterschmidt.

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The Organization of the Jewish Refugees in Italy: Cultural Activities and Zionist Propaganda inside the Displaced Persons Camps (1943–48)

ABSTRACT

The Second World War caused millions of displaced persons (DPs), who were uprooted from their own country and needed international protection. Among the DPs, there were also the Jewish survivors who – despite being a minority in the great ocean of refugees – deeply influenced the post-war political landscape in Europe and in the Mediterranean. This article focuses on several aspects of the Jewish displacement in Italy (1943–48), highlighting dynamics of self-understanding and self-representation experienced by the Jewish DPs in the refugee camps. These mechanisms are analysed by examining the tension between the Zionist activity among the Jewish DPs and the wider international humanitarian programme for rehabilitating post-war refugees.

Introduction

The 20th century was characterized by an endless movement of people across the unstable boundaries of Europe, caused mainly by conflicts and political issues. Since the early 1900s, migrations became a mass phenomenon and began even to interfere with the European state system.

The refugee problem reached international dimensions during the First World War that for the founding of specific organizations to manage it were required for the first time. These organizations were created by intergovernmental committees as provisional solutions for particular national groups who were considered in need of temporary assistance. From the time that humanitarianism became part of a shared agenda within the League of Nations, it required another thirty years to define refugee status at an international level: from 1921, the year of the foundation of the High Commission for Refugees of the League of Nation, to 1951, the year of the Geneva Convention. During this period, millions of men, women and children in Europe were uprooted from their towns, villages and cities, and forced to seek refuge elsewhere or deported to forced labour or concentration camps. These migrations challenged the fundamental concept of the nation state: citizenship. Thus, the refugees – viewed by contemporaries as ‘the scum of the earth’ (Arendt 1951, 267) – found themselves outside the protective network of the national frameworks and were thus totally deprived of the guaranties inherent in this membership, becoming instead increasingly dependent on the refugee-rescue organizations. Moreover, the European states system were in a state of collapse as a result of the two world wars, with new redrawn borders that further altered the demographic composition of states (Judt 2010, 13–40).

After the Second World War, refugee camps were established by the Allies throughout Europe, in which the uprooted found a temporary refuge, waiting for ultimate repatriation or resettlement. According to Malcolm Proudfoot, who was director of the Operational Analysis Section at the Prisoners of War & Displaced Persons Division (PW&DP) of the Supreme Headquarter Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), by May 1945 the refugee problem involved more than forty million civilians from twenty-one countries (Proudfoot 1956, 32). In order to identify them, the Allies coined the term ‘displaced persons’ (DPs), a formula that defined those who were forced out of the boundaries of their own countries because of the conflict, requiring international assistance, and awaiting repatriation or resettlement. According to the Allies’ policy, international assistance was to be granted only to persons uprooted from Allied countries, whereas refugees coming from enemy countries received a different treatment (Woodbridge 1950, vol. 3, 43). The social workers of the UN agencies – i.e. the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and then the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which provided assistance to the post-war European refugees (Woodbridge 1950; Holborn 1956) – carried out millions of individual interviews with the displaced persons, determining who and to what extent each refugee was eligible for international protection. ¹Although this might imply that the displaced persons were passive in post-war Europe, the men and women who lived in the refugee camps were extremely active. They developed different feelings of belonging and membership, in which there were evident elements of continuity with the past as well as elements of a radical change (Holian 2011; Cohen 2012). By analysing this process, this article will show that while the network of organizations responsible for the administration of this humanitarian emergency had an innovative approach to how they supervised and managed, at the same time it became involved in dynamics of self-determination by the DPs, often in opposition with the ultimate goals of the Allied mission.

The Jewish displacement across Europe: DP policy vs. DP politics

In order to examine the development and the consequences of the management of the post-war refugee crisis, this article will analyse a specific case study: the Jewish displacement. In particular, it will focus on the Italian case, which has been investigated less than the German and the Austrian ones (Brenner 1995; Königseder and Wetzel 2001; Lavsky 2002; Patt and Berkowitz 2010). It highlights, on the one hand, the limits and concerns of the Allies’ policies and, on the other, it shows how the sense of marginalization found typically in the DP camps accelerated the dynamics of community aggregation, a process sometimes similar to that of other refugee groups and sometimes peculiar to the Jewish refugees.

The crux of the Jewish displaced persons problem revolved around their rejection, in the wake of their experiences during the Shoah, of repatriation as well as their request to be recognized as Jews in the national sense and not according to their original nationalities. This approach led to a heated debate. At the time, Great Britain was the mandatory power in Palestine and, in accordance with the provisions of the British Mandate White Paper of 1939, vigorously limited the aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel). ²Thus, the British authorities – fearing the consequences of a massive Jewish emigration to Palestine – justified their negative response to the Jewish DPs’ requests for national recognition or for any special treatment that would lead to pressure on the British Mandate to open Palestine for immigration.

Nevertheless, in the United States zone of occupation, the Jews were already recognized as a separate collective subject as witnessed in the Harrison Report, published in the summer of 1945. It was an inquiry that took the name from its author: Earl G. Harrison (a United States representative of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees), who was appointed by President Harry Truman to investigate into the conditions of the surviving Jews in Europe in the DP camps. In his report, Earl G. Harrison described the alarming situation of the Jews and denounced the policies of the authorities responsible for that situation, putting into question the work of SHAEF and stressing that Aliyah was the only suitable solution to the problem of the Jewish survivors. ³President Truman, embracing Harrison’s views and conclusions, positioned himself in completely opposition to his British ally (Lavsky 2002, 51–55; Kochavi 2001, 89–133).

Moreover, the publication of the Harrison Report brought to the attention of world public opinion the fate of the victims of the Nazi persecution and further sharpened the controversies between Great Britain and the United States on Middle Eastern policy. The Jewish DPs therefore – though representing a minority in the huge number of post-war refugees – became a major challenge for the general management of the large humanitarian crisis and the international political arena.

The post-war Jewish diaspora was not a uniform and homogenous group. Not all of them were Zionists who wished to immigrate to Palestine, but – regardless of the country where they were planning their future – the Jewish DPs were highly motivated by a powerful national feeling, defined by the historian Zeev Mankowitz as ‘proto-Zionism’. ⁴In fact, Zionism was fundamental in the experience of displacement of the Jewish survivors and indeed the urgent need for an ideology is a common feature of almost every group of refugees at that time in Europe (Wyman 1989, 106–30).

The idea of national independence was already widespread in the Jewish diaspora before the Second World War, but among the Jewish DPs it developed in a transnational context, becoming purely pragmatic and acquiring characteristics of political, cultural and military resistance. The return to the Promised Land meant a clean break with the past of the diaspora, which is summed up by the use of the word ‘return’ itself and the actual refusal to remain in Europe. These feelings were in part the result of the actions of a decisive Zionist leadership (in general, but specifically in the DP camps) as well as the controversial involvement of the refugee agencies in those mechanisms promoting the self-understanding of the DPs themselves.

Zion’s Gate: Italy 1943

For obvious reasons, research into Jewish displacement generally takes as its starting point spring 1945. Nevertheless, in analysing the Italian case, this paper adopted summer 1943 as the starting point. In June 1943 the Allies landed in Sicily and the newly liberated southern Italian regions soon became the first assembly centres for the Second World War refugees, among whom a great number of non-Italian Jews had already reported. ⁵In the spring of 1943, about 9,000 foreign Jews lived in Italy of whom 6,386 had been interned by the Italian authorities. These were the so-called ‘old refugees’, who were mainly German and Austrian Jews who had found refuge in Italy in the 1930s, and Polish students or Yugoslavs interned in Italy since 1940 (Voigt 1993).

At the end of 1945, according to the Anglo American Commission of Inquiry (AAC), the Jewish DPs of non-Italian origin in Italy numbered 16,000, ⁶but this number continued to increase in the months and years immediately after the war due to the arrival of the Sherith ha-Pletah. This term, of biblical origin, which means literally ‘the surviving remnant’, was used for the first time in the ghetto of Kaunas in Lithuania at the end of 1944 to indicate the Jews who escaped Nazi deportation; the Jewish DPs used it later to refer to themselves (Mankowitz 2002, 24 ff.).

The Sherith Ha-Pletah arrived mainly from Eastern Europe through a spontaneous escape movement, known as Brikhah [flight, in Hebrew], which involved approximately 250,000 Jews (Bauer 1970). Brikhah was soon linked to the underground movement of the Mossad le-‛aliyah Bet (in short: Mossad), which from 1945 organized the illegal immigration of Jews from Europe to Palestine on behalf of the Jewish Agency. This transnational community of Jews who crossed Italy on their way to Palestine contributed to make Italy ‘Zion’s Gate’, the last stop before the aliyah. Between August 1945 and May 1946, fourteen ships of the Mossad left from Europe, including ten from Italy with 5,586 passengers; an additional twelve ships sailed between June and September 1946, including six from Italy, with 10,408 people (Toscano 1990, 91; Sereni 1973; Zertal 1998).

The first encounter between the Allies and a large group of Jewish DPs in Europe took place on 14 September 1943 at Ferramonti Tarsia Camp (Calabria, south-west Italy). Since summer 1940, it had served as a Fascist internment camp until the Allies converted it into a refugee camp in 1943. According to various sources, there were about 2000 refugees in Ferramonti when the Allies arrived, almost all Jewish ‘old refugees’ (Urbach 2008, 210; Capogreco 1987, 143–152). ⁷

The Jewish refugees in Italy rapidly established an organized rescue network. Beyond temporal and numerical data, a question arises spontaneously in order to fully realize this accelerated development: who were the leaders of the Jewish DPs in Italy?

This examination should first take into consideration the composition of the British Army, which occupied Italy between 1943 and 1947 (Ellwood, 1985). In its ranks, there were a significant number of soldiers enlisted from the Middle Eastern territories, at that time under British control, including Mandatory Palestine. Almost 7,000 Jewish soldiers from the Yishuv (Hebrew term for the Jewish community in Palestine before 1948) voluntarily joined the Allies in the invasion of Sicily, though only in September 1944 were the Jewish volunteers constituted in separate units. Thus, the Jewish Brigade – as the Jewish Units of the Allied Army are known from late 1944 – inevitably represented the first contact between the diaspora and Eretz Israel and thereafter played a prominent role in the clandestine activities of the Brikhah and the Mossad.

Therefore, the profiles of the Jewish DPs’ leaders in Italy came from the ranks of the Jewish Brigade, the Brikhah and the Mossad. Some of them arrived from the Yishuv and were members of paramilitary organizations (such as the Haganah and the Palmach) or delegates of the political parties of the Yishuv. Still others were those who had led the resistance in East European ghettos, or outstanding personalities who were leaders in the Zionist youth movements in pre-war Europe.

The official documentation of the Allied Control Commission (ACC) reveals that the Zionist groups, with their strong leadership, had replaced the Palestine Office immediately after the liberation of Ferramonti. They were in charge of recording those who wanted to make aliyah and providing them all the necessary documents for emigration. ⁸In addition, the soldiers of the Brigade had been providing irregular rescue services to the Jewish DPs that they encountered since September 1943. By February 1944 they had established, inside their barracks in Bari, a facility for DPs that included a canteen, a hospital, a synagogue, a dormitory, a school for children and a meeting room for youth movements. This facility was known as the Merkaz la-Plitim [the Centre for Refugees], an organization that assisted and supported all the Jews who were waiting for an entry certificate to Eretz Isreal. After the liberation of Rome, delegates of the Jewish Brigade, meeting in Fiuggi (near Rome) in September 1944, decided to give a more comprehensive and well-organized form to the Merkaz la-Plitim, which changed its name to the Merkaz la-Golah be-Italia, the Centre for the Diaspora in Italy (Urbach 2008, 286–91; Markowitzky 1997, 16).

The Fiuggi meeting was attended even by representatives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (better known as JDC or simply: ‘Joint’), an American Jewish organization founded in 1914 which was in the frontline of the rescue of the Jewish refugees in Europe before, during and after the Second World War. In Italy, the Joint was active since the late 1930s through the Delegation for the Assistance of the Jewish Emigrants (DELASEM), a branch of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities entrusted with assisting foreign Jewish refugees (Sorani 1983). The Joint and other Jewish organizations financed 40 to 50 per cent of the DELASEM’s budget, which from the early 1940s was forced to operate clandestinely until it was finally replaced by the Joint itself in 1944–45 (Handlin 1965; Bauer 1974 and 1981).

The organization of the Jewish refugees in Italy: self-understanding and self-representation

The Jewish DPs in Italy could rely upon a network of well-structured organizations and institutions, which gradually spread throughout the country. These services – reserved for the Jews – were in addition to those provided by the Allied Control Commission (ACC) and by UNRRA from 1945. From the time of the Allied landing in Italy, the ACC was responsible for directing the humanitarian programme for the refugees and the DPs. The ACC entrusted the task to the DPs Sub-Commission (established in October 1943), which assisted foreign refugees and stateless persons, whereas the Italian Sub-Commission assisted Italian refugees in cooperation with the Italian authorities. About a year later, in September 1944, the two DP branches were merged into a single unit: the Displaced Persons and Repatriation Sub-Commission. It provided accommodation for the refugees by transforming detention camps into refugee camps, as well as by confiscating schools, hospitals, barracks and private houses and designating them as refugee centres. In 1945 many of these structures were transferred to the administration of UNRRA.

With regard to housing, the Jewish refugees in Italy were often organized in kibbutzim [communes] and hachsharot [training collectives], attached to small agricultural colonies within the refugee camps themselves or nearby, where the refugees lived the typical communal life-style of the Yishuv while preparing themselves ideologically and practically for aliyah.

Hence, Italy became the place where the halutzim, the pioneers of Eretz Israel, met the survivors of the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe. With the arrival of the Sherith Ha-Pletah, the identity of this transnational community of Jewish refugees became increasingly defined politically and culturally.

In the months immediately following the end of the war, the Jewish DPs in the refugee camps in Italy, as those in Germany and Austria, began to establish committees of self-representation. The first call for the unity of the Jewish DPs in Italy came with the circulation within the refugee camps of a leaflet, announcing a national conference that would open in Rome and continue in Ostia (near Rome) between 26 and 28 November 1945. Its purpose was the creation of an organization that would represent the 15,000 Jewish DPs at that time in Italy. ⁹

The leaflet explained the goals of the Organization of Jewish Refugees in Italy (OJRI), namely:

1. to re-educate them for life in civilized society and develop their sense of social responsibility;

2. to sponsor the creation of an organization for mutual aid;

3. to educate them for productive work;

4. to satisfy their cultural and spiritual needs;

5. to fight against the problem of demoralization among them, caused by the terrible persecution and their fight for survival in ghettos and concentration camps;

6. to reawaken their sense of human dignity, their self-confidence and generally to give them guidance as they return to a normal way of life;

7. to promote agricultural and professional training in view of emigrating to Palestine. ¹⁰

Prior to the conference of Rome, elections had taken place all over Italy on 8 November 1945 in order to democratically select one delegate for each hundred DPs, for a total of 140 representatives who participated in the meeting. ¹¹

The first session of the conference was organized in the hall of a hotel in Rome, where a stage was set up for the presiding chairmen. The hall was decorated with blue and white banners as well as the flags of the USA, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France and Italy. Banners proclaimed the slogan: ‘Open the gates of Palestine. We have no way back to our previous homes’. ¹²

The declared purposes of the conference, attended also by delegates of the Italian Jewish Community, of the Jewish Agency as well as of Italian authorities and representatives of the rescue agencies, were basically two. First, it aimed at giving a permanent organization to the network of Jewish groups that had risen soon after the Allies’ arrival in Italy and was further expanded at the end of the war with the official establishment of the UNRRA mission. Secondly, the organizers hoped that the wide participation in the conference would resonate throughout the world and emphasize the condition of the Jewish DPs in Italy, thus raising public awareness about their situation and their request for emigration to Palestine. Leo Garfunkel, afterwards elected OJRI president, stressed these points in his opening speech:

The aim of our Conference is to consider the ways by which the very hard life of the Jewish Refugees in Italy could be mostly improved, how to mitigate their plight [...]. It is essential we should assume position towards the cardinal and ardent problem that faces us by all its tragic sharpness as a question of to be or not to be, whereto we should cast our views and steps, where, on which spot in the world we may now create a new, quiet and safe home. The hospitable Italian country is apparently to be temporary refuge whence we should proceed to another place which we may deeply root in for ever [...]. Whether there is any spot on earth to find rescue for our tortured and tormented body and soul – it is the only Eretz Israel. ³¹

The result of this three-day assembly was the official establishment of the Organization of the Jewish Refugees in Italy (OJRI), which thenceforth was recognized as the sole organ of political representation of the Jewish refugees in Italy.

In order to facilitate the carrying out of services in various fields – cultural, educational, professional training, religious and health – the OJRI was divided into specialized departments. The activities of each department were supported both by the Jewish Agency and funded by private organizations, first of all the Joint (which spent for example in 1946 more than 56 million lira on the assistance to Jews in Italy). It should be pointed out that the programmes of the OJRI, though being part of the wider humanitarian rehabilitation programmes of post-war Europe, had a distinct Zionist slant.

Even though there was a hierarchical organization in the refugee camps, with the Allies at the top, followed by the agencies of the United Nations and finally by the non-governmental organizations, the Allies nevertheless welcomed the drive for self-government by the DPs. The DP self-organization served as a recognized channel for the transmission of official instructions affecting the community in general; it acted as a responsible body able to exercise control over the community and eliminate frivolous and unsubstantiated individual petitions for official consideration; and provided a measure of control in domestic matters, in the registration of refugees and in the collection of personal data. ¹⁴ The UNRRA administration ‘even encouraged any reasonable form of self-government on the part of refugees’, as pointed out by Umberto Nahon, who visited the refugee camps in Italy as a delegate of the Jewish Agency in January 1946. ¹⁵

Unquestionably, these forms of aggregation on the part of refugees, which were largely supported by the Allies and UNRRA, favoured the ultimate goal of their own mission, which essentially aimed at reintegrating refugees in a national identity framework. On the other hand, this support of selfrepresentation reinforced the DPs’ self-determination and promoted the formation of a communal identity that in some cases – as in the Jewish one – did not coincide with British policy.

Zionist activism: political and cultural programmes in the DP camps

‘Help the people to help themselves’ was the motto of UNRRA, which coordinated and regulated the missions of non-governmental organizations by promoting a shared collective responsibility and an innovative, secular and institutionalized approach in rehabilitating the refugees. The work of UNRRA – subordinated to the Allies’ decisions – was also characterized by a system of mandates (some with a high degree of responsibility) to private associations to carry out the work.

For example, the involvement of the Jewish organizations in rescuing and rehabilitating the Jewish survivors represents a paradigmatic case of the contradictions arising from the collaboration between international institutions and private associations. The most evident example is the Joint, which signed an official agreement with UNRRA, ratified by the Allies – under which the Joint acted as an intermediary between the Jewish DPs and the authorities, and financed all the cultural and political activities among the Jewish DPs, making a special effort to obtain certificates for entry into Palestine.

The Joint was the major funder of kibbutzim and hachsharot, where the DPs were learning agricultural techniques according to the Zionist ideals of a return to the land and to manual labour, and in which emissaries of the Jewish Agency (shlichim) promoted political activism and national independence. Each kibbutz and hachsharah was affiliated with a political party or movement of the Yishuv. Thus there were kibbutzim of socialist orientation affiliated with the Hashomer Hatzair, or religious-oriented affiliated with the Hapoel Hamizrahi Party or of Zionist-revisionist orientation affiliated with Betar. In 1947 about 12,000 Jewish refugees lived in kibbutzim and hachsharot in Italy (Marrus 1985, 338).

Through the activities of its cultural department, the Organization of the Jewish Refugees in Italy made Zionist education of the younger generation of Jews its main mission, promoting awareness of a new Jewish identity linked to Eretz Israel.

The cultural and educational activities in the refugee camps were central in the rehabilitation of the DPs, and had the purpose of offering them the possibility of a new start in life after resettlement. The programmes included schools for children, vocational courses for adults, circulation of information through the press, and cultural activities as theatre, music and sport. In every DP camps there were schools for children of all ages. The teachers came directly from the Yishuv or were selected and trained from among the refugees by teachers from Eretz Israel. The main subjects were Hebrew language, and those related to Judaism, the history of the Jewish people and Eretz Israel.

Children who arrived in Italy without parents were provided for in orphanages, often supported by the Joint and affiliated with the ‘Aliyat Ha-No’ar (the movement of Youth Aliyah). The orphans were divided into groups according to age, each guided by a madrich [guide, in Hebrew], who was in charge of their education and preparation for ‘aliyah.

Adults had the opportunity to attend workshops and vocational training, where they learned crafts and trades related to manufacturing (sewing, upholstery, carpentry, bookbinding, plumbing, electricity, carpentry, iron working, etc.). These training courses were also offered in collaboration with UNRRA and the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT), another private Jewish organization that had been involved in rescuing Jews from 1880, which began operating in Italy in 1947.

OJRI also published an official weekly journal in Yiddish: Ba-Derekh [on the way, in Hebrew]. It featured a great variety of subjects, focusing on international politics, the condition of the Jewish communities around the world, the British Mandate in Palestine and the political situation in Italy. There were also other sections giving voice to the Jewish leaders of the DP camps, to war testimonies by the refugees on their experiences of persecution or resistance as partisans in the ghettos, and other sections dedicated to the search for lost relatives.

Moreover, the Association of Jewish Journalists, Writers and Artists Refugees in Italy founded the literary and art magazine in Yiddish In gang: khoydeshzhurnal far literatur un kunst [On the move: a monthly magazine for literature and art]. It aimed to promote Jewish culture among the DPs after the war, in a Zionist-awakening framework. In gang, published between 1947 and 1949, gave space to personal stories of refugees, to poems and stories written by the DPs themselves, to reviews about the shows staged in the refugee camps, historical insights, sociological reflections, book reviews and introductions to new artists. The press and the bulletins produced by the Jewish DPs themselves circulated among the refugee camps in Italy. Many DP camps were equipped with libraries and reading rooms, where magazines and books were available to the readers in a number of languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, English, German, Polish, etc.).

The rehabilitation programme of the Jewish DPs consisted also of theatre and the music, which were resumed inside the refugee camps. Artists among the refugees, who founded itinerant acting companies and orchestras, often initiated productions. Great classic works of the Jewish theatre were staged, such as those of Shalom Aleichem, which told about life in the shtetl (small towns in Eastern Europe with a large Yiddish population before the Holocaust), and Aaron Ashman, which featured the pioneers in Eretz Israel.

In additions to producing cultural events, the Jews in DP camps in Italy began to play sports as an integral part of their rehabilitation. Through the support of the Joint, OJRI organized ‘national’ competitions, called the Maccabiah Games, which always ended with the singing of Hatikvah (literally ‘The Hope’, which would soon become the national anthem of the State of Israel). ¹⁶

Conclusions

The goal of this brief review of the activities that took place in the Jewish DP camps in Italy is not to express mere praise of the Joint and of Jewish organizations in general, nor to depict the reality of the DP camps in post-war Europe as free of complications. As in all the refugee camps throughout Europe at that time, those hosting Jews also experienced problems caused by overcrowding, hunger, black marketeering and general disorders generated by the condition of marginalization implicit in the nature of refugee-camp life itself. The goal of this reflection on the Jewish displacement in Italy is rather to shed light on several distinct features of the Jewish displacement, according to the above-mentioned considerations.

In redefining themselves and thus in reconstructing their identity during this period of marginalization, the displaced persons (in general) used traditional categories of membership and recollection to a given national place. Though embracing this element of continuity with the past, there emerged in the specific case of the Jewish displacement several aspects of discontinuity.

The refugee camp became an extraterritorial space wherein people from different nationalities and with different experiences of integration, assimilation, discrimination and resistance met in a place that did not belong to any of them, and in a place they did not intend to create any kind of bond. In this place they were controlled and managed by international institutions while at the same time subjected to internal forces of political aggregation, that often found (practical and ideological) support in those institutions that would have been expected to remain outside these dynamics. Thus, the Jewish displacement became a sort of space and time between the past of the diaspora and the yearning for a future new homeland in Eretz Israel. This intermediate space turned into a venue where the different experiences of its temporary inhabitants were mediated and even became a springboard for a new identity. It was the place where the DPs created a new self-perception and developed a new sense of national belonging through the ‘negotiation’ of personal and collective experiences.

Chiara Renzo

Chiara Renzo is a PhD candidate in History at the joint doctoral programme of the Universities of Florence and Siena and a Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies. Her dissertation focuses on the transit of the Jewish DPs in Italy between 1943 and 1951. In 2015, Chiara Renzo was Visiting Research Fellow at the Hebrew University and at the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research in Jerusalem. In 2016 she obtained a fellowship from the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) at the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide in London.

ENDNOTES

1The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was an agency founded in 1943 by the Allies in order to rehabilitate Europe after the Second War World. It was active until 1947, when it was succeeded by the International Refugee Organization (IRO).

2 Aliyah in Hebrew means literally ‘rise’ or ‘climbing up’. The term is commonly used to refer to the immigration of Jews to Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel, the traditional Jewish term for Palestine). After the failure both of the proposed partition of Palestine in 1937 by the British Royal Commission headed by William Robert Peel and the St James Conference in 1939, the British Government decided to act unilaterally with regard to the Arab revolts in Palestine at that time. The White Paper of 1939 set out British policy until the end of the British Mandate: it limited the aliyah for the following five years to 75,000 individuals, 15,000 per year.

3Accessed 9 November 2016: https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/displaced-persons/ resourc1.htm

4Zeev W. Mankowitz, ‘Zionism and the Sherith Hapletah’, in She’erit Hapletah, 1944– 1948: Rehabilitation and Political Struggle, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Saf Avital (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990), 211.

5The Central Archives of the State in Rome (ACS), Jewish Refugees, 8 October 1943, UA – Headquarters Allied Commission (AMG), Reel no. 599B, Disposal Jewish Refugees, October 1943 – February 1944.

6The findings of the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry are available online. Accessed February 2016: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/anglotoc.html

7Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem (CAHJP), Reference my visit to your HQ on Oct. 43, 8 October 1943, E. E. Urbach Archives P118, Fol. 6: Refugees (I) in Ferramonti, October 1943 – February 1944.

8ACS, Conditions of the Jews in Italy, Sicily and Sardinia, 30 January 1944, Reel no. 104F, Jews in Italy, December 1943 – March 1944.

9The Central Zionist Archives of Jerusalem (CZA), L16/521 Sifron Kinus ha-Pli.tim be-‘I.talia. Record Group 4: Affiliated Office of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency and Institutions Established By Them, Collection L16: Palestine Office for Italy (Ufficio Palestinese), Rome 1944–1969.

10Ibid., Pamphlet of Conference of the Jewish Displaced Persons in Italy 26–28 November 1945.

11Ibid.

12Ibid., Pamphlet of the Conference of the Jewish Displaced Persons in Italy 26–28 November 1945, 3.

13Ibid., Opening Speech by L. Garfunkel at the Conference of Jewish Refugees in Italy, Rome, 26 November 1945, 4–5.

14ACS, Reel n. 104F, Jews in Italy, December 1943 – March 1944, Conditions of the Jews in Italy, Sicily and Sardinia, 30 January 1944, 3.

15CZA, Jewish Agency report on Southern Region Camps, S25/5243, 2.

16This summary of the cultural and political activities organized among the Jewish DPs in Italy is an abstract of the result of the author’s PhD research project. The primary sources analysed are available at the Central Zionist Archives, at the Central American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. The views or opinions expressed in this article, and the context in which the images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, nor imply approval or endorsement by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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The National Socialist ‘National Community ’ in the ‘Foreign German Community ’ through the Example of Transylvanian Saxons and their National Church

ABSTRACT

Attempts have recently been made to newly explain the social processes of change against the backdrop of National Socialism with the analytical concept of ‘national community’. However, until now the subjects of the ‘foreign German community’ and religion hardly attracted any attention within these discussions about national community. This article links these two aspects through the example of the church of Transylvanian Saxons in relation to the ‘national community’ concept. This is the main focus of an investigation of communicative exclusion from ‘others’ to create an imagined national community. Such an existing verbal exclusion at least in part explains why the Transylvanian Saxon majority approved the expulsion of its Jewish neighbours and was able to enrich itself with their former property without any moral concern.

Historians and social scientists are still trying to develop a coherent approach to explain dynamics in the Third Reich that led to the mass murder of European Jews. As is now generally known, it was not merely individual perpetrators imbued with National Socialist ideology who engaged in the disenfranchisement and murder of Jews, and it was not a unilateral ‘top down’ process. The dynamics of exclusion rather ensued – alongside the legal framework – as a process ‘from below’ that often involved ordinary people (Wildt 2007). Attempts have recently been made with use of the analytical concept of ‘national community’ to review the social history of National Socialism against the background of causes of social and cultural change¹.

While many published studies to date have been fruitful, ² they miss two key aspects to which attention should be given in any analysis of social transformation processes in the context of National Socialist influence: one is the so-called ‘foreign German community’, which has virtually received no attention in recent research on national community. ³ The second missing aspect is religion: due to its function within society (Luhmann 1992), it is not viewed separately from other aspects of social developments, but must be necessarily included in a debate on a foreign national community.

The following is set out in the example of the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church of the Augsburg Confession [A. B.] in Romania, the national church of the German-speaking minority of Transylvanian Saxons, which together with previous analyses of national community can explain certain social processes of change within the ‘foreign German community’ in the 1930s and 1940s. Given the importance of the church for the identity of Saxons, this example shows that religion has a socially relevant significant influence on such processes of change that also extends to national community-based inclusion and exclusion.

The national community inclusion and exclusion mechanism

The ‘homogeneous racial character’ of people was significant in the Nazi interpretation of national community, which, in relation to the so-called ‘foreign German community’, meant inclusion and in this context served as an ‘instrument to demand the loyalty of citizens of foreign states to the Nazi regime in Germany and its policies, to mark claims beyond own state borders and, finally, to legitimise the Nazi policy of territorial conquest’ (Götz 2012, 61 f.). In National Socialist understanding such membership in the national community, in addition to racial or ‘location-based’ belonging with the ‘foreign German community’ (Knoch 2013, 39), at the same time signified – in relation to a ‘foreign German community’ – a commitment to National Socialism because immediate access to the population was not possible. Therefore, a sense of belonging to such a community had to be created through emotion. This was pointed out in 1941 by Andreas Schmidt, the leader of the German minority in Romania: ‘there can be no regard for satisfying individualistic efforts in the struggle for a European restructuring’. Rather, each individual must make sacrifices ‘because a community order can only be built by disciplined and self-sacrificing members’ (Schmidt 1942a, 17). Therefore, according to Schmidt, only those belong to a ‘people’ or national community, who vow ‘to bear a portion of the duties accorded to such persons’. (Schmidt 1942b, 44). ⁴ The demand for commitment to the national community in the form of individual sacrifice for its benefit was accompanied by the promise of a future community creating a better life for all (Schmidt 1942b, 45). ⁵

Even if Schmidt’s appointment as minority leader of the Germans in Romania was prompted less by his personal qualities or merit, but rather by his ties to the SS (Schutzstaffel, Nazi paramilitary organization), and was linked to his fanaticism, it nevertheless caused ‘alienation’ among the Transylvanian Saxon elite (Traşcă 2006, 275). His statements show that national community was an integral part of the discursive element in the Nazi leadership of the German-speaking minority in Romania. ⁶

It was less about expected obedience of the German minority leadership in Romania, since it rather considered itself to be a part of the National Socialist national community. For the Nazis in the Third Reich, all ‘Germans’ beyond its borders belonged to the national community, whereby the ideology of national community understood as a supranational concept demanded loyalty to Nazi Germany of all ‘Germans’ outside the Reich (Götz 2005, 60). Such an expression of loyalty is already evident in the varied use of the term, as well as the promotion of its underlying ideology since the 1930s in political debates among Transylvanian Saxons and Banat Swabians (Götz 2005, 76). However, it would be wrong, as Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer rightly point out, to attribute the ‘mental structural change of Nazi society solely to the propagandistic, legislative and executive actions of the regime: it is the action context of political initiative and private adoption and implementation that renders the Nazi project consensual in such an amazingly short time’. This can be called a participatory dictatorship to which members of the national community also gladly contribute their part, even if they are not ‘Nazis’ (Neitzel and Welzer 2011, 65). Thus, no active involvement within a National Socialist organization was required within a national community to take part in its leadership – in its broader understanding (Nolzen 2009, 77).

The concept of national community, which above all in the last decade has sought a new explanation of the social practice of an imagined communitarization in National Socialism, does not merely wish to explicitly examine those state instruments of enforcing such a community utopia ‘from above’. Rather, the concept focuses on independent actions ‘from below’, that is, how to define a national community within a society and what processes are employed. The propagandistic promise of the national community applied to a social community of Germans and the national resurgence of Germany, whereby ‘the political force of reference to a “national community” [was] in the “promise, in the mobilization, not in establishing a social actual state [...]”’ (Bajohr and Wildt 2009, 8). There is no search for the historical reality of the community, but rather for mechanisms of how and with what success such a consensus takes place within society (von Reeken and Thießen 2013, 17).

The core element of community imagined by the Nazis was in the inclusion of its members. This inclusion was based on the National Socialist worldview of a racially homogeneous society, which meant excluding those who did not fit into the racial scheme (Bajohr and Wildt 2009, 17). However, ‘racial purity’ was by no means automatic for inclusion in the national community. In National Socialist understanding; there was an immense ambiguity in the national community, which could be reinterpreted according to need and appeal to different sectors of society. Nevertheless, there was a clear demarcation of who could not belong to the community. This primarily concerned Jews and ‘inferior’ people from the perspective of racial ideology. ‘Blood’ affiliation was, in principle, the primarily unconditional affiliation requirement, but social practice also determined possible exclusion from the community. Exclusion could take place as a result of any misconduct, whereas inclusion in the community could follow from achievements in culture or other social merits (von Reeken and Thießen 2013, 20 f.). It should be noted, as Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann found in relation to the research of Robert Gellately, that it was not the terror of the Nazi regime that prompted the populace to comply with National Socialist demands. Indeed, Peter Fritzsche in his work has shown even more the desire of Germans ‘to meet the behavioural requirements of National Socialists, including complicity in genocide, and to be obedient members of a propagated national community’ (Schmiechen-Ackermann 2012, 21 f.). The alleged engagement of the national community thereby concerned a state-enforced exclusion of ‘others’, above all, Jews, in which large parts of the population voluntarily and without duress also benefited, for example, through the acquisition of ‘Aryanized’ goods or the elimination of disliked competition in everyday work.

Despite all the different possibilities of interpreting the underlying concept of national community in the Third Reich, ‘local communitization [...] based itself on violence, but also on integration, inclusion and homogenization, whereby the framework for action particularly shifted during the Second World War. Whereas we, in fact, find no uniform national community in the Third Reich, many national communities existed with which social rules were negotiated locally’ (von Reeken and Thießen 2013, 26).

National thought in the Evangelical Church A. B. in Romania until 1933

As already stated at the start, the so-called ‘foreign German community’, despite extensive research within that community concept, drew little attention until now. These ‘Germans’ numbering around thirty million, of which only ten million lived in Eastern and South-eastern Europe (Bergen 2005, 267), nevertheless, formed an integral part of the National Socialist national-community idea. Even more serious in analysis of ‘community as a social practice’ (von Reeken and Thießen 2013) was the neglect of the religion factor in an inclusion-/exclusion-based idea of community. This is even more surprising when considering that 94 per cent of all inhabitants of the Third Reich in 1939 belonged to either the Catholic or Protestant church (Junginger 2011, 197).

For pastors outside industrial agglomerations and cities, the idea of rebuilding a national community – as a direct counter-model to the emerging pluralist secularizing society – formed a contact point for service to the Third Reich, even before 1933. Especially in rural areas, the Nazis only succeeded in penetrating and ultimately winning over a majority of the Protestant milieu with the help of pastors. Nazi racial thought still aroused concern among most pastors, but the National Socialist ‘guiding principle of the national community as a pastoral community especially appealed to village clerics’ (Pyta 1995, 397). This fact was also demonstrated by the German-speaking minority in Romania. In Bessarabia, the Nazi self-help organization in 1932 resorted to assistance from the Transylvanian Saxon Minister Alfred Csallner in promoting the Nazi movement among the German-speaking Protestant population, as conservative leaders closed themselves off to Nazism (Schroeder 2012, 321).

During this time the transition from the idea of a cultural community to a decidedly Nazi-racial interpretation of community, with its inclusion-/ exclusion-mechanisms, was smooth. As Michael Wildt has concluded, the concept of the national community was one of the basic linguistic elements of almost all political parties in Germany during the Weimar Republic. The propagation of national community included different ideas, whereby the core idea of a harmonizing society always remained the same. Crucially society was not understood to be a pluralistic coexistence of individuals, but always as a collaborative unit of the people (Wildt 2009, 34).

Konrad Möckel, as the parish priest of Kronstadt and thereby holder of one of the most important offices within the Evangelical Church A. B. in Romania, argued in such a manner in 1933: as a result of the growing acceptance of National Socialist ideas within Transylvanian Saxon society – and again boosted by Hitler’s rise to power in the German Reich – Möckel found himself compelled on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday on 20 April 1933 to express his opinion on the national community within the church’s official communication channel. With Banat Swabians and Transylvanian Saxons already being labelled Germans, it became clear that Möckel and most so-called Romanian Germans weakened their own local identity in favour of a connection with the German people, a process that had already commenced at the end of the 19th century. ⁷ Accordingly, Möckel spoke in his guiding message during meetings of Saxons of a ‘strong sense of own kind and, therefore, of a commitment to the people’s community’, not a Transylvanian Saxon one, but rather a German people’s community (Möckel 1933, 153). Semantically, Transylvanian Saxons and Germans were merged here, not only by Möckel, into a single people in the sense of a community-forming group.

Möckel complained, however, that everyday perceptible national elation nevertheless demonstrated an inner poverty because some Saxons had lost their true faith in God. A national community without faith only becomes a catchphrase. He spoke out strongly against the attempt in the Third Reich by those in an inner-Protestant movement of German Christians to merge religion and National Socialism into a German Christianity (Bergen 1996). Möckel did not see a way to a national community or national consciousness through a connection between religion and politics and instead employed both terms in the same way. He referred to faith starting ‘to illuminate the German kind in such light and shine’ (Möckel 1933, 155). He believed that the people would find their true meaning as a German people through faith.

Even if the parish priest in Kronstadt explicitly spoke out against the mere notion of a national community based on racial ideology, his idea of the national community already had an exclusive character. Such a distinction from the multi-ethnic society of Transylvania is explicable given the restrictive Romanization policy of Bucharest central governments in the 1920s and 1930s. Also prevailing was the sense of superiority of Saxons and Swabians towards their Romanian and Hungarian neighbours from the Habsburg period, which resulted in a privileged position in the Austrian multi-national state (Duller 2012, 258 f.). Generally perceived civilizational decline through inclusion in the Romanian state in 1919 brought emphasis on a special ‘German way’. Möckel himself distinguished his own group in the face of the minority situation by emphasizing the ‘German way’ and ‘German national community’ with respect to the Romanian-Hungarian environment.

Möckel’s comments underscored the decisive change within Transylvanian Saxon society long before 1933 in which church representatives were actively involved: the ‘cognitive turn from [the] self-identity of a national minority in a multi-ethnic Romanian state to an organizational part of the German nation’ (Duller 2012, 273).

The idea of an organizational connection with Germany voiced by its proponents was based on race. The national church was also open to such a view well before 1933. Pastors and teachers, in particular, belonged to Saxon supporters of social-Darwinian eugenics of the interwar period (Georgescu 2010, 863). The most famous of them, Heinrich Siegmund, even appointed the former national Bishop Friedrich Teutsch as the ‘first “medical member” of the church’s governing council, the state consistory, in 1920’ (Georgescu 2010, 866).

However, it was not only isolated church representatives who were involved in the eugenics movement of Transylvania: national church leaders were more involved even before 1933 in settlement projects initiated on the basis of racial selection and ‘people struggle’ (that is the struggle between Germans and other nationalities). The background for this was the increasing acceptance of eugenics and a loss of authority of the church within Transylvanian Saxon society since the early 1920s. As a result of the incorporation of Transylvania in Romania in 1919 and the subsequent deterioration of the economy⁸ caused by various factors, different and partially National Socialist groups arose and held the church complicit in the generally difficult situation. The main point of criticism was the close personal ties between the church leadership and political elite of the Saxons, reinforced by the fact that political leadership circles were always keen on a settlement with the Romanian government. Criticism of political relations in Romania accordingly led to the church and its ties to politics being criticized. In response to the criticism of its hegemony within society during the 1920s, the church, on the one hand, rigorously punished critics within its own ranks. On the other hand, it tried to benefit from the growing influence of National Socialism among Transylvanian Saxons. A readiness therefore arose within the church leadership to cooperate with the National Socialists in certain respects as long as this did not threaten the leadership claim of the political elite or enforcement of the church order (Hagen 2016, 21 f.).

With such cooperation based less on ideological and rather more on rational opportunistic motives, national church leaders also hoped to rein in the increasingly progressive secularization of Transylvanian Saxons. Thus, church leaders in 1930 already discussed an inner-Saxon settlement programme, together with the Nazi self-help organization and the noted eugenicist, Heinrich Siegmund, which aimed to resettle Saxon communities ‘endangered’ as a result of a rural exodus and alleged ‘displacement’ by other ethnic groups. The idea of race was founded on the idea of ‘breeding and selection of more stalwart settlers’ to reclaim Transylvanian municipalities from Romanians and at the same time to prevent ‘miscegenation’ (interbreeding among racial types). The main task was assigned to local farmers as ‘carriers of the national body’ and ‘fountainhead of national life’ in this conceptual construction (Hagen 2016, 24). As Timo Hagen rightly noted, it was a ‘theme of inner settlement [...] in 1930, already a long-established part of ethno-centric thought and action of the Saxon (church) leadership that proved itself particularly adaptable to nationalist-racist thought and terminology’ (Hagen 2016, 25).

With one such thought already prevailing in 1930 that considered the Saxon people to be part of a German people’s community finding itself in a supposed ‘race war’ for its own survival, it was only a small step to adapt to the National Socialist national-community concept with its exclusion mechanisms.

The National Socialist national community and the Lutheran national church

Whereas the Kronstadt Pastor Konrad Möckel in 1933 had a positive attitude toward the idea of community, but rejected mere homage to racial breeding, other church representatives at the same time blatantly legitimized National Socialism and its community promise in the official communication organ of the church. The parish priest Josef Scheiner, for example, propagated the allegedly positive binding force of the National Socialist idea in relation to Saxon youth. Youth work camps organized by the Transylvanian National Socialists would finally create a sense of community and in visiting them Scheiner felt ‘immense delight’: ‘the discipline, the youthful joyfulness with which the boys and girls carried out by no means easy work and the serious struggle for the highest truth, particularly for a position of faith in this faithless world’ (J. Scheiner 1933, 156). Scheiner here projected a supposedly ideal condition of community onto the activities of National Socialism, which, differently than the church, would again foster that community feeling. The pastor therefore urged the church and its representatives to reach out to National Socialism because ‘God may hold us accountable if we withdraw from this call to mission’ (J. Scheiner 1933, 157).

A divine message indirectly reached the Third Reich, which would manage to recreate that idealized community of the Transylvanian Saxons. The church should therefore not shut itself off to such a great matter. The Heidendorf pastor and later chief counsel of the national church, Andreas Scheiner, described it in a similar way: fixation on the racial idea as in the case of National Socialism was ‘very welcome’ because there is no mere individual, ‘but only one through a belonging in a natural life context of certain people [...]’ (A. Scheiner 1933, 157). At this point, a community is formed only by the link to a race, and National Socialism rejuvenated that knowledge. Also, in the case of Andreas Scheiner, the ideal of community earned Christian legitimacy in that he pointed out that the Bible always speaks of people and ‘our kin’, hence, community, and not the individual or individuality (A. Scheiner 1933, 157).

Bishop Glondys spoke out in church publications with an editorial at the turn of 1934 in which the connection between people and Christianity as a racial link clearly stands out. First, the bishop made it clear that all German-speaking minorities outside the Reich were part of the German and now National Socialist national community: ‘The foreign German community warmly welcomes the miracle viewed by the world in the revival of the German people from pitiful disunity to a powerful unity of German nations in the German Reich and the evolution of a great, blood and culture-based German national community throughout the world and across all boundaries’ (Glondys 1934, 1).

Glondys attributed the divine mission to National Socialism and declared that the ‘wishes and prayers’ of Transylvanian Saxons would accompany Hitler’s work (Glondys 1934, 2). Although the Gospel remains the ‘supreme measure of everything, including the people’, the ‘Transylvanian Saxons also know that their church has vitally helped in their coming together as a people and that ultimately they are not strictly a people’s or church community, but rather a nationalist-religious community’ (Glondys 1934, 2). The bishop at this point linguistically created an insoluble connection between the church and a blood-bound national community that could not survive independently.

The Brenndorf Pastor Fritz Schuller, who from 1933 had given biblical legitimacy to Nazi racial laws, went one step further:

In the Old Testament we find not only racial theory, but practical racial politics with removal of foreign elements from the core of a people. That appears very inhuman and unchristian, but it is good for the race because blood is a special juice and the order of God’s creation requires it to remain pure. Sterilization and race law in Germany is much milder than this method [of racial politics] of ancient Jews (Schuller 1934, 180 f.).

The anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis, as well as their crackdown on political opponents found a divine legitimacy, but with the repeated addition that Jews had supposedly invented racial theory and that measures of the Nazi state against them were therefore legitimate. The national community as well served as the base element of such policies, as Schuller points out further:

God commands in the Old Testament. A leader accumulates supreme power in the Reich and everyone obeys his will. The enemies of the people – the alien gods of Marxism – will be vanquished in concentration camps; the example of Elijah will be followed who curtly dealt with the priests of Baal. Authority wherever extended is a nation-building element (Schuller 1934, 181).

Marxism and Bolshevism as an enemy of the German people naturally meant Judaism because the anti-Semitic view of Marxism and Bolshevism saw it purely as a Jewish movement to gain world domination (see Pufelska 2010). According to the priest, such influences had to be eliminated from the community and by force if necessary. ‘Enshrined in the Bible is a model for all times of how a people rise under the call of eternal norms. Punishment and destruction will come if they abandon these standards [...]. The Bible writes these laws with flames of fire in world history’ (Schuller 1934, 181).

Preservation of the racial national community was thus made a God-given law by church representatives, especially in the official communication channels of the church, which accepted and justified all measures for its implementation. This basic understanding, which even the bishop similarly articulated, shows that the church itself helped shape a racist world image and thus solidified the idea of a community based on the exclusion mechanism: ‘we’ and ‘others’. The church and its representatives, however, cannot be seen as initiators of such thought. Yet, the fact that large parts of Transylvanian Saxon society still saw the church as a supreme authority and defender of its own culture accorded a type of voluntary legitimacy ‘from the top’ in the sense of divine justification, even though such justification was not required. One finds here the mechanism described by Neitzel and Welzer: there is participation without having to directly belong, that is, without having to join forces with National Socialist organizations. Nevertheless, one feels a belonging to the great whole, to a national community and, thereby, at the same time assumes its exclusion mechanisms.

From national community to ‘dejudaization’

Whereas the inclusion-exclusion of ‘we’ and ‘others’ focused more at the start of the 1930s on Transylvania’s Romanian majority population and less on the Jews, ‘the Jew’ as a counterpoint to the national community took centre stage in church promotion of a national community at the latest with the election of Wilhelm Staedel as its new bishop in 1941.9 Before Staedel was elected as the new bishop through active support of the now entirely Nazi German minority in Romania, the national church placed the matter of Jewish exclusion with reference to a government decree within its own sphere of competence. In a circular dated 15 October 1940, the church informed all school and kindergarten heads that ‘those children whose have two parents or only a father who are Jews, regardless of religion, cannot attend Romanian or private schools, or schools of other Christian ethnic groups’ (Rundschreiben [circular] 1940a, 531 f.).

Even if the last part of the sentence noted that Jewish children or children considered to be Jews could still be taught, for example, in church schools, the church pushed through the exclusion of these children from its own schools within several months (Möckel 2016, 97). Merely a week after the circular on ‘the situation of Jews in schools’, another circular followed to all school leaders subservient to the church. It stated that in an ‘Announcement of the Ministry of National Education, Culture and Arts’ that:

1. the purchase of textbooks, books and school props is only permitted to students in Christian bookstores,

2. Christian authors of textbooks cannot conclude any publishing contracts with Jewish publishers. (Rundschreiben [circular] 1940b, 544)

The national church appeared to meet the call of Ion Antonescu and Horia Sima’s new national Legionary government, whereby the now publicly celebrated discrimination and repression of Jews began to take shape in the sphere of the control of the church. ¹⁰

The newly elected Bishop Wilhelm Staedel in 1941 was a follower of the German Christians, an anti-Semitic movement within the Protestant church, which promoted a symbiosis of Protestantism and Nazism (Schuster 2016). Accordingly, Staedel and his followers attempted to dejudaicize their own national church according to the model of German Christians in the Third Reich in that it joined the Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life in late 1941 and founded their own branch of this institute in Sibiu-Sibiu (Schuster 2013a). It aimed to transfer the idea of a ‘dejudaicized’ Christianity onto its own national church, as well as to practically implement this idea. For example, it created a new curriculum for school religious education in which the Old Testament as a ‘Jewish religion book’ was entirely swept aside while Jesus and Christianity were represented as fighters against Judaism for this purpose (Wien 2007). This branch, which was established in the presence of nearly forty pastors and laymen in March 1942 and which published the ‘dejudaization of Christian teaching and church life’ as an aim, served as a recruitment agency for pastors sent on behalf of the national church to conquered Transdnistria to propagate this new understanding of Christianity and humanity among local German-speaking settlers. At the request of the SS, the national church also sent pastors from that branch to the government to ensure the religious care of local ‘new settlers’ (Schuster 2013b).

It was not just Staedel’s radical circle who drove forward the exclusion of Judaism as a means of creating a community of ‘we’. Bishop Friedrich Müller, as a representative of the old conservative elite and opponent of the church politics of Staedel, in internal discussions opposed the national church’s efforts to join the noted institute. However, he officially stated that the protection of the race was in the spirit of Martin Luther, but that this task solely lay with the state. Even though he had to vote against church accession to the institute, this did not hinder ‘dealing with issues imposed upon us by the opponents of Christianity, Jews’. ¹¹ Also, the aforementioned Konrad Möckel rejected membership in the institute through a mixture of religious and political concerns, but admitted that there is ‘no harsher anti-Semitic scripture as the Old Testament in which the Jews were seen through the eyes of a court. He could agree with academic research in this form [the “dejudaicization” of Christianity].’ ¹²

Also, as of 1941 anti-Semitism was an integral part of public church pronouncements on national community construction. In 1943 alone, there was a wide variety of statements in the church’s information bulletin that presented ‘evangelical information and served as a dissemination body in Romania’ (Schlarb 2006, 145) and which received appropriate attention. For example, August Schuster addressed the Jewish Question in detail and concluded: ‘Anyone who studies the history of revolutions with some attention, who observes the forces of decay in all areas, especially the religious and social, encounters the Jewish Question, whose entire earnestness has never been so clearly exposed as now’ (Schuster 1943a, 286).

Six months later, Schuster attributed Jews with lies, plans for world domination, etc., whereby Christianity was exactly the opposite of all this (Schuster 1943c). Also, ‘the Jew’ who seeks to destroy the ‘sanctuaries of Western Christendom’ stood behind the Allied bombing raids on the Third Reich (Schuster 1943b).

These are just a few of the many examples that show that the church also used ‘the Jew’ as a counterpoint to the national community. Thus, the church created a moral legitimacy to ostracize the Jews in Transylvania. Even though not all Saxons approved this, it was the German national group in Romania, the organizational merger of all German-speaking inhabitants of Romania, that from 1940 onwards benefited from the expropriation and expulsion of Romanian Jews. In Mediasch (Mediaş) alone, it took over all major Jewish enterprises in the city in November 1940 (Weber and Danecke 2016, 219). The ‘Romania Germans’ particularly benefited from the expropriation of Jews to such a degree that even the Antonescu regime viewed this development with concern and tried to curb it (Baier 2016). ¹³ Even if this trend could not solely be blamed on the church, the latter nevertheless contributed to it through openly conveying a racial national community concept promoting the exclusion of ‘others’ – whereby this involuntary role of ‘others’ from the late 1930s semantically meant Jews. Accordingly, Pastor Hoffmann was in agreement with SS-Obersturmführer Hoffmann and SS-Hauptsturmführer Weingärtner regarding the Jewish Question during his mission in occupied Transdnistria. ¹⁴ Against the background of the mass murder of Jews in this area, this shows that some church representatives understood a ‘solution to the Jewish Question’ was a necessary measure that had been legitimized by the national church.

Summary

The example of the Transylvanian Saxons shows that the national-community concept initially provided cultural support for the German-speaking minority in south-eastern Europe. Early on, there was a distinction between ‘we’ and ‘others’, whereby the ‘we’ mainly referred to a racially understood bond with the German people. The ‘others’ were not only Jews, gypsies and communists, but rather initially referred to a distinction between ‘German’ and ‘non-German’, in the light of the status of Saxons as a minority in the Romanian state. However, such a mind-set enabled it to refine its image of ‘others’ to the ‘Jews’. The anti-Semitic policies of the Legionnaires and Ion Antonescus (Glass 2014), coupled with the anti-Semitic policy of the Third Reich and its early military successes, undoubtedly encouraged Jewish exclusion within the region.

The binding force that rendered National Socialism a ‘dominant moral system’ justified the exclusion of ‘others’ as a higher principle and created a range of standards whose transgression created a feeling of action against the community, the national community (Gross and Konitzer 1999, 49). In light of a selfimage of a threatened minority, binding forces emanating from the Third Reich further reinforced acceptance of a promised community ideology.

The national church, which as early as the 1920s faced increased secularization and a distancing by the public, unconditionally supported the idea of a national community, as its image was the unifying bond of Transylvanian Saxon culture. It is not surprising that the idea of faith and race or blood prevailed as an inseparable unity relatively quickly, with the active participation of Bishop Glondys. On the one hand, this reflects an early reception of Nazism and therefore racial thought in Transylvanian society. The church did not want to turn its back on this, especially since quite a few church officials were among the active agitators of the Transylvanian Nazi movement. On the other hand, this allowed the church to present itself as a vital part of the national community and thereby help to counter its gradual loss of leadership among the Saxons.

Not all church representatives wanted to foster National Socialism with their rhetoric. However, the still prevailing high social status of the church and its representatives – either intentionally or unintentionally – legitimized the image of ‘we’ and ‘others’ as a racial categorization. Through reference to Hitler’s divine mission, the national church also created an additional justification for anti-Semitism. Social pressure exerted by National Socialism, ¹⁵ coupled with the influence of the national church on people’s thinking in a racial way, impeded the individual from acting outside expected norms. The idea of being a member of an imagined great German community made many Saxons, also outside the borders of the Reich, ‘obedient members of the Nazi national community’. The national church, as an institution that always bound society, reinforced this effect through the early use of a racial exclusion rhetoric. ¹⁶ It was not at first explicitly directed against Jews, but nevertheless was able to serve as a new definition of ‘others’ as a negative image in relation to its own community.

Translated from German into English by Edward Assarabowski

Dirk Schuster

Dirk Schuster was born in 1984, and studied medieval and modern history and religion at the University of Leipzig and in 2011–14 undertook a PhD scholarship at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom. In 2016, doctoral studies ensued on the academic understanding of self at the Eisenach ‘Dejudaisation Institute’ of the Religious Studies Institute at the Free University of Berlin. Since 2014, he has been an academic researcher at the Institute for Jewish Studies and Religious Studies of the University of Potsdam. His research has focused on the interdependence of religion and politics, the Transylvanian Saxon church, as well as atheism in modern societies.

ENDNOTES

1 For a discussion of this concept, see Steber et. al 2014.

2 For the state of research, see Steuwer 2013.

3 An exception is Götz 2005. In the collection on the National-Socialist regime of migration and the national community, only the article by Michael Wedekind (Wedekind 2012) deals with ‘foreign Germans’. Elizabeth Harvey rightly draws attention to the special potential for research on ‘foreign Germans’ in relation to the community debate (Steber et. al. 2014, 450).

4 Also, for Schmidt a ‘strengthening of the national community’ through a purerace approach was among those tasks underlying the slogan ‘Common interest precedes self-interest’ (Schmidt 1942c, 72).

5 It must be concurred with Michael Wildt in his research summary on the national community that it was a social utopia of the future, which promised to overcome social inequalities, but did not (Wildt 2013, 356).

6 This, of course, took place before Schmidt. So, the Association of Germans in Romania from 1935 was called the German national community in Romania.

7 Timo Hagen demonstrates this fact in the use from 1919 of motifs of the Teutonic Knights to symbolize the biological affiliation of the Saxons to the German ‘national body’ (Hagen 2013).

8 The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 tied the Saxons even more strongly to the German Reich because they saw a better market there for their own products (Gross 2016, 179).

9 Developments occurred within the national church in the 1930s against the background of the establishment and consolidation of National Socialism under the Transylvanian Saxons: Wien 2013; Frühmesser 2013.

10 Andreas Möckel writes, for example, in his memoirs about how gunmen drove the Jews of Kronstadt onto the main street in broad daylight (Möckel 2016).

11 Central archive of the Lutheran Church in Romania [ZAEKR] 102: minutes of the 6th national consistory meeting of 3 November 1941, agenda item 58.

12 Ibid.

13 Mariana Hausleitner attained the same result for the Danube Swabians in Romania and Serbia (Hausleitner 2014, 250–74).

14 ZAEKR 103 (1942), 138 [unfoiled] (Report of Pastor Hoffmann from Zuckmantel on his work in Transnistria).

15 The Nazis in Bessarabia demanded the exclusion of those German-speaking people from the community who opposed to National Socialism because this was seen as an act of treason (Schroeder 2012, 322).

16 Lida Froriep also refers to the fact that people’s thought, the idea of being German, as well as the Church as an inseparable triad promoted the turn towards National Socialism (Froriep 2012, 155).

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