Shared History—Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939–1941 (review)

Emerging from an international conference held in Leipzig and sponsored by the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation, this fine volume contains thirteen essays examining inter-ethnic relations in the Soviet-occupied regions of Poland and the conflicting narratives surrounding them. The controversy over Jan Tomasz Gross’ Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland serves as the point of departure for the collection. The articles in the volume illuminate the strains in relations between Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Lithuanians under Soviet control, even as they attempt to resolve some of the conflicts resulting from nationally bound memory cultures in the postwar years, and especially since 1989. Research on these issues remains timely. As Kai Struve, one of the volume’s editors, suggests, “the advancing political, economic and legal integration of Europe is going hand in hand with increasing conflicts about how to remember the past” (p. 44). These conflicts notwithstanding, there remains cause for optimism, for, as the editors assert in their introduction, “memory and history have been growing consistently closer over the last generation”; at the same time, “the historical profession increasingly has examined critically its own role in constructing national identity by ‘writing the nation’ and, thus, in participating in the creation of national memory” (p. 14).

Shared History—Divided Memory is organized into three main sections, the first of which, “Memory and Historiography,” outlines the ways in which memory conflicts over Polish-Jewish and Ukrainian-Jewish relations have evolved in recent decades. In his essay “Eastern Experience and Western Memory: 1939–1941 as a Paradigm of European Memory Conflicts,” Kai Struve addresses the tensions between “critical” and “heroic” narratives of Polish history in these years. He concludes that such tensions reflect broader changes in contemporary European memory landscapes, and mark a renegotiation of relations between victims and perpetrators. Focusing on Polish historiography as well, Joanna Michlic analyzes the struggle to integrate Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust into a broader narrative of Polish history. For Michlic, the greatest barriers to incorporating the Polish-Jewish dynamic remain the “tenacity of the exclusivist ethno-nationalistic legacy of the past” (p. 68) and the reliance on anti-Jewish stereotypes—stereotypes still evident in the work of a number of influential Polish historians. This tendency is, however, countered by the work of historians such as Dariusz Libionka, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, and Andrzej Żbikowski, who have challenged conventional prejudices (such as that of the alleged Jewish-Communist nexus, or Żydokomuna) and recognized both the heroic and anti-heroic aspects of Poland’s national history. Wilfried Jilge’s essay “Competing Victimhoods: Post-Soviet Ukrainian narratives on World War II” invites a comparison of Polish and Ukrainian historiographical perspectives, as the author emphasizes the importance of the wartime experience for contemporary Ukrainian culture, the re-writing of World War II history in the post-Soviet era, and the marginalization of Jewish history in contemporary Ukrainian memory.

The second and largest section of the collection, “Soviet Rule,” will prove highly informative to most readers, as its essays confront a variety of critical but under-investigated issues related to the interaction between Jews and non-Jews in Soviet-occupied Poland. These include the extent to which Jews welcomed or benefitted from Soviet rule; the complex relations between Jews, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Poles; Soviet control and the ways in which it influenced interethnic relations; and the importance of understanding interethnic relations in specific and defined regional contexts.

Of the seven essays in this section, three in particular stand out. Grzegorz Hryciuk analyzes Soviet repression against the background of stereotypes of Jewish privilege and collaboration. In doing so, he not only exposes various forms of repression— arrests, deportation, resettlement of refugees—but also accounts for the national composition of the victims...