Polytraumatic Memory in the USSR: Where Does the Holocaust Fit?

In Eastern Europe, in the immense area that was formerly the USSR, the question of the postmemory of the Holocaust, insofar as it concerns countless witnesses and, in the territories that fell under Nazi occupation, entire populations, is a question that must be asked with some urgency today. Yet for the second and especially the third generation of writers to emerge after World War II, there is nothing to compare with the kind of works that are available today in Western and Mitteleuropa Europe. Literatures of testimony, forged from “oeuvres-témoignages,” to borrow Claude Mouchard’s expression, were indeed written in Russian or in Yiddish, certain works even appearing in print shortly after the war began.¹ Others appeared, heavily censored, in the course of the 1960s. But these works seem to have had no successors and to have generated little or no commentary.

If we consider that half of the victims of the Holocaust were killed here, in these territories, during the two-year Nazi occupation, we have to wonder where the postmemory of such a traumatic event is concealed today, and how it manages to stay hidden. We should first remember that many of the mass killings that occurred here were carried out under fundamentally different conditions from those that we commonly imagine in the West when we think of the Holocaust. They were committed in or near places where people lived, close to towns and villages, in ditches or ravines, with machine guns, rifles, and pistols. The Einsatzgruppen systematically massacred the entire Jewish population in this region.² The non-Jewish, Slavic population—whom the Nazis also despised—looked on or at least knew about these murders. I mention these facts, which other historians have already written about, only because they oblige us to reconsider the question of the witness and, of course, the transmission of trauma by literature. Shifting our attention to areas rarely considered by Western observers also forces us to ask whether the Holocaust might not have been experienced differently depending on the historical context in which it occurred. And if this is true, should we, or should we not, be calling for a norm for the traumatic memories that the twentieth century has left to the twenty-first? How should we understand what this literature reveals to us?

In these parts of Eastern Europe, knowledge of the catastrophe was not passed on as it was in the West, by survivors returning from concentration camps. These people spoke about the horrors they had experienced to an ignorant, incredulous population. Mass murder was “unrepresentable,” as Claude Lanzmann’s film showed us.³ In the Ukraine, in Belarus, in the former territories of the USSR where, for two years, the Nazis carried out their “Final Solution,” residents of these places witnessed the killings as they occurred. Everyone knew about them and was in some measure involved, from a distance or more closely. Very few survivors escaped from the ravines to find shelter in non-Jewish homes. And those who did said almost nothing about what they had suffered. But countless others were bystanders, and these people did see, hear, sometimes even accompany these victims, their own neighbors or family members, to their deaths. Especially numerous were the war correspondents and the thousands of soldiers who discovered the mass graves and other traces of recent massacres during the Red Army’s counterattack after Stalingrad. Hundreds of thousands of witnesses and “discoverers of traces” in some way experienced the trauma linked to the Holocaust. What came out of these experiences? Certainly not all of the non-Jewish witnesses expressed solidarity or even sympathy with the Jewish victims. Some of them—the numbers vary according to region—openly collaborated with the Nazis. They often benefited from the disappearance of their Jewish neighbors, a part of whose confiscated belongings went to them. Still others risked their own lives, particularly in Belarus, in order to help those in danger. Some of these sought to bear witness by writing texts of moral revolt, appeals to memory, most often in the form of...