Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe

11. Conflicting Memories: The Reception of the Holocaust in Lithuania

319 saulius sužiedėlis and šarūnas liekis 11. Conflicting Memories The Reception of the Holocaust in Lithuania The Shoah represents the bloodiest page in the history of modern Lithuania. The genocide of the Jews should thus logically occupy a central place in the memory of the nation’s twentieth-century experience of wars and foreign occupations. Although perceptions of the Holocaust have changed considerably since the 1990s, the establishment of the Holocaust as a central memory has not yet happened. The history of the vanished Litvak world has evoked interest but has also presented Lithuanian society with controversies, some of which have resonated internationally. Lithuania’s Holocaust is situated within a difficult conversation on the history of Jewish-Lithuanian relations and is closely linked to the broader transformation of historical memory of the post-Soviet era. Embedded within this setting are a number of issues: the context of wartime memory; conflicting postwar narratives concerning the Shoah; the emerging national conversation about the Holocaust since the late 1980s in both the academy and the public sphere; and the political dimensions, both domestic and international. Lithuania’s Jews: A Brief Historical Sketch The ancestors of the mostly Yiddish-speaking Litvaks hailed from Poland and Germany. While there is evidence of earlier Jewish settlement , the first known charters granting privileges were issued by Grand Duke Vytautas to the Jews of Trakai, Grodno, Brest, and Lutsk in 1388–89. There was a brief period of expulsion between 1495 and 1503, but by the mid–sixteenth century it is estimated that there were some 120,000 Jews in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the majority in what is today Ukraine and Belarus. Many Jews were killed or dis- 320 sužiedėlis and liekis placed during the rebellion of the Cossack leader Bohdan Chmielnicki (Khmelnytsky) and the Muscovite invasions of the mid–seventeenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century an estimated 250,000 Jews lived in the Grand Duchy. The famous Gaon of Vilna, Rabbi Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman (1720–97), epitomized the high level of Litvak religious scholarship and culture. Historically, Lithuania’s Jews constituted a legally defined estate. The social hierarchy of the various estates (ethnoreligious communities) was regulated by law and custom . Included within the Russian empire’s Pale of Settlement after the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, the Jews found a commercial niche as both agents of the landowners and smalltime traders among the region’s villagers.1 Jews and their Gentile peasant neighbors interacted regularly in the economic sphere but for the most part were strangers culturally. During the later tsarist period, secular Jews and many educated Lithuanians tended to assimilate into one of the “high” cultures: Russian proved attractive to Jews, Polish to Lithuanians. The 1897 imperial census counted nearly a million and a half Jews in the lands of the former Grand Duchy, less than a third of whom lived in the ethnic Lithuanian gubernias. At the turn of the century, Vilnius had 154,000 inhabitants, a Jewish plurality in the city of 40 percent. The conflict between the rational secularizing tendencies of the Haskala and Orthodox traditionalists, the latter’s struggle against Hasidism, are major themes of nineteenth-century Jewish life; meanwhile , the emergence of the Bund and Zionism reflected the influence of socialism and secular nationalism. For its part, the newly assertive Lithuanian national movement exhibited secular and clerical anti-Semitic tendencies, exemplified respectively by Vincas Kudirka (1858–99) and Motiejus Valanþius (1801–75), although there were also liberal and social democratic voices advocating tolerance, such as Gabrielė Petkeviþaitė-Bitė (1861–1943) and Andrius Domaševiþius (1865–1935). The emergence of a small but increasingly assertive Lithuanian -speaking business and professional class proved harbingers of future Lithuanian-Jewish economic rivalry.2 The emergence of an independent state (1918–40), in which the Lithuanian-speaking majority ruled the country for the first time 11. Conflicting Memories 321 since the medieval period, revolutionized ethnic relations. Many Jewish leaders joined Lithuanians in building the new state, and more than two thousand Jews fought in the ranks of the national army during the independence wars of 1918–20. In August 1919 the Lithuanian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference proposed Jewish political and cultural autonomy, which, however, was short-lived: attacked by rightist parties as a “state within a...