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

19. On the Periphery: Jews, Slovenes, and the Memory of the Holocaust

591 gregor joseph kranjc 19. On the Periphery Jews, Slovenes, and the Memory of the Holocaust For some time now, the Holocaust has been widely understood as something that did not really occur in Slovenia, a region with very few Jews. This notion of Slovene “exceptionalism,” in which the trends of East-Central European history tend to somehow pass Slovenia by, remains strong in Slovene popular consciousness. Slovenia’s recent escape from the worst of the Yugoslav wars and her rapid integration into the institutional superstructure of “Europe”—nato, the EU, and the euro zone—has only confirmed this belief. It also manifests itself in the myth of the ethnic homogeneity of Slovenia, unlike the perceived multiethnic soup of the Balkans. Only recently has this somewhat smug impression been disassembled by refreshingly new research and theorizing. The Holocaust did occur in Slovenia, and Slovenes were a piece of its grim puzzle. As elsewhere in East-Central Europe, anti-Semitism also has a long tradition in Slovenia, and as the notion of “anti-Semitism without Jews” reveals, it is not precluded by the tiny size of the Slovene Jewish community. Since its independence in 1991, a renewed academic and even public interest in the history of Slovenia’s Jewish community has emerged, a trend observed in other postcommunist Eastern European states. Holocaust issues are still very pertinent. The process of Jewish communal and heirless property restitution still needs to be completed. Scholarly studies of the Holocaust in Slovenia are still relatively sparse, although in comparison to its virtual absence under socialism, the general story of the genocide is better known to younger generations. The integration of independent Slovenia into the European and international mainstream and the pressure of the 592 kranjc Slovene Jewish community and Slovene academics have helped Slovenia conform to at least a minimally acceptable degree of Holocaust remembrance and antiracist pedagogy. Yet difficulties remain in bringing the past to light. There is a persistent trivialization of the Holocaust, still voiced by Slovene political leaders who claim that the fate of the Jews was intended for occupied Slovenes. Among the supporters and representatives of the wartime anticommunist camp, some of whose members were complicit in antiSemitic propaganda that correlated partisan resistance with a world Jewish conspiracy, there is, borrowing political scientist Michael Shafir’s term, overt “deflection of guilt to the fringe” or upon the Germans, and an unwillingness to confront the darker chapters of Slovene history.1 While violent manifestations of anti-Semitism are very rare, Holocaust negationism does occasionally occur, as well as a more common interlinking of the Holocaust with contemporary Middle Eastern politics. Moreover, xenophobic attitudes toward not only Jews, whose existence in Slovenia is still somewhat denied or ignored, but also the perennial “Other”—Roma, Muslims, South Slavs, and foreign workers—continues to be a stubborn societal reality. The heart of Slovene exceptionalism in regard to the Holocaust stems from two factors: the tiny size of the Slovene Jewish community during World War II and the notion of Slovenes as primarily victims of the conflict. According to the 1931 Yugoslav census, there were only 820 Jews in the Dravska banovina (Slovenia).2 However, the census asked for religious, not national, affiliation, and it is assumed that the census missed those Slovene Jews who had converted or left the faith, or who would not count themselves as Jews. The census also could not anticipate the influx of Jewish refugees from Central and Eastern Europe who were escaping persecution in the 1930s and early 1940s. As a result, the number of Jews living in Slovenia on the eve of the Axis invasion has been estimated to have been as high as fifteen hundred or even higher.3 The Jewish population of inner or formerly Habsburg Slovenia had reached its heyday in the medieval period. Habsburg emperor Maximilian I decreed the expulsion of the Jews in 1497, and only in the late nineteenth century, following the 1867 emancipation of AustroHungarian Jewry, did Jews begin to trickle back into these former 19. On the Periphery 593 medieval communities. They received a rather frosty reception from the local townspeople. Janez Evangelist Krek, one of the fathers of Slovene Christian Socialism, warned against a Jewish influx in his 1901 work Socializem: “The disorganizing Jewish element is indirectly already among us and has shown its influence. Sad conditions: dissension , social...