Reflection on Memory: Toward "Memory Solidarity"

"[H]ow can one remember what one doesn't know?" the architectural historian Dr. Samuel D. Gruber asked in a 2009 blog essay about Holocaust memorials. "How can one 'not forget' what is never fully discussed or taught?"¹

These are key questions that provide an unresolved underpinning for Jelena Subotić's Yellow Star, Red Star. The book presents detailed and developing scenarios of how memory (or revised, redimensioned, co-opted memory) of the Holocaust is deliberately used to foster specific political/identity goals in Croatia, Serbia, and Lithuania. Subotić writes that her motivation was to investigate "the apparent need of so many postcommunist Eastern European states to revisit the Holocaust now, seventy-five years after the war has ended, and control the way in which the Holocaust is remembered, understood, and interpreted" (206). She focuses in large part "on Holocaust representation and appropriation—in museums, memorials, laws, and history textbooks" (218). Her findings are presented essentially as case studies of her three chosen countries, but she also recognizes that they are part of a much broader issue. "Holocaust appropriation—inversion, diversion, and conflation—is ubiquitous across postcommunist Eastern and Central Europe," she writes (207). And she rightly recognizes that "These practices […] vary depending on the way in which the Holocaust itself played out in each country, the country's unique experience of communism, and the domestic and international environment that the country has experienced since the postcommunist transition" (207).

Subotić also recognizes that the uses of Holocaust memory are problematic in western Europe, whose countries could begin their reckoning with the Shoah and its impact already in 1945 and did not have to deal with the specific policies of communist regimes that generally suppressed Jewish history and memory and lumped Jewish victims of the Shoah with general victims of World War II. While providing little detail, she sets her case studies in the context of Europe as a whole, noting that the failure of western European democracies to acknowledge their own problematic history had helped fuel "a sense of resentment and injustice" in the East, particularly as the West made more honest reckoning with Jewish and Holocaust history a prerequisite for postcommunist countries joining the EU. "Eastern European elites," she writes, "are keenly aware that there is continuing denial of the extent of complicity in the Holocaust by the governments of these Western countries [such as France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, and the Netherlands], which have anchored their memory of the Holocaust on glorifying anti-Nazi resistance and downplaying—if not flatly ignoring—pervasive local collaboration" (35).

Subotić presents a detailed and disturbing analysis of Holocaust memory manipulation that is different in each of the three countries she deals with. Her analysis of each country speaks for itself, and speaks loudly. But, while she places her study within the context of postcommunist Europe as a whole, the countries she chose to examine have distinct histories that in many ways set them apart from parts of the rest of the region. This holds true especially for Croatia and Serbia, which became independent, postcommunist states only as a result of the bloody breakup in the 1990s of Yugoslavia, a country that, while communist, had not been part of either the Soviet Union (like Lithuania) or the Soviet bloc.

The series of ethnically driven wars that destroyed Yugoslavia formed the most deadly and traumatic event (or series of events) in Europe since the end of World War II. The conflicts inherent in those wars echoed the internecine Yugoslav battles fought under and alongside the World War II umbrella. The atrocities, specifically the massacre of more than seven thousand Muslim men by Bosnian Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995, became recognized internationally as genocide, the first such instance in Europe since the Shoah. The echoes were inescapable: I experienced them myself. In March 1993, an unexpected storm left me snowbound at Auschwitz for four days. In the Balkans, the Bosnian War was raging; at Auschwitz, the Auschwitz Memorial Museum was in the early stages of implementing changes to rectify the distortions and disinformation—the manipulation of memory—found in the communist...