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

2. The Invisible Genocide: The Holocaust in Belarus

59 per anders rudling 2. The Invisible Genocide The Holocaust in Belarus The current borders of the Republic of Belarus are a Soviet construction —the result of Lenin’s and Stalin’s nationalities policies. Rather than having been established in response to the demand from a mass nationalist movement, the borders were implemented by Soviet authorities in accordance with “expert advice” from Soviet ethnographers in the 1920s, partly in order to appropriate the agenda of the Belarusian nationalists and win them over to the Soviet cause. During the following two decades, the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) was forged through mass political violence, Stalin’s industrialization and Gleichschaltung of the 1930s, and the genocidal onslaught of the Nazis in the 1940s. Divided between Poland and the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1939, only following the Soviet invasion of Poland was all of Belarus united into one Soviet republic. After the Soviet annexation, western Belarus was subjected to a brutal Sovietization , carried out at a furious speed. From 1930, waves of terror swept the republic, targeting not only national activist and the Bolshevik elites but also fictional enemies, participants in conspiracies that existed only in Stalin’s mind. The purges affected up to half a million people, or one in eight citizens within the pre-1939 borders of the BSSR.1 The impact on the cultural life of the BSSR was devastating : 90 percent of the leading cultural, intellectual, and political figures of the brief Belarusian cultural renaissance between 1917 and 1927 were affected by the terror.2 The invading German troops arrived in a society paralyzed by fear and partly desensitized to political violence. By 1941 there was no longer anything extraordinary about an act of murder.3 60 rudling Belarus had one of the largest concentrations of Jews anywhere in the world. The census of 1939 listed 375,124 Jews in the BSSR. While the annexation of western Belarus following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 almost doubled the population of the republic, its Jewish population nearly tripled. By June of 1941, 670,000 Jews lived in the western part of the republic, 405,000 in the east. No more than 10 to 12 percent of the Jews in the western part and less than 50 percent in the eastern and central parts of the republic survived the war. In all, “no less than 800,000” Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis in occupied Belarus.4 While anti-Semitic sentiments were less pronounced in Belarus than in neighboring countries, Jewish survivors often emphasize their isolation and the indifference on the part of the local population.5 Here, as in other parts of the occupied Soviet Union, local peasants sometimes regarded the mass murder of Jews as an entertaining spectacle .6 Local reactions to the Holocaust varied, and many people were shocked by its brutality. Martin Dean describes the reaction of local Belarusians in Barisau to an Aktion against the local Jewish population by Einsatzgruppe B in October 1941. During the roundup of Jews, which took place in full view of the civilian population, the locals expressed hostility to the Jews: “Let them die, they did us a lot of harm!” Yet the murder of the Jewish population en masse, often in plain view of the locals, led to either complete apathy or horror. If, on the previous evening, the non-Jews believed that the Jews deserved their fate, the following day they asked: “Who ordered such a thing? How can 6500 Jews be killed in one go? It’s the Jews now, when will our turn come? What have these poor Jews done? All they did was work!”7 A decade of extreme political violence had scared many Belarusians into passivity. Many feared what would happen to pro-German collaborators if the Soviets returned. Subsequently, collaborationist movements were weaker among the Belarusians than among neighboring peoples.8 In their internal correspondence, the German authorities complained about how difficult it was to incite the local population to commit acts of anti-Jewish violence: the Belarusians “did not seem to understand the racial problem posed by Jews.”9 In August 1941 the Einsatzgruppen reported that “there is practically no Belorussian 2. The Invisible Genocide 61 national consciousness left in that area. A pronounced anti-Semitism is also missing.”10 Yet it was not only the Jewish population of the BSSR that was subjected to mass...