Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe
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Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe
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Overview
Despite the Holocaust’s profound impact on the history of Eastern Europe, the communist regimes successfully repressed public discourse about and memory of this tragedy. Since the collapse of communism in 1989, however, this has changed. Not only has a wealth of archival sources become available, but there have also been oral history projects and interviews recording the testimonies of eyewitnesses who experienced the Holocaust as children and young adults. Recent political, social, and cultural developments have facilitated a more nuanced and complex understanding of the continuities and discontinuities in representations of the Holocaust. People are beginning to realize the significant role that memory of Holocaust plays in contemporary discussions of national identity in Eastern Europe.
This volume of original essays explores the memory of the Holocaust and the Jewish past in postcommunist Eastern Europe. Devoting space to every postcommunist country, the essays in Bringing the Dark Past to Light explore how the memory of the “dark pasts” of Eastern European nations is being recollected and reworked. In addition, it examines how this memory shapes the collective identities and the social identity of ethnic and national minorities. Memory of the Holocaust has practical implications regarding the current development of national cultures and international relationships.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496210203 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 06/12/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 792 |
| Sales rank: | 828,775 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"Our Conscience Is Clean"
Albanian Elites and the Memory of the Holocaust in Postsocialist Albania
Compared to the contentious postsocialist debates over the Holocaust that have occurred in the other countries of Eastern Europe, the wartime history of prewar Albania's 156 native Jews has generated scant public attention and scholarly research both in Albania and abroad. Nearly all Albania's Jews and hundreds of nonnative refugees survived the Second World War in Albania. A small group of government officials, historians, and journalists based in the country's capital, Tirana, formulated Albania's first published perceptions of the Holocaust after the fall of Albanian communism in 1992. Albanian elites have since addressed the subject within the context of issues that tend to arouse broader Albanian public interest and controversy than does the Holocaust itself, such as the present-day rehabilitation of prominent Albanian leaders persecuted by the country's communist dictatorship, and Kosovo's independence movement. Elite Albanian perceptions of the Holocaust also reflect the spirit and biases behind contemporary government-scholarly initiatives to rewrite twentieth-century national history and debunk the tenets of Albania's socialist historical scholarship. In official, scholarly, and media representations, the Final Solution resembles the Albanian communist persecution of Albanians in 1945–91 and the Serbian military and political oppression of Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s. Further, the Holocaust symbolizes Albanians' sense of humanity, which drove the nation to rescue Jews from being deported by occupation forces to extermination camps in Axis-occupied Europe. Drawing primarily on Albanian historical literature, newspapers, and interviews, this chapter analyzes the work and research motivations of Albanian elites who have writtenthe country's nascent Holocaust narrative since the collapse of communism in Albania.
Albanians and Jews during the Second World War
Italy invaded Albania on 7 April 1939 and then annexed the country of approximately one million people. Following the German invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Italian counterpart, Count Galeazzo Ciano, agreed to transfer portions of Kosovo, western Macedonia, and southern Montenegro — all with Albanian majorities — to Italian-occupied Albania. Germany took over the Albanian territories incorporated by Italy after Rome's formal surrender in September 1943. German military offensives against communist-led Albanian partisan forces began in the winter of 1943–44 but failed to prevent the resistance movement's takeover of most of Albania's southern territories by October 1944. Following the German retreat from Albania in November 1944, Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav partisans suppressed a local Albanian rebellion in Kosovo in February 1945 and then reinstated Yugoslav jurisdiction over the region.
The shortage of research into Albanian wartime history as a whole and the dearth of primary sources specifically related to Albanian Jews make it difficult to reconstruct even a basic narrative of the Holocaust in Albania. The scant literature permits only tentative answers to questions concerning Axis policy toward Jews in Albania, the level of policy implementation, and local–Axis collaboration in the execution of policy. After invading Albania, fascist Italian authorities, under the direction of viceroy general Francesco Jacomoni, introduced Italian legislation that prohibited Jewish emigration to Albania and mandated the deportation of foreign Jews. The Albanian interior ministry forwarded Jacomoni's instructions to the local prefectures, but the level of compliance of Italian subordinates and local Albanian officials is unclear. To deter Jewish emigration, Jacomoni ordered the house arrest of foreign Jews or their confinement in concentration camps that Italian authorities had set up in the Albanian interior in 1940. The nonnative Jewish population in Albania, however, continued to increase, reaching one thousand in June 1943, according to Italian estimates.
Explaining the difference in the fates of Jews in the annexed territories of Kosovo and those in the Albanian interior presents a particularly difficult challenge for Albanian historians. Five hundred to six hundred Sephardim inhabited the territories of Kosovo prior to the Second World War. Prishtina was Kosovo's economic center and home to the region's largest Jewish community, around four hundred out of a population of sixteen thousand. During the Italian and German occupations of Albania, an unknown number of native and nonnative Jews were transferred from Kosovo to the Reich and the Albanian interior, while, according to testimonies in the Yad Vashem files of the Righteous among the Nations, only two Jewish families were deported from Albanian proper. In Prishtina, Italian authorities and local Albanian police compiled lists of Yugoslav Jewish refugees in January 1942. Fifty-one were detained in a concentration camp in Prishtina and then transferred to German supervision in Serbian Mitrovica. Approximately 250 Yugoslav Jews, including an unknown number of those native to Prishtina, were transported to concentration camps in the Albanian interior in 1942. They were among the approximately five hundred Jews confined to house arrest or held in concentration camps in the Albanian towns of Berat, Kruja, and Kavaja as of July 1943.
German authorities did not aggressively seek, deport, or exterminate Jews from Albania proper after occupying the country in November 1943. In contrast, the Germans deported an unknown number of foreign Jews and Prishtina natives from Kosovo to the Reich in 1944, with the assistance of Albanian SS Skanderbeg troops. German SS chief Heinrich Himmler organized the Kosovo-based Albanian SS Skanderbeg Division in April 1944. Research on the Albanian SS division is scarce, but historian Martin Cüppers's investigation of German wartime documents represents the latest and most detailed account of its brief history. According to Cüppers, on 14 May at least one company of the Skanderbeg Division arrested 281 foreign and local Jews in Prishtina. The fate of these Jews is unclear. Part of this group was among the hundreds of political prisoners transferred from Prishtina to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany via the Sajmište concentration camp near Belgrade. According to a list of transports to Bergen-Belsen, 249 Prishtina natives were among the 437 Jews who arrived at Bergen-Belsen from Sajmište on 23 June 1944. At least 177 Jews of the wartime Albanian state — nearly all from Kosovo — were killed at Bergen-Belsen.
Contributors to the postsocialist Albanian discussion of the Holocaust fail to address the differences in the survival rates of Jews in Kosovo and Albania proper, focusing instead on the unison in which members of the nation acted to save Jews from being deported to foreign concentration camps. Scholars have only scratched the surface of Kosovo's wartime political and social history. Thus, the reasons for the different survival rates remain elusive. Indeed, an analysis of Albanian complicity in the deportation of Jews from Kosovo to concentration camps abroad requires a more precise understanding of Tirana's and Berlin's policies toward Jews in Kosovo and Albania proper. When the Germans entered Albania in September 1943, they promised Albanian national elites to restore Albanian independence from Italian domination and to grant the country extensive autonomy in domestic civil affairs. By convincing distinguished nationalists to serve in Albania's government, Hermann Neubacher, Hitler's special representative in Southeastern Europe, hoped to neutralize communist and other nationalist Albanian resistance forces, minimize the Wehrmacht's presence in Albania to two-and-a-half divisions, and concentrate Germany's war effort against the Red Army in the Soviet Union and western Allied divisions in Italy. As Albanian historian Shaban Sinani suggests, the immediate German objective to elicit Tirana's support to suppress Albanian resistance forces in late 1943 and early 1944 took precedence over Berlin's long-term designs to exterminate Europe's Jews. However, in spring 1944 the success of the Albanian partisans in the interior of the country and of Yugoslav partisans in Kosovo prompted Germany to renege on its pact with Tirana to grant Albanians exclusive control over domestic affairs. The arrest of Jews in Prishtina by Albanian SS Skanderbeg troops coincided with a surge in German arrests of officials and other civilians in Kosovo and Albania proper suspected of being communists or communist sympathizers, and with the erosion of Albania's authority over civil issues and domestic policy. Despite the commendable research efforts of Albanian historians, it is unclear whether the Albanian national government considered the treatment of Jews to belong to the sphere of domestic policy. A handful of Albanian sources suggests that Tirana viewed the fates of native and nonnative Jews of Kosovo as an internal Albanian question. In response to the arrest by the German command of four Prishtina Jews in the Albanian town of Shkodra in May 1944, the Albanian interior ministry instructed the foreign ministry to request German military authorities "not to intervene in our internal matters, except in cases that have to do directly with the German military." Yet the limited quantity of relevant Albanian archival material and the fledgling state of the field of Albanian wartime history permit only a superficial analysis of Albanian and German policies toward Albania's Jews.
The Albanian-Serb conflict in wartime Kosovo is another development that requires further investigation by Albanian Holocaust researchers, as it may have led to the distinct fates of Jews in Kosovo and Albania proper. Kosovo, unlike Albania proper, whose population consisted overwhelmingly of ethnic Albanians, was home to a large Serb minority. Ethnicity had been a divisive factor in Kosovar politics and society since the Ottoman Empire retreated from the Balkans in 1912 and Tirana and Belgrade staked competing territorial claims on Kosovo. While a strong partisan resistance organization emerged in the Albanian interior, the German occupation of Albania was relatively popular in Kosovo. During the first half of 1944, the rapid growth of the Yugoslav partisan resistance movement in Kosovo, whose regional membership consisted mostly of Serbs, exacerbated the Albanian-Serb divide in the contested territory. In spring 1944 Albanian police and gendarmes helped the German command monitor and arrest Serbs suspected of aiding the Yugoslav partisans. Only through further research on Kosovo's wartime history will it be possible to establish whether Albanian involvement in the German military crackdown against allegedly dangerous Serbs in spring 1944 portended Albanian complicity in the German-orchestrated deportations of the region's Jews. Nonetheless, analyses of the history of wartime Jewry should take into account the politics of Albanian identity, which varied between multiethnic Kosovo and relatively homogenous Albania proper.
Unfortunately, with a shortage of literature and documentary evidence, even basic questions concerning the history of Jews in wartime Albania remain. Little is known about conditions in Albanian concentration camps, for example, although according to survivor testimonies and Italian documents, Jews were subjected to forced labor. Survivor accounts show that some nonnative Jews in Albania proper eluded arrest by German occupation authorities with the assistance of Albanian civilians. Yet historians have produced little information about the reprisals that occupation authorities inflicted upon Albanian civilians who were caught sheltering Jews. Further, it is unclear whether Albanian officials or civilians were aware of the Final Solution. If — as Albanian contributors to the discussion of the Holocaust assert — Albanian civilians and officials defended Jews during the Second World War, an explanation of the alleged Albanian rescue would benefit from information about what or whom Albanians believed they were protecting Jews from and at what risk to their own lives.
That the above questions merit further research is suggested by the unusual fact that nearly all native Albanian Jews survived the war in Albania, as did hundreds of foreign Jews held in concentration camps, hidden by civilians, or disguised as Albanian Gentiles. According to an estimate cited by historian Bernd Fischer, eighteen hundred Jews were in Albania proper at the conclusion of the war. Yugoslav Jews who survived the war in Albania returned to their native country in the spring of 1945. By September 1946, after several groups of Jews left Albania under international supervision, the Albanian Jewish community numbered 157, a figure nearly identical to the population registered during the reign of King Ahmet Zog (1928–1939).
Albanian conceptions of the Holocaust, emerging after the fall of communism in Albania in 1992, draw on a range of interpretations of little-studied wartime events that involved the country's small community of Jews, Axis policy and activity in Albania, and Albanian relations with occupation authorities. In the process of constructing an Albanian Holocaust narrative, Albanian elites have had to contend with extensive gaps in the historiography of the Second World War in Albania. Documentary evidence has provided only anecdotal information about the extraordinary fact that more Jews were present in Albania after than before the Second World War. As I explain in the next section, due in part to the paucity of relevant secondary and primary sources, the contributors to Albania's discussion of the Holocaust have addressed the topic from the point of view of contemporary issues affecting the Albanian nation as a whole — above all, controversial debates over the legacy of Albanian communism and Kosovo's independence movement.
Official, Scholarly, and Media Portrayals of the Holocaust after Communism
The Albanian Communist Party seized power in Tirana in 1945 under First Secretary and Prime Minister Enver Hoxha. With a professed devotion to the teachings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, Hoxha and the rest of the leadership of the Communist Party, which changed its name to the Party of Labor in 1948, controlled Albanian cultural, economic, and political life as one of Eastern Europe's most repressive dictatorships. Few citizens of the region's poorest country had contact with the outside world, even following Hoxha's death in 1985. Hoxha's successor, Ramiz Alia, introduced free speech and political reforms in 1990, which failed to allay the demands of students and disgruntled party members to end single-party rule. The moderately right-wing Democratic Party won the country's first multiparty elections in March 1992. Under the leadership of head of state Sali Berisha (1992–97), Albania moved gradually toward economic privatization and integration within the Euro-Atlantic community. During Berisha's administration and that of Socialist Party chief Fatos Nano (1997–2005), the country was beset by high unemployment and the political repression of free speech and human rights. Public outrage against rampant political corruption climaxed in 1997, when the collapse of government-condoned financial pyramid schemes sparked a nationwide outbreak of riots and anarchy. The influx of 450,000 ethnic Albanian refugees during the war in Kosovo in 1999 additionally burdened the country's struggling economy and fragile social order. Albania's turbulent domestic history contrasted with Tirana's more harmonious and gradual foreign policy inroads. In 2006, under the second Democratic Party (2005–present) administration, Albania signed a Stabilization and Association Agreement, which outlined the provisions the country needed to meet in order to join the European Union. Tirana's top foreign policy priority to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), supported by both Democrats and Socialists, materialized when Albania was invited to become a member of the alliance in 2008. Against this tumultuous backdrop, a small group of Albanian historians, officials, and journalists took an initial interest in the country's involvement in the Holocaust.
Since 1992, Albanian officials, historians, and journalists have expressed only lukewarm interest in the subject of the Holocaust, as seen in the shortage of relevant publications and debates in the country. The first scholarly article on wartime Albanian-Jewish relations to appear in Albania was written by Albanian historian Apostol Kotani and published in 1990 during the free-speech reforms enacted by Ramiz Alia. The only monograph appeared in 1995 by the same author. Albania is not a member of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research. Middle and primary school world history textbooks devote only a few sentences to the
Holocaust in Europe, while national history textbooks neglect the topic altogether. Incipient Albanian conceptions of the Holocaust conform to patterns characteristic of the rewriting of Albanian twentieth-century history since the advent of multiparty elections. The postsocialist Albanian treatment of the Holocaust is embedded in controversial public debates over the nationalist credentials of Albanian communists and anticommunists, and the resurgence of ethnic nationalism — particularly over Kosovo — in Albanian historiography. Further, the Albanian Holocaust narrative has emerged through collaboration between officials and scholars. Finally, Tirana's foreign policy initiative to integrate Albania into Euro-Atlantic institutions has influenced the content of the few official statements on the subject.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations,
Preface and Acknowledgments,
Introduction JOHN-PAUL HIMKA & JOANNA BEATA MICHLIC,
1. "Our Conscience Is Clean": Albanian Elites and the Memory of the Holocaust in Postsocialist Albania DANIEL PEREZ,
2. The Invisible Genocide: The Holocaust in Belarus PER ANDERS RUDLING,
3. Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust in Bosnia and Herzegovina FRANCINE FRIEDMAN,
4. Debating the Fate of Bulgarian Jews during World War II JOSEPH BENATOV,
5. Representations of the Holocaust and Historical Debates in Croatia since 1989 MARK BIONDICH,
6. The Sheep of Lidice: The Holocaust and the Construction of Czech National History MICHAL FRANKL,
7. Victim of History: Perceptions of the Holocaust in Estonia ANTON WEISS-WENDT,
8. Holocaust Remembrance in the German Democratic Republic—and Beyond PETER MONTEATH,
9. The Memory of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Hungary,
Part 1: The Politics of Holocaust Memory PAUL HANEBRINK,
Part 2: Cinematic Memory of the Holocaust CATHERINE PORTUGES,
10. The Transformation of Holocaust Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia BELLA ZISERE,
11. Conflicting Memories: The Reception of the Holocaust in Lithuania SAULIUS SUzIEDeLIS & šARuNAS LIEKIS,
12. The Combined Legacies of the "Jewish Question" and the "Macedonian Question" HOLLY CASE,
13. Public Discourses on the Holocaust in Moldova: Justification, Instrumentalization, and Mourning VLADIMIR SOLONARI,
14. The Memory of the Holocaust in Post-1989 Poland: Renewal—Its Accomplishments and Its Powerlessness JOANNA BEATA MICHLIC & MA?GORZATA MELCHIOR,
15. Public Perceptions of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Romania FELICIA WALDMAN & MIHAI CHIOVEANU,
16. The Reception of the Holocaust in Russia: Silence, Conspiracy, and Glimpses of Light KLAS-GöRAN KARLSSON,
17. Between Marginalization and Instrumentalization: Holocaust Memory in Serbia since the Late 1980s JOVAN BYFORD,
18. The "Unmasterable Past"? The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Slovakia NINA PAULOVIcOVá,
19. On the Periphery: Jews, Slovenes, and the Memory of the Holocaust GREGOR JOSEPH KRANJC,
20. The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Ukraine JOHN-PAUL HIMKA,
Conclusion OMER BARTOV,
Contributors,
Index,
What People are Saying About This
“Since the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, debates have taken place in all the countries of the area on the involvement of the local populations and wartime governments of the area in the mass murder of the Jews. This well-researched and comprehensive volume provides a definitive account of the present state of these discussions. It is essential reading for all those interested in the Holocaust.”—Antony Polonsky, Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Brandeis University