The Issue of the Memory of the Holocaust and Its Impact on the Lithuanian-Jewish Relations

Abstract

From the viewpoint of today’s assessment it is obvious that the difficulty to forget the experience of the Holocaust has radically transformed the social and psychological space of the Lithuanian-Jewish relations. The aim of the current article is to analyze the separate phases and socio-cultural contexts of the impact of the memory of the Holocaust on the Lithuanian-Jewish relations, while emphasizing its controversial aspects. In this regard, the research into the historiographic, periodical, and archival sources and memoirs has revealed the following features of the genesis of the memory of the Holocaust and its impact on the Lithuanian-Jewish relations:
Images of the Holocaust and the motifs of (un)awareness of the Jewish experience began to form in the Lithuanian collective consciousness already during the period of the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The criticism of the sources allows us to discern two phases in the genesis of memory of the Holocaust in the Lithuanian social consciousness: 1) the first phase – the period from the middle of 1941 till the beginning of 1942: the emergence of viewpoints based on the theory that the basis of the Holocaust was the reaction to terrorism in Soviet Lithuania; 2) the second phase – the beginning of 1943: the emergence of viewpoints claiming that the Lithuanians “involved” in the assassinations of Jews were victims of the fraud of the occupational Nazi regime in the Lithuanian collective consciousness. Besides, during these two periods the structure of the memory of the Holocaust in Lithuania apparently did not develop in parallel, but had two versions – the Lithuanian and the Jewish. It was related with the fact that these two national groups used essentially different semantic categories while trying to reflect on the same historic events in their collective memory, and later – in the long-term historical memory. This aspect had a great influence on the Lithuanian-Jewish relations, especially on their psychological context.
The system of historical memory related with the Holocaust experience formed in the intellectual environment of Lithuanian exiles followed the defensive strategy, which recognized only those elements of the memory of the Holocaust that allowed to support the standpoint that the Holocaust experience was a problem of the Jews rather than the Lithuanian historical memory.
The policy of the Soviet historical memory that employed different means of neutralization of the impact of the memory of the Holocaust sought to recreate historical images and semantic structures emphasizing their uniqueness, rather than recreating the memory itself. Thus the Soviet version of the memory of the Jewish genocide was being created: it developed a concessive memory discourse acceptable to both national groups and memory practices, which supported “socialist solidarity”. The psychological meaning of the situation, however, resulted in a rather strong inner pressure in the Lithuanian-Jewish relations, which shows that in Soviet Lithuania neither Lithuanian nor Jewish models of the memory of the Holocaust lost their socio-cultural function.
In the post-Soviet period, both Lithuanians and Jews confronted not only ideological (images and stereotypes formed in Soviet Lithuania and emigration), but also socio-psychological (compromise and martyr egocentrism) problems of “dealing” with the Holocaust experience. They brought about new complications of the adaptation of memory of the Holocaust to the culture of memory in post-Soviet Lithuania, which, in its turn, tends to influence the current development of the Lithuanian-Jewish relations. The most important of them is the sacralization of the memory of the Holocaust, which provokes the appearance of new mystifications.