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

Abstract

August 7, 2015 Harold Marcuse, Review for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of: Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, edited by John-Paul Himka and Joanna Michlic (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 778 pp., cloth $50. review: 2375 words This anthology collects twenty essays about the reception of the Holocaust in eastern Europe since 1989-90, arranged alphabetically from Albania to Ukraine. The editors of the volume contributed essays on two of the countries in this group, which they see as bracketing the range of post-communist engagement with the Holocaust (9). Michlic, who co-authored the essay on Poland, was then at Brandeis and is now a professor at the University of Bristol. She is perhaps best-known as co-editor of a documentation of the debates triggered by Jan Gross's 2001 book about the July10, 1941 massacre of Jewish Poles in Jedwabne. 1 In fact, she sees that debate as having made Poland the country where the second phase of restored memory has reached the most sophisticated level (9). Himka, now a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, is a specialist in Ukrainian history. His assessment is that in Ukraine the first phase of restored memory still has the upper hand, with the second civic phase trying to establish itself in public discourse only with great difficulty. This two-phase model of Holocaust recollection is implicit throughout the collection, and is discussed in greater detail below. Assembling so many excellent essays is an astonishing achievement. The contributors were asked to follow a similar chapter structure: After an introduction describing the wartime situation with an emphasis on relations between Jews and the majority nation, and a brief overview of memories of the Holocaust under communism, seven post-1989 topics were to be covered: high politics and public debates, education and scholarship, culture (literature, cinema, music, theater), grassroots projects and sites, diaspora narratives, indigenous Jewish communities, and antisemitism and Holocaust negationism (meaning both denial and relativization). As one might expect given the broad range of events during the Holocaust, the various countries display a wide range of Holocaust retrospection (or lack thereof), and various authors draw from a similar diversity of sources to attempt to gauge that activity. These include sites, museums and research institutions, memorials and their inscriptions, conferences, scholarly publications, textbooks and curricular materials, speeches, polls, films, fiction, internet forums, newspaper comments, and more--basically anything that sheds light on public dealings with the past. Common to all essays, however, is the extensive use of primary sources and secondary literature in the native languages, Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).