The Holocaust is a Foreign Country: Comparing Representations of Place in Lithuanian Jewish Testimony

Abstract

This article explores discourse on the Holocaust as a ‘placeless’ event. Analyzing survivor testimony delivered in different cultural contexts, I ask whether or not the idea of strange or vanished places is culturally specific or universal to memories of Holocaust victimhood. As a case study, I analyze the testimony of Lithuanian Jewish Holocaust survivors. I compare the more commonly heard testimonies of survivors living in North America and Israel to the lesser known voices of survivors who have remained in Lithuania—witnesses who live and testify ‘on the scene of the crime.’ I demonstrate how important the idea of estranged geography figures in the testimony of émigré witnesses. By contrast, the survivors who have remained in Lithuania draw a different narrative map of the country, one in which past and present interact on the same sites. Their home landscape, however, also has black holes, dark places that they consider untouchable in everyday life. The article thus points to a tension between contextual particularities and universal challenges in depicting Holocaust places.