Van Voren, Robert Undigested Past: The Holocaust in Lithuania Woolfson, Shivaun Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania: People, Places and Objects (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 381 van Voren, Robert. Undigested Past: The Holocaust in Lithuania. On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics, 31. Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2011. 195 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €20.00 (paperback). Woolfson, Shivaun. Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania: People, Places and Objects. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2016. xiii + 250 pp. Map. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £24.99 (paperback). Robert van Voren has written an unusual, compact study of probably the worst period of twentieth-century European history. The title (Undigested Past: The Holocaust in Lithuania) alludes to the fact that the country in question has had a hard time accommodating these difficult years into its national narrative — and the struggle goes on today. Nonetheless, the most unusual aspect of the book is its attempt to put Lithuanian difficulties into a comparative context. To do this, the author displays comparatively how very hard it was for the population of The Netherlands to ‘digest’ the full story of its own reactions to Nazi occupation and genocide. So if the Lithuanian population has to face criticism for only slow progress in coming to terms with ‘the skeletons in its closet’, then it should not be singled out as the only group found wanting. This text might only be 182 pages long, but it has big ambitions. It provides a discussion of the historical background to the place of Jews on Lithuanian soil, the origins of antisemitism among the Lithuanian population, Jewish life during the interwar period, the perpetration of the Holocaust, popular collaboration, motives for participation in genocide and, finally, two chapters examining why the dreadful events happened and the difficulties encountered in their finding adequate recognition. Without doubt Undigested Past is a thoughtful piece of work, but potential readers should probably be made aware that it is founded on secondary literature. As such it provides a useful guide to a large amount of work, but at times the study can seem quite familiar. Historically, about 5 million Jews lived in the Russian Empire, mostly in the Pale of Settlement where they carried out their existence quite separately from the Gentile population. They experienced pogroms in the 1880s, then again in 1905 before some 200,000 of them were deported to the Russian interior during the First World War, a time when that community was stigmatized as unreliable and potentially pro-German (pp. 15–16). Regarding the origins of race-hatred, van Voren deploys some depressing information against the Catholic Church. A catechism from 1908, for instance, read, ‘priests and elderly Jews hated Christ the Lord. His enemies agreed to destroy him’ (p. 36). The interwar period started out promisingly for the Jews living in the newly independent Lithuanian state. The Paris Peace Treaty created the preconditions for extensive Jewish autonomy and the terms were incorporated SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 382 into the Lithuanian constitution of 6 August 1919. Initial good fortune, however, soon began to wane and from the mid 1920s on the state experienced a growing policy of Lithuanianization (p. 42). By 1923 about 7.6 per cent of the population of Lithuania was Jewish. Most of the Jews were urban and many were proletarian. It was, perhaps, more or less predictable that by 1 January 1941, at which point the Soviet Union had occupied Lithuania, Jews were overrepresented in the Communist Party, comprising 16.6 per cent of members (p. 53). Van Voren notes, however, that the Communist authorities didn’t just persecute Lithuanians, they persecuted Jews too (p. 59). Across his text van Voren deploys some truly unforgettable statements. One of the more eccentric comes from Lithuanian émigré author, Tomas Venclova: ‘What happened during the first days of the war was a catastrophe for the Jews, but was a far worse catastrophe for the Lithuanians’ (p. 67). Really? Thereafter follows a predictably depressing cataloguing of atrocity. That said, van Voren is to be commended for noting that some 800 Lithuanians have been honoured by Yad Vashem as belonging to the ‘Righteous Among Nations’ and the author makes clear that at least some Lithuanians paid with their lives for assisting Jews (p. 106). Nevertheless, he concludes that...