The Long Shadows of Vilna

2019 ◽  
pp. 150-204
Author(s):  
Jelena Subotić
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Justice ◽  
World War ◽  
Baltic Region ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Soviet Communism ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Jewish Populations

This chapter turns to the Baltics. It focuses in particular on the case of Lithuania, the country with the highest numbers of both prewar Jewish populations and Jewish victims in the Holocaust in the Baltic region. Lithuania is also the country that has most aggressively pursued a strategy of memory conflation, by which the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Lithuania are considered, together, as a “double genocide” and not as distinct historical events with their own tragic trajectories and consequences. Lithuania has also been at the helm of a creative use of post-World War II architecture of international justice, where the state is prosecuting individuals for genocide—not for the Holocaust, but for the “genocide” of Soviet occupation. This chapter begins with the overview of the Holocaust in the Baltic states, then describes Holocaust remembrance practices in the Baltics during Soviet communism, and finally analyzes postcommunist strategies aimed at explicitly using the legal and political structure designed to deal with crimes of the Holocaust to instead criminalize the Soviet past.

scholarly journals Painful Neutrality: Screening the Extradition of the Balts from Sweden

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-92
Author(s):  
Lars Kristensen ◽  
Christo Burman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Baltic

Abstract The article deals with the extradition of Baltic soldiers from Sweden in 1946 as represented in Per Olov Enquist’s novel The Legionnaires: A Documentary Novel (Legionärerna. En roman om baltutlämningen, 1968) and Johan Bergenstråhle’s film A Baltic Tragedy (Baltutlämningen. En film om ett politiskt beslut Sverige 1945, Sweden, 1970). The theoretical framework is taken from trauma studies and its equivalent within film studies, where trauma is seen as a repeated occurrence of a past event. In this regard, literature and moving images become the means of reaching the traumatic event, a way to relive it. What separates the extradition of the Baltic soldiers from other traumas, such as the Holocaust, is that it functions as a guilt complex related to the failure to prevent the tragedy, which is connected to Sweden’s position of neutrality during World War II and the appeasement of all the warring nations. It is argued that this is a collective trauma created by Enquist’s novel, which blew it into national proportions. However, Bergenstråhle’s film changes the focus of the trauma by downplaying the bad conscience of the Swedes. In this way, the film aims to create new witnesses to the extradition affair. The analysis looks at the reception of both the novel and film in order to explain the two different approaches to the historical event, as well as the two different time periods in which they were produced. The authors argue that the two years that separate the appearance of the novel and the film explain the swing undergone by the political mood of the late 1960s towards a deflated revolution of the early 1970s, when the film arrived on screens nationwide. However, in terms of creating witnesses to the traumatic event, the book and film manage to stir public opinion to the extent that the trauma changes from being slowly effacing to being collectively ‘experienced’ through remembrance. The paradox is that, while the novel still functions as a vivid reminder of the painful aftermath caused by Swedish neutrality during World War II, the film is almost completely forgotten today. The film’s mode of attacking the viewers with an I-witness account, the juxtaposition and misconduct led to a rejection of the narrative by Swedish audiences.

Was There a Soviet Policy for Evacuating the Jews?: The Case of the Annexed Territories

Slavic Review ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben-Cion Pinchuk
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Large Population ◽  
World War ◽  
Soviet Government ◽  
Soviet Policy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Baltic

As a result of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States, eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bucovina in 1939-40, the Soviet Union was left with the largest Jewish population in Europe. Given this large population, the fact that the Soviet Union had the greatest number of Jews who survived World War II has aroused the interest of researchers and drawn attention to the role of Soviet policy in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. Some of the reasons for the survival of Jews in Soviet-annexed territories seem obvious. In contrast to other European countries, only part of the USSR was occupiéd by German armies. Therefore, Jews could find refuge in the unoccupied regions. This simple and generally sufficient explanation is not the only one which has been offered, however. Some Western scholars have argued that the Soviet government had a specific policy designed to rescue Jews from the danger of annihilation. Soviet propaganda, particularly that aimed at Western audiences, maintained that millions of Jews owed their lives to Soviet rescue operations during the Holocaust.

Secret Peace Overtures, the Holocaust, and Allied Strategy vis-à-vis Germany: Hungary in the Vortex of World War II

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
László Borhi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The U.S

This article explores how the U.S. and British governments' wartime strategy against Germany affected their policies toward Hungary, a country that had allied itself with Germany when World War II began. U.S. and British leaders wanted to facilitate an Allied landing on the French coast by diverting German troops to other theaters, thinning them out as much as possible. To this end, the United States and Britain were cool toward Hungary's peace overtures in 1943 and were willing to brook Germany's military incursions into Hungary and Romania in 1944 because German troops operating there could not be quickly redeployed to the west. Germany's occupation of those two countries led to the destruction of what remained of the once-large Jewish communities there, a tragic price that Allied leaders were ultimately willing to risk. The failure of Hungary's secret peace overtures also contributed to the later Soviet occupation of Hungary and the grim fate that befell the country after the war.

Navy Marine Mammal Systems in Support of Munitions Clearance

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 96-98
Author(s):  
Bob Olds ◽  
Chris Harris
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
New Caledonia ◽  
False Positive Rate ◽  
Bottlenose Dolphins ◽  
World War ◽  
Baltic Region ◽  
Positive Rate ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Highly Evolved

AbstractSince the early 1970s, the U.S. Navy has utilized bottlenose dolphins to detect, locate, and neutralize moored, bottom, and buried sea mines. The dolphins’ highly evolved biological sonar is superb at finding mines in cluttered and highly challenging marine environments. Recently, the Navy applied the dolphins’ mine-hunting capabilities to the mission of demining in the waters off the coast of New Caledonia. In November 2009, a team of dolphins, along with their handlers, were deployed to New Caledonia and worked alongside other mine-hunting assets to clear mines that were planted during World War II. The dolphins’ extremely low false-positive rate made them ideally suited to sort through the large number of contacts generated by other assets and to mark the location of the actual mines. Through this highly successful and unique operation, numerous mines were cleared and disposed of. Currently, there are plans to participate in similar types of demining exercises in the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro as well as in the Baltic region.

Painted Memories

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 26-29
Author(s):  
mayer kirshenblatt ◽  
barbara kirshenblatt-gimblett
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Daily Diet ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Yom Kippur ◽  
Root Vegetables

Mayer Kirshenblatt remembers in words and paintings the daily diet of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust. Born in 1916 in Opatóów (Apt in Yiddish), a small Polish city, this self-taught artist describes and paints how women bought chickens from the peasants and brought them to the shoykhet (ritual slaughterer), where they plucked the feathers; the custom of shlogn kapores (transferring one's sins to a chicken) before Yom Kippur; and the role of herring and root vegetables in the diet, especially during the winter. Mayer describes how his family planted and harvested potatoes on leased land, stored them in a root cellar, and the variety of dishes prepared from this important staple, as well as how to make a kratsborsht or scratch borsht from the milt (semen sack) of a herring. In the course of a forty-year conversation with his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who also interviewed Mayer's mother, a picture emerges of the daily, weekly, seasonal, and holiday cuisine of Jews who lived in southeastern Poland before World War II.

“The heart above the ruins”: Miriam Waddington’s Poetry, the Spanish Civil War, and Jewish Canadian Literature

1969 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Robins Sharpe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Canadian Literature ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Subject ◽  
War Consequences

The Jewish Canadian writer Miriam Waddington returned repeatedly to the subject of the Spanish Civil War, searching for hope amid the ruins of Spanish democracy. The conflict, a prelude to World War II, inspired an outpouring of literature and volunteerism. My paper argues for Waddington’s unique poetic perspective, in which she represents the Holocaust as the Spanish Civil War’s outgrowth while highlighting the deeply personal repercussions of the war – consequences for women, for the earth, and for community. Waddington’s poetry connects women’s rights to human rights, Canadian peace to European war, and Jewish persecution to Spanish carnage.

Fragments of the Holocaust

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Duindam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Museum Studies ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
World War ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
Memorial Museum ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
A Site

Why do we attach so much value to sites of Holocaust memory, if all we ever encounter are fragments of a past that can never be fully comprehended? David Duindam examines how the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theater in Amsterdam used for the registration and deportation of nearly 50,000 Jews, fell into disrepair after World War II before it became the first Holocaust memorial museum of the Netherlands. Fragments of the Holocaust: The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg as a Site of Memory combines a detailed historical study of the postwar period of this site with a critical analysis of its contemporary presentation by placing it within international debates concerning memory, emotionally fraught heritage and museum studies. A case is made for the continued importance of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and other comparable sites, arguing that these will remain important in the future as indexical fragments where new generations can engage with the memory of the Holocaust on a personal and affective level.

scholarly journals A history of the city written in a map – cartography as the mirror of socio-political events in Gdańsk in the years of 1918–1939

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Bień
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Political Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Made In

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> A cartographic map of Gdańsk in the years of 1918&amp;ndash;1939 was very different from the other maps of Polish cities. The reasons for some differences were, among others, the proximity of the sea, the multicultural mindset of the inhabitants of Gdańsk from that period, and some historical events in the interwar period (the founding of the Free City of Gdańsk and the events preceding World War II). Its uniqueness came from the fact that the city of Gdańsk combined the styles of Prussian and Polish housing, as well as form the fact that its inhabitants felt the need for autonomy from the Second Polish Republic. The city aspired to be politically, socially and economically independent.</p><p>The aim of my presentation is to analyze the cartographic maps of Gdańsk, including the changes that had been made in the years of 1918&amp;ndash;1939. I will also comment on the reasons of those changes, on their socio-historical effects on the city, the whole country and Europe.</p>

scholarly journals The Paths of Books of Latvian Jews during World War II

Knygotyra ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 210-235
Author(s):  
Jana Dreimane
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
World War ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Book Collections ◽  
Book Values ◽  
Second World

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian] The aim of the research is to find out the influence of the Nazi regime on preservation of historical book collections, which were established in Jewish societies, schools, religious organizations and private houses in Latvia until the first Soviet occupation (1940/1941). At the beginning, libraries of Jewish associations and other institutions were expropriated by the Soviet power, which started the elimination of Jewish books and periodicals published in the independent Republic of Latvia. The massive destruction of Jewish literature collections was carried out by Nazi occupation authorities (1941-1944/45), proclaiming Jews and Judaism as their main “enemies”. However, digitized archives of Nazi organizations (mainly documents of the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce) shows that a small part of the Latvian Jewish book collections was preserved for research purposes and after the Second World War scattered in different countries. Analysis of archival documents will clarify the Nazi strategy for Latvian Jewish book collections. It will be determined which book values survived the war and what their further fate in the second half of the 1940s was.

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