The Stakes of Holocaust Remembrance in the Twenty-First Century

This concluding chapter takes a broader view of the importance of Holocaust remembrance after communism. It also looks at how other states in the region have adopted their political memories to fit the new political environment. The chapter also opens up a discussion about the larger implications of this variety of Holocaust remembrance practices, especially practices aimed at memory inversion and repurposing of fascist crimes into crimes of communism. Specifically, it discusses the relationship between Holocaust remembrance and the rise of the far-right movements in Europe, and the danger that inverted Holocaust remembrance presents in relegitimizing fascist movements in the present. The chapter ends with a call for memory solidarity—for groups to acknowledge, remember, and care for the memory of others as a foundation for building a more just society.

The Long Shadows of Vilna

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.

At the Belgrade Fairgrounds

This chapter reveals that Holocaust remembrance in Serbia was never really about the Holocaust. During socialist Yugoslavia, Holocaust remembrance was placed within a larger narrative of Yugoslav antifascism and resistance—its multiculturalism and commitment to a pan-national socialist identity. To the extent that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were ever memorialized, this remembrance was either a product of Jewish organizations and initiatives or, in state efforts, a nonethnic remembrance that subsumed Jewish suffering under the larger framework of antifascist struggle and triumph. After the end of communism, however, Holocaust remembrance became a critical element in the total delegitimation of communism. This erasure of the communist past was built around an attack on Yugoslav multiculturalism, an attack which then provided legitimacy to the role of nationalism as the ordering principle in the postcommunist state and the increasing importance of maintaining an ethnically homogeneous body politic. A significant part of this project involved breaking the commitment to pan-national brotherhood and unity and thus making Yugoslavia retrospectively seem unnatural and artificial.