The wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1989 reunited East with West and opened the floodgates of memory. While the tearing down of the Berlin Wall is perhaps the most iconic image of the end of Soviet control, Lithuania was actually the first occupied nation to declare independence from the Soviet Union. The thrice-occupied Baltic nation has spent the last thirty years embroiled in the process of state building and comprehending a history fragmented by war, occupation, deracination, forced deportation and most divisively, collaboration with totalitarian regimes. Since its reincarnation as a post-Soviet state, Lithuania has come under fire for the ways in which it has reckoned with or failed to reckon with its twentieth-century history, in particular, their collaboration with both Nazi and Soviet regimes and their culpability for the systematic murder of 200,000 Lithuanian Jews. Reckoning with this history has been further complicated by the attempt to reintegrate the East into the rest of Europe and the efforts of the European Union to ‘correct’ the complicated memories of their Eastern European neighbors. While well-intentioned, the EU’s attempt to force Lithuanians to come to terms with their crimes fails to take into account the complexity of Lithuania’s national character and history, and amounts to a commandeering of memory work, which ought to take place on Lithuania’s own terms.
The end of the Soviet Occupation brought with it the end of enforced silence; however, it did not put an end to the policing of narratives. While the admission of several Eastern European countries, including Lithuania, into the EU in 2004 presented a new platform upon which to voice memory of Stalinist terror, this memory is in direct tension with the Holocaust-centered Western meta-narrative. EU membership unofficially requires newly admitted nations to cultivate a national narrative focused on guilt and accountability for past crimes instead of perpetuating more comfortable narratives of victimhood. The EU’s efforts to root out anti-Semitism and foster international solidarity to prevent future Holocausts are in many ways admirable. However, they fail to take into account several factors such as allotting time for memory construction, the complexities of having experienced double totalitarianism, and their own biases and shortcomings in memory work.
In 2000, the pressure on Lithuania to grapple with its role in the Holocaust took an institutionalized form. The International Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research was announced in Stockholm. The Stockholm Declaration, signed by thirty-one countries, including Lithuania, mandates specific policies be implemented regarding Holocaust education and commemoration. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) does important and valuable work in fighting the pan-European problem of anti-Semitism. However, it oversteps its bounds in placing the Holocaust as the most important memory-touchstone for Eastern Europe. Their mandate says that “The unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning.” But the Holocaust means radically different things in Eastern and Western Europe. The Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius commemorates only victims of Soviet crimes, showing that the Holocaust is not the most important genocide in Lithuanian collective memory. While European organizations such as the IHRA and EU make good arguments for Lithuania to be truthful about its role in the Holocaust, they cross a boundary when they insist that the Holocaust take on more significance than other memories which affected Lithuania just as much.
It’s true that many Lithuanians remain obstinately unwilling to reconcile with the more uncomfortable aspects of their history. In the 1990s Lithuanian courts failed to prosecute several known Nazi collaborators despite the abundant evidence. The fact that the state-funded Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius includes the stories of only Lithuanian victims of the Soviet Occupation, reveals the disturbing reality that the 200,000 Lithuanian Jews killed in the Holocaust are to this day not considered Lithuanian. Lithuanian author Rūta Vanagaité attempted to correct such gaps in Lithuanian collective memory. Her book, Our People, called attention to the active engagement of Lithuanians in the murder of their Jewish neighborhoods and sparked a debate about Lithuanian history so virulent she was turned away by friends and family members who considered the book a betrayal. An interview with Vanagaité conducted in January 2016 reveals a culture of fear around reconciling with the Holocaust in which academics were afraid to speak out. But an article published a month later by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency looks on Lithuania more optimistically and writes of how Vanagaité’s book is beginning to change people’s attitudes for the better.
The discourse around Vanagaité’s book is demonstrative of several things, the most important of which is Lithuanians’ ability to comprehend their trauma and collaboration with the Nazi regime on their own. Western Europe has historically imposed a perceived moral and intellectual authority onto their Eastern neighbors. While the Holocaust is an important memory touchstone, it is condescending and senseless to demand that one’s memory touchstones extend to everyone else. Moreover, Vanagaité’s book, the Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum, and the emergence of grassroots Holocaust and Gulag remembrance prove that Lithuanians are not backwards people obsessed with their own inflated victimhood, but a country of people capable of reckoning with their complex and unimaginably difficult past.
That said, the culture of amnesia and denial the Vanagaité calls attention to is quite real, and will take time to uproot. Western criticism of Lithuania’s work on its culture of remembrance fails to remember that by the time the Holocaust arrived in East-European political discourse, the West had already had three to five generations to develop. As the younger generation is constantly calling into question the memories of the older, the central touchstones of cultural memory change[1]. Even Germany, so often praised as an example of memory reckoning done right, only arrived at their current narrative after the children of Holocaust sympathizers rejected their parents’ continuing silent loyalties to the Nazi period. Even if there were a movement to replicate Germany’s memory path and plaster Vilnius with monuments the way Berlin is plastered with monuments, it would still take several generations to grapple with the huge volume of remembering and forgetting Lithuanians have before them.
Between two occupations, war, Stalinist terror and the Holocaust, Lithuanians have more to remember and to forget, and are embroiled in the process of state-building besides. Moreover, while Germans have gone to great lengths to commemorate their complicity in the Holocaust, young Germans know comparatively little about the legacy of the Second World War and the various atrocities visited upon Russian and Polish neighbors. Just because Germany’s memory is imperfect doesn’t mean it can’t be held up as a model, however, it does show that memory work is a constant process, and ‘perfect’ or ‘correct’ narratives are not attainable. While Lithuania has a lot of work to do in rooting out anti-Semitism, there are no grounds for insisting that the Holocaust shape their society the way we have chosen to let it shape ours. Rather than Western kettle calling the Eastern pot black, all nations should be somewhat self-critical about the ways in which they engage with collective memory.
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- Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak, ed., Memory and Change in Eastern Europe: Eastern Perspectives (New York: Berghahan Books, 2016).
Perceptive piece.