The Art of Retribution: Holocaust Memory and Justice in People's Poland and Soviet Lithuania, 1944-69

Abstract

The pursuit of Holocaust justice and representation in the European socialist borderlands is a story of the navigation of the murky terrain of responsibility for violence. In the closing days of World War II, territories in Eastern Europe liberated from Nazi domination faced the thorny problem of dealing with persons who had taken part in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. Lithuania and Poland together once formed the vast Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1569-1795 and were home to distinctive Jewish communities in the heart of European Jewish life in Russia’s western imperial borderlands. Poland and Lithuania each enjoyed a brief period of independence in the aftermath of the First World War and lost it in the aftermath of the Second, but under separate trajectories. Lithuania was formally incorporated as a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, while Poland underwent Communist transition but retained its own autonomy within the Eastern Bloc. Both countries lost about ninety percent of their prewar Jewish population during the Holocaust. Like elsewhere in Eastern Europe, much of the physical violence against Jews had been carried out with the help of local collaborators. Retribution for wartime crimes and the transition to Communist rule were intimately connected. Yet regardless of high politics in the ebbs and flows of Cold War, the attempts in Communist Poland and Soviet Lithuania to represent and perform justice for the Holocaust in various settings—artistic and legal, secret and public, domestic and transnational—evidenced deep engagement with the concept of personal participation in violence. By comparing artistic responses to the Holocaust with legal trials against perpetrators in Poland and Lithuania, the dissertation explores broader topics in postwar Soviet and European history through the lens of justice. The dissertation begins by examining early artistic responses to the genocide of the Jews in the immediate aftermath of liberation from Nazi occupation and outlining developing discourses on trauma and justice emanating from the public. Subsequent chapters turn to the legal arenas in Poland and Lithuania to understand how crimes against Jews were discussed and how justice was configured in relation to broader judicial and political aims. The analysis then follows how Jews in postwar Poland and Lithuania used the communal and state mechanisms available to them to address the hurt they had experienced from fellow Jews. The final chapter reintegrates the ‘German perpetrator’ into the story of retribution against local non-German collaborators in the context of important Cold War moments in the 1960s, such as West Germany’s own efforts to begin prosecuting war criminals. The art, film, literature, and music addressed in the final chapter brings the story full circle by exploring the boundaries of moral and criminal liability for genocide as understood by the people and institutions who tried to artistically represent and prosecute the Holocaust in the very spaces where most of it had happened. This project builds upon scholarship that seeks to show that there was justice for the Holocaust behind the Iron Curtain. While previous scholars have focused on single nations or republics in the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution, this study examines the various entangled ways a multiethnic borderland region under similar prewar conditions and differing (but still Communist) postwar ones confronted the same problem of accounting for the institutionalized murder of one of its largest minority groups by a foreign power and the ways in which ordinary people helped make it happen. A court of law typically cannot suspend the perpetrator-victim dichotomy, but the artistic arena served as a space where the binary could be transcended. The artistic impetus to represent the nature of humanity was sometimes at odds with the state’s priority of accounting for it. Managers of trials and several cultural figures who addressed war, Holocaust, and justice in their works often reified socialist ideological categories to fulfil propaganda goals but did so in meaningful ways for confronting the destruction of Europe’s Jews.