Shoah distortion An important but imprecise book about how the narrative of the Holocaust is being rewritten
By Efraim Zuroff
THERE ARE currently two dangerous phe- nomena which threaten Holocaust remem- brance and education in many countries all over the world. The first is Holocaust denial, which needs no explanation, and already be- gan in the course of World War II.
The second is that of Holocaust distortion, which does not deny that the Shoah took place, but seeks to alter its narrative for po- litical reasons. It began after World War II in Communist countries, which purposely refused to accurately identify some of the perpetrators and the primary victims, and has become increasingly more dangerous with the fall of the Soviet Union.
The former is in large measure in remis- sion in the Western world, having been ef- fectively refuted by numerous scholars and defeated in very important court cases, es- pecially that of David Irving, but is still a se- vere problem in the Arab and Moslem world. The latter, on the other hand, has for many years been for the most part ignored and al- lowed to flourish unhindered in post-Com- munist Eastern Europe.
It was only in wake of the controversy over the Polish Holocaust bill in 2018, that the issue received wide exposure, but al- most exclusively regarding Poland and not about any of the other major offenders such as Lithuania, Ukraine, Croatia, Hungary, Latvia, Belarus, Romania and Estonia. And that is why this book is important and de- spite numerous historical mistakes and a few significant flaws, should be required reading for all Western government leaders, Foreign Ministry officials, and anyone interested in issues concerning Holocaust commemora- tion and education.
After presenting a very detailed descrip- tion of the historical, political and ideolog- ical roots of Holocaust distortion, which help explain its success since 1990, and the dangers it poses to European unity and the future of the European Union, Subotić, a professor of Political Science at Georgia State University at Atlanta, focuses on how
this problem has developed in Serbia, Croa-
bia is nowhere as prevalent and dangerous, tia and Lithuania.
as it is elsewhere in Eastern Europe. On the My assumption is that her choice in this
other hand, the fact that both Serbia and Cro- regard was based on her personal history
atia were part of former Yugoslavia offers an and knowledge of the Balkans (based on
instructive opportunity for comparison. her Preface, she is of Serbian origin), but
In each country, Subotić offers a compre- is somewhat problematic, since the extent
hensive description of the many ways in to which Serbian Nazi collaborators partic-
which the accepted Western (and Jewish) ipated in the mass murder of Jews was rela-
narrative of the Holocaust is being rewrit- tively minor, especially in comparison to the
ten, and how the particular local history of events in Lithuania and Croatia.
World War II, the Holocaust and their af- The Serbs, moreover, were the victims of
termath have shaped the alternative version a genocidal campaign launched against them
produced to replace the original. by the Croatians, and hence the issue in Ser-
In each case, she begins with a description
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and his wife Agata Kornhauser-Duda place a candle at the Monument to the Victims at the former Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz- Birkenau, during a ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camp and International Holocaust Victims Remembrance Day on January 27
40
THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 22, 2020
of how the Soviet Union or the local Com- munist regime did their own manipulation of the history of the Holocaust. Thus, for exam- ple, in all three countries she deals with, the unique fate of the Jews, who were identified as a major ideological enemy of the Third Reich and were therefore singled out for to- tal annihilation, was never acknowledged by the authorities, a fact which made it easier for the creation of different false narratives after the fall of Communism.
Once the transition to democracy in East- ern Europe was achieved, efforts began to of- fer an alternative narrative to the events from 1939-1990. In direct contrast to the accepted Western history of that period, the former Communist countries presented a narrative in which Holocaust crimes shared equal bill- ing with those of Communism, which they claimed were worthy of being categorized as genocide, even though that was not the case. In several countries, among them Lith- uania, denial that Communism was geno- cide became a criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment. In Croatia, names of
schools, streets and public buildings named for Communist or partisan leaders were changed to those of prominent figures from the pre-Communist era, including persons associated with the notorious Ustasha re- gime of 1941-1945, which murdered hun- dreds of thousands of innocent Serbs, Jews, Roma, and anti-fascist Catholic Croats. In Lithuania, leaders of the post-World War II resistance against the Soviets have become national heroes, even in cases in which they actively participated in Holocaust crimes.
Due to the paucity of scholarly research on Holocaust distortion, this book is quite valu- able. It is not, however, without flaws and factual mistakes. Among the former are, for example, Subotić’s exaggerated claim that Holocaust distortion “destabilizes the core of the European Union, which was built on the memory of World War II-no WW II, no European Union.”
If that were indeed the case, the EU would long ago have taken strong measures against the new democracies, when in fact, none of the guilty parties has paid any price for distorting the history of the Shoa. A second flaw is its failure to devote virtually any at- tention to the issue of the prosecution after independence of Eastern European Nazi war criminals, which is one of the most import- ant aspects of how seriously these countries are dealing with Holocaust-related issues.
Thus, for example, there is no mention whatsoever of the most important trial of a Holocaust perpetrator conducted in East- ern Europe, that of Jasenovać commandant Dinko Sakić, probably the most positive step taken by the Croatian government to date to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.
The numerous mistakes regarding Holo- caust history also diminish the importance of this book. To list just a few. Hungary is not the most extreme case of Holocaust distor- tion in Eastern Europe. Lithuania, Ukraine and Croatia are far worse. Nor had 60,000 Jews already been murdered by the Hungar- ians by 1942, that was the figure of fatalities prior to the mass deportations to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. Lithuanian hopes for independence were not squashed a few months after the Nazi invasion of late June 1941, but rather after a few weeks, in early August 1941. The murder of 16,000, most- ly Jewish men, by late August 1941, hardly represented “most Jews in the countryside,” where 100,000 Jews resided when the Nazis invaded.
The Lithuanian Ypatingas burys murder
squad which carried out the Ponar killings were not the “white-banders.” Those were men who joined the makeshift vigilante squads formed as soon as the Soviets began to retreat, and were identified by white arm- bands, since they did not have uniforms.
The number of Jews living under the Nazi occupation was 220,000, not 165,000. The latter figure was the number of Jews in Lith- uania in the mid-thirties, but 80,000 Jews living in Vilna and its environs came under Lithuanian jurisdiction in 1939, when the Soviets occupied eastern Poland and turned the area over to the Lithuanians.
There is much to be learned from Yellow Star, Red Star, but it is a shame that the au- thor was not more precise in the historical ac- counts on which she based her assertions. ■
Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesen- thal Center, and the director of the Center’s Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs. His latest book, together with Ruta Vana- gaite, Our People; Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) deals extensively with Holocaust dis- tortion in Lithuania
Yellow Star, Red Star; Holocaust Re- membrance After Communism Jelena Subotić Cornell University Press: London and Ithaca, 2019 Hardcover, 264 pages; $29.95
Yellow Star, Red Star; Holocaust Re- membrance After Communism Jelena Subotić Cornell University Press: London and Ithaca, 2019 Hardcover, 264 pages; $29.95
THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 22, 2020 41