Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism

by Jelena Subotic

Yellow Star, Red Star asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled―ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated―throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Jelena Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism. Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"―insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Holocaust, Academia, Antisemitism, Academic, World War II

264 pages, Hardcover

Published December 15, 2019

Reviews

[Jakub Ferencik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subotic’s book aims to make sense of political memory as it relates to post-fascist and post-communist legacies in the Baltics and Balkans (as Yugoslavia and its successor states). In particular, it looks at how this memory has affected identities and ontological insecurities in people groups of the region.

The core argument is that the post-communist states encourage nationalism because of different national insecurities that arise due to the ideological interests of Western European states (p. 10). The Western European states have been xenophobic to citizens of Eastern Europe, which makes this endeavor more challenging. Nonetheless, the author argues that we have a responsibility to restore factual history to memory in the region where it is often underplayed and revised.

The Polish and Hungarian cases are perhaps most severe in their denial of collaboration (and hesitancy to admit fault). They tend to view themselves merely as victims. But especially in the Hungarian case, that was not true. Poland was adamantly anti-Semitic leading up to WW2 and there were many instances where Poles killed entire Jewish communities in villages (such as in Jedwabne, where 1,600 Jews were burned alive) without any incentive from the Nazi killing squads. Slovakia, Yugoslavia, the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, and many other nation-states (/republics) had a history of this that very few have reckoned with thus far.

The methodology relies on primary archival and secondary literature sources on the Holocaust in the Balkans and Baltics. This includes newspaper coverage, museum exhibitions, oral testimony, history textbooks and the revisions they often provide, as well as film, literature, and speeches. Extensive effort is also drawn from interviews and visits to Auschwitz, Belgrade, Krakow, Ljubljana, and elsewhere (p. 13).

Overall, there is so much to learn by reading Subotic's book. I hope that this field of research gets more attention in the coming years because, well, it's about time.

[Doug Becker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jelena has written a fabulous and detailed history about the manipulations of Eastern European states and their memories of the Holocaust. In challenging these narratives, she calls upon nations to promote a
memory solidarity and to engage in international recognitions of atrocities as a form on global truth-telling. This is an essential book to anyone interested in how the Holocaust becomes a weapon for nationalist leaders. It also covers areas in Europe under-researched in the English language.

[Iñaki Tofiño · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subotic makes a compelling case explaining how Holocaust memories have been manipulated in former Communist countries such as the Baltic republics or the ex Yugoslavian republics to make way for a new memory, the memory of Stalinist crimes, which undermines the role of antifascist fighters presenting them as Soviet agents and promotes a problematic notion of nation building in those regions, linked to former fascist regimes. Widening the concept of memory promoted by the EU, many of these countries put aside the Shoah and present a new kind of Holocaust which suits better their nativist nationalism and allows for the reappearance of neo-Nazi and neo-fascist movements.

[Indumugi C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book on changing memory narratives on the Holocaust in post-communist States in Eastern-Europe. This book is based on memory-studies. It looks at the manner in which Eastern-European countries that housed the most horrific gas chambers such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, also engaged in historical revisionism in their path to attaining European Union (EU) membership.

The book uses three case studies – Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania to explain the extent to which post-communist States engaged in memory politics, and and obfuscated or inverted holocaust crimes as crimes of communism. The revisionist policies implemented through laws or other means (such as museum artefacts) completely ignored and trivialized the role of local collaborators and fascists. The strength of this book lies in the depth of research and details, and it was so good!

[Marta Kazic]

Phenomenal! And I’m not just saying that because I am friends with the author’s lady mother! It is genuinely engaging and informative and it does an excellent job at filling in the gaps in the readers knowledge in a subtle and encouraging way.

[Jill Wrenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a compelling book about a painful period in history. The author effectively weaves her family’s own experience into her detailed research. I highly recommend it.

[Fiona Sutherland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read of Jewish wartime experience of Nazi and
.

[Ed Stoddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

When this reviewer lived and worked as a journalist in Lithuania in the 1990s, the Holocaust was a red-hot issue which I frequently turned my attention to. Lithuania was a centre of Jewish life in Europe, Vilnius the "Jerusalem of the North." One of the current centres of "Litvak" life is where I currently reside - Johannesburg, South Africa. Much of this diaspora is descended from Litvaks who left before WWII, many in the pre-WWWI Czarist era.
Their timing was great - they got out in time. For around 95% of Lithuania's Jews perished during the Holocaust, the highest percentage of any Nazi-occupied country. And when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, pogroms were unleashed that would see Lithuanians murdering Jews even before German troops arrived. Well-documented and photographed incidents included one in a garage in Kaunas where Lithuanians beat Jews to death.
The Lithuanian narrative in the 1990s - which has not changed much since - went like this: the Jews had greeted the "Russians with flowers" and were therefore Communist collaborators. In the view of many Lithuanians, this at least helped to explain what happened. In the view of more hard-right nationalists, it meant the "Jews had it coming to them." And some even dismiss altogether the notion of Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust. As victims of Soviet invasion and occupation,
Lithuanians recoil at a narrative that also holds them to be perpetrators. And of course, not all Lithuanians were murderous anti-Semites, and many did indeed suffer at the hands of Moscow's minions. And of course, many Jews also suffered under the Soviets, their businesses and properties nationalised, their faith suppressed. That does not fit into the wider Lithuanian narrative.
In this fine book, Jelena Subotic has deftly navigated the mine fields of memory in Lithuania, Serbia and Croatia around the Holocaust. Her main thrust is that "post communist states today are dealing with conflicting sources of insecurity." Among these is a desire to be seen as "European" and part of the EU, but they reject the West European narrative that places the Holocaust at the centre of the region's 20th century history.
"... the cosmopolitan Holocaust memory as developed in the West does not fit narratively with the very different set of Holocaust memories in post-communist Europe," Subotic writes. One concern is that the lack of an honest reckoning with the Holocaust helps to give rise to hard-right and even fascist movements, which find fertile ground in Eastern Europe. It also highlights how history can be corrupted by the state for the purposes of insecure nationalism.
This reviewer in the 1990s became fairly well-acquainted with the historiography of the Holocaust and some of the issues around its battlefields of memory. This book has helped to bring me up to date and is a salient reminder - as someone with an MA in history - of the uses and abuses of history. Subotic is a political scientist but like the best in her field, she also views the world through the prism of an historian.