Holocaust Memory and the Cold War. Remembering Across the Iron Curtain (2025)

Remembering Across the Iron Curtain. The Emergence of Holocaust Memory in the Cold War Era. York Sept. 2-4.

The Cold War influenced how people, societies and states dealt with and understood the Holocaust and its aftereffects. Challenging previous perceptions of the West as the democratic “Free World” that embraced commemoration and the East as totalitarian and repressive, the papers in this conference will examine how political interests influenced commemoration in both East and West. At the same time speakers will show how individual actors carved out space to remember the Holocaust in ways that stood at odds with the dominant narratives. Examining communal, individuals and state efforts, from the Soviet Union to the US, from Hungary to France, this conference will provide opportunities to re-evaluate the commonalities, differences and entanglements between Eastern and Western memory of the Holocaust.

« Memories of totalitarianism. The assymetry of memory East and West, and the Holocaust » in : Eugeniusz Smolar (dir.) Memory and Responsibility. The legacy of Jan Karski. Semper Scientific Publishers, Warsaw, 2015, pp. 182-192.

“A Disturbed Silence: Discourse on the Holocaust in the Soviet West as an Anti-Site of Memory,” in Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, Alexander M. Martin (eds), The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014): 158-183

Fabiszak, Małgorzata. (Submitted). “Contesting memories in text and image: Discursive representation and cognitive construal”. (In:) David Seymour and Ruth Wodak (eds.) The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century: Contested/Contesting Memories. Routledge.

Beyond the "Auschwitz Syndrome": Holocaust Historiography after the Cold War

Patterns of Prejudice, 2010

Re-remembering the Holocaust in Eastern Europe

Nationalities Papers

Jelena Subotić’s book is an important contribution to memory studies scholarship because it shows how the mechanism of memory appropriation connects state-led remembrance practices with the processes of national identity formation. Through the comparative analysis of Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, Subotić argues that Holocaust remembrance in these states is less about remembering the Holocaust – or acknowledging the states’ own responsibilities for the forced displacement and mass killing of the Jewish population on their territories – and more about the political use of the memory of the Holocaust in the context of the postcommunist transition and national identity insecurities. Yellow Star, Red Star, and particularly its chapters on Serbia and Croatia, nicely complement the existing literature – such as the work of Keith Brown, Siniša Malešević, Vjekoslav Perica, Dejan Jović, Emil Kerenji, Vjeran Pavlaković, Jelena Đureinović, Tamara Banjeglav, and Ana Ljubojević, among others – ...

"The Politics of Holocaust Memory in Central and Eastern Europe: Contemporary Poland as a Comparative Case Study," in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 33, Becoming Post-Communist: Jews and the New Political Cultures of Russia and Eastern Europe, ed. Eli Lederhendler (New York: OUP, 2023), 24-46

2023

Non-Self-Evident Memory: Post-Soviet Jewry and the Holocaust

Sociological surveys show that in the whole world, even on the American continent, so far away from places such as Babi Yar and Aus-chwitz, the memory of Holocaust plays a crucial role in the collective self-identity of the Jewish people, competing with the essential features of Judaism and solidari ty with the State of Israel. Since the violation of the rights of a human being and indifference in the face of suffering jeopardize the very existence of human society, the Holocaust is the most extreme example of such violations, and the greatest moral failure mankind has ever experienced. Confronting the Holocaust, as well as genocide, may contribute to understanding the importance of humanistic and democratic values, and help construct tools for making moral judgments. That is why courses on the study of gen-ocide and the Holocaust have become part of the curricula of educational institutions in the United States and elsewhere. The question as to how to educate the youth about the Holocaust — its historical context, and its reasons and consequences — concerns educators, researchers, and community workers from different and distinct countries. Quite often the answers are utterly contradictory and diametrically opposed to one another.  The question as to how the Jews in contemporary Russia and other Post-Soviet countries are aware of what happened during the years of Holocaust stirs active debate among researchers, and there is no clarity on this issue so far. Even though in the past two decades there have been some significant efforts aimed at reviving the memory of what was silenced for decades, it is hard to say that those efforts have been successful.

Review of "Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism: Remembering the Holocaust in State-Socialist Eastern Europe” (2022)

Hungarian Cultural Studies., 2023

This volume—edited by Kata Bohus, Peter Hallama, and Stephan Stach—reads as a response to “questioning the myth of silence” (David Cesarani), from an Eastern European perspective, as it reevaluates the region’s contribution to Holocaust memory. Covering five countries—the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union—and spanning the entire period of the Cold War, the book offers insights into manifold cases of Holocaust memory. With many of these cases unknown in Western scholarship and long-ignored in Eastern European scholarship, it offers in-depth analyses of marginalized instances of Holocaust commemoration.

2023

The conference examines the memory of the Holocaust in fine arts within the Eastern Bloc from 1945 until the end of the 1960s. Organised by: Agata Pietrasik, Freie Universität Berlin, Kunsthistorisches Institut & Daniel Véri, Museum of Fine Arts – Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI), Budapest Supported by: Alfred Landecker Foundation Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/2510457102443655/