The Painful Dilemma of Memory Politics: Interview with Leonidas Donskis [Part I]

On Thursday, February 13 at 7:00pm, YIVO will present Unresolved History: Jews and Lithuanians After the Holocaust, a panel discussion with European Union Parliament Member, Dr. Leonidas Donskis; award-winning writer and political dissident, Tomas Venclova; Faina Kukliansky, Chair and advocate for the Lithuanian Jewish Community; Saulius Sužiedėlis, of Millersville University; and Mikhail Iossel of Concordia University. The group will address Lithuania’s controversial treatment of the Holocaust and Lithuanian-Jewish relations today. Introductory remarks will be delivered by Lithuanian Ambassador to the United States, Žygimantas Pavilionis, and former U.S. Ambassador to Lithuania, Anne E. Derse.

Read more about the program.
Attend the event.

Leonidas Donskis

Leonidas Donskis is a Member of the European Parliament (2009–2014) and has written and edited over thirty books, including Modernity in Crisis: A Dialogue on the Culture of Belonging (Palgrave MacMillan) and Forms of Hatred: The Troubled Imagination in Modern Philosophy and Literature (Rodopi). His works have been translated into fifteen languages. Donskis is a visiting professor of politics at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania and holds an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Bradford, Great Britain.

He was interviewed by YIVO Public Program Director Helena Gindi and Yedies editor Roberta Newman.

HG: What particular challenges would you say the Lithuanian Jewish community is facing today?

LD: I would say that the number one challenge is that it’s a very tiny minority. What we had in the twentieth century before the Holocaust was a very impressive Lithuanian Jewish community. We know that around 250,000 Jews lived in Lithuania before World War II, and the degree of tragedy was really incredible because, during the war, around ninety-five percent of them were killed. That percent was the highest in Europe, and only 20,000 Jews survived the Holocaust in Lithuania — including my father, incidentally. I am happy to be the son of a Holocaust survivor.

We need to keep in mind the decrease of the Lithuanian Jewish community over the past decade, due to the fact that many Lithuanian Jews have been repatriated to Israel since 1973, when the first wave of Lithuanian Jews left Lithuania for Israel. So all this has made the Lithuanian Jewish community a very tiny community, a very tiny segment of Lithuanian society. Right now, we have around 5,000 people. This is why it’s very important to decide to what extent we can rely on the community alone in tackling such challenges as education and historical memory. To what extent do we need ethnic Lithuanians, in terms of historical research or Lithuanian academics who would be able to teach Yiddish in summer courses? This is already the case, incidentally, because in Vilnius or other towns there are ethnic Lithuanian academics who are teaching Yiddish in seminars and courses. Incredible as it sounds, Lithuanian historians or philologists are quite active in this process. So that’s why it’s very important to decide to what extent can we, the Lithuanian Jewish community rely on ourselves.

Question number two is, what is the best form of cooperation between Lithuanian Jews and the state of Israel? And what about the relationship of the entire global community of Jews all over the world and Lithuania? What is very important to understand is that the Lithuanian Jewish community has a responsibility to preserve the very special historical record of this great community. Because Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews) gave so many eminent people to Europe and the world, and were responsible for the preservation of such a precious memory. We cannot even think of simply abandoning this treasure of memory, culture, and intellectual legacy.

But at the same time, I think it’s very important to think about Holocaust education and Holocaust memory. And this relates not only to the Lithuanian Jewish community, per se; it relates even more to ethnic Lithuanians, especially in high schools and universities, where it is very important to introduce Holocaust education as an inextricable part of the curriculum. I think that this remains quite problematic. Even these days quite a few people in Lithuania still perceive the Holocaust as something that stands on its own, something that is not intimately related to Lithuanian history. The Holocaust narrative is not integrated into the Lithuanian political historical narrative to the extent that it’s regarded as something inalienable from Lithuanian history.

So these are very important challenges, and education, memory politics, research, and the preservation of Jewish legacy are among key aspects of this question.

HG: Can you go into more detail about the state of Holocaust education in Lithuanian schools today? Also, in terms of public memory, what is Lithuania doing publically, as a government, to teach about the Holocaust, either through museums or public spaces?

LD: I think that we have a very uneven constellation, so to speak. On one hand, there have been some very beautiful gestures from the Lithuanian government. Some of the educational programs that have been introduced into high schools, the museums, the cultural events, and commemoration ceremonies: all these things are very important and were impossible even to think about some fifteen or twenty years ago. And now these things have become absolutely inextricable from Lithuanian public life.

Yet there are still things that call for very, very serious debate. For instance, what I would regard as the more-or-less official attitude to the provisional government. During World War II, there were those who tried to restore independent Lithuania. And we know that, in fact, some pieces of legislation were introduced at that time by the provisional government (which was an ally to Nazi Germany) that were directed against Lithuanian Jews, against our fellow citizens. It can be assumed that people didn’t know what was going to happen, that people might have been myopic or naïve, but even so, it’s absolutely obvious that had Lithuania been liberated by Great Britain and the United States, there is no question about the fate of what that provisional government would have been. It would have been put on trial and held responsible for collaboration with the Nazis. But the problem is that it happens quite frequently that the provisional government is celebrated and praised to the skies.  The reinternment of the head of the provisional government, Juozas Ambrazevičius (Brazaitis) [in May 2012], was a very, very difficult experience, to say the least.

This reveals that there is some discrepancy between some of the beautiful, very benevolent gestures undertaken by the Lithuanian government and public figures and the attempt to somehow keep on celebrating aspects of modern Lithuanian history that are controversial, to say the least.

Personally, I think it’s impossible to reconcile these different aspects of Lithuanian history: on the one hand, celebrating people who were responsible for the Holocaust — for instance, the Lithuanian Activist Front, instigators of the June Uprising  [against the Soviet occupiers in June 1941 when the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union] — and, on the other hand, trying to come to terms with history, and thinking about victims, and celebrating the righteous gentiles who saved Jewish lives. I don’t think the two are compatible with each other. And I think that this is the very painful dilemma of Lithuanian memory politics. It’s impossible to serve two mutually exclusive purposes. On one hand to celebrate the provisional government, on the other hand to be sensitive to the tragedy of Lithuanian Jews. Well, we have to decide.

RN: Are things beginning to change? Is there a generational difference?

LD: A new generation of Lithuanian historians has begun to emerge. We have people who are in their 30s and 40s, and they have started writing and publishing very important articles and books about the Holocaust and World War II. I would say that some twenty, twenty-five years ago, prior to Lithuanian independence in 1990 — in the late 80s, for instance, when I was a young man — we knew for sure that there were very few Lithuanians able to raise their voices to try to do justice to the victims of the Holocaust. There were few people who were courageous enough to say out loud that there were perpetrators. That Lithuania was not only a victim of Nazism and Communism, but that Lithuanians were also perpetrators: people who slaughtered, who killed their fellow citizens, Jews. Tomas Venclova, the Lithuanian poet, writer, and literary scholar who is my friend, and who is now Professor of Slavic Literature at Yale University, was a very lonely voice — I would say, a voice crying in the wilderness.

But I have to say that the picture has changed over the past years. Now it’s not only Tomas Venclova or Saulius Sužiedėlis, who is now an émigré historian in the United States, an American academic of Lithuanian background. Now it’s not only these two who are courageous and decent and kind in their research and public opinions. There are more than one Lithuanian historian, brought up in Lithuania, who have started raising their voices and doing research. And I think that this is an achievement of present day Lithuania.

But I think that Lithuanian memory politics still lacks consistency. We have to decide to what extent we’ve been consistent, and whether we’ve done our best in how we’ve tried to introduce Holocaust education into the high schools. I have great doubts as to whether it is sufficient to have only one or two pages on the Holocaust in Lithuanian textbooks. There has been some progress, but everyone feels that much remains to be done at this point. I learned from my German academic friends that it took almost five decades for Germany to come to terms with what happened in the twentieth century. They told me that in the beginning it was just a bunch of poets and writers of the 1947 generation, including Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, and only after decades and decades was there a wave of German historians and academics who started publishing books.

I don’t know how much time is needed for Lithuania, but it was in 1997 that we had the first really important conference in Nida, Lithuania on the Holocaust. And I remember that at the time I felt that the whole event was quite isolated. And now I wouldn’t say that this is the case in Lithuania. Every event in Vilnius or Kaunas, every university conference on the Holocaust or Jewish culture becomes a public event, and we have more and more people who are really interested in this. And I think that Litvak legacy is celebrated to a degree that would have been unthinkable in 1992 or 1995. So, there are some positive trends. But still, by and large, I would say that what we need most is consistency: an articulate and consensual policy. This is necessary because on one hand, when we attempt to minimize the Holocaust — as if to say that Lithuania itself was a victim of Communism, and it’s inappropriate to pay so much attention to perpetrators — and at the same time try to be sensitive to the Jews, it’s impossible to reconcile these two attitudes. We have to decide. It’s an ethical choice.

Interview transcribed by Alix Brandwein and edited for length and clarity.

This is the first installment of a two-part interview. The second part will be posted next Friday, February 7th.