Immie McCalman
Bartov, Omer, ‘Eastern European as the Site for Genocide’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 80, no.3 (2008), pp. 557-593
Omer Bartov analyses and outlines some of the main issues surrounding the Holocaust and its affect in Eastern European countries such as Poland, Bulgaria and Ukraine. He explores the relationship between memory and the site, documentation and forgetting, professional conventions and historical responsibility. Bartov argues that despite years of scholarship surrounding the genocide of Jewish people, the sites of their execution outside of Auschwitz are given little attention and those who experienced first-hand the destruction from the Nazi regime are ignored in Eastern Europe.
The article is broken down into different subsections: 1) Bifurcated Scholarship, 2) Opening Pandoras Box, 3) Communal Massacre, 4) The Economy of Genocide, 5) Testimony and History and 6) Eastern Europe as Lieu De Memoire. Through these different parts Bartov highlights that Eastern Europe is covered in countless sites in which large parts of history have been completely erased – he explains that those killed were thrown into mass graves not far from where they called home and the sites of life and death are generally vaguely known. Bartov recalls them as sites of forgetting, rather than sites of remembering and remorse. The memory of Jewish life and death in Eastern Europe detached from the sites in which life was lived and murder perpetrated.
Bartov supports the idea that there is bifurcated scholarship regarding Jewish genocide; he discusses that many historians lean on what happened to the victims once they were in the concentration camps rather than where the victims were ripped away from. Whereas the rest ponder on the relationship between the Jewish victims and their gentile neighbours and the little attention that is given to this notion over the German perpetrator.
The situation regarding Jewish death in Eastern Europe changed after the fall of communism. Bartov uses the available access to Eastern European files to explain how Western views on Eastern Europe have been transformed: revealing that the massacre of Jews by their own Polish neighbours proves that the innocent were in fact killers- turned into tools of the Nazi genocide policy. Furthermore, the new narrative introduces Poles into the Holocaust as active protagonists. Bartov claims that precise regions of Eastern Europe where population was dense, murder rates were high and non-Jews were threatened and brutalized to turn on their neighbours. Viewing the Holocaust for Eastern Europeans as very much a communal genocide, public murders were became a part of everyday life; with those who sheltered Jews also denouncing them. Bartov explains that the fear of the victims own neighbours and friends added onto the fear of the Nazi regime.
Additionally, Bartov depicts the crucial role property and capital played in the implementation of the Holocaust- believing that genocide served was a mechanism for social mobility to non-Jews. Yet Bartov states that most historians are reluctant to use Jewish testimonies when reconstructing the Holocaust’s effect in Eastern Europe because the Holocaust had an incomparably greater overall impact on Eastern European countries because populations were greater.
Overall, this article focuses on how Eastern Europe remains the heart of the Holocaust, both physically and socially. Bartov provides evidence for why he thinks the effects of genocide have been discarded and issues of motivation are more complex as the link between higher and lower levels of “ethnic cleansing” can be grasped clearer from first hand and local perspectives of people living in these areas that held communal massacres. Bartov concludes with the idea that the Lieu de Memoire is in the fields and hills, the riverbanks and towns of Eastern Europe.