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

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.

RN: How does Lithuania’s experience of Soviet domination complicate relations between Jews and non-Jews?

LD: It complicates it a lot because the problem with Eastern Europe was that in Lithuania, like in Ukraine other places, quite a few groups and segments of society took the Nazi propaganda that equated Jews and Communists seriously. These pearls of Goebbels’ propaganda did horrible damage—it really harmed Lithuania and other Baltic states. I believe that what was happening in 1941 was an incredible indoctrination of young Lithuanians, who came to believe that the Jews were treacherous with regard to Lithuanian independence, that the Jews betrayed Lithuania.

Of course, it was nonsense. We learn from history that there were Litvaks [Lithuanian Jews] among the liberal patriots of Lithuania, and we know that in 1918, after World War I, when Lithuania was on the eve of independence, there were Jewish volunteers who fought for Lithuanian independence. That’s why—keeping also in mind that the role of Lithuanian Jews was really quite extensive in public affairs, economic life, and intellectual life—it was more than unfair. It was grotesque and absurd to claim that Lithuanian Jews betrayed Lithuania.

Regretfully, many people took this absurd propaganda of the Nazis quite seriously. […]  According to this theory, quite a few Jews held very high ranks in NKVD [the law enforcement agency of the Soviet Union; a predecessor of the KGB] and similar repressive structures of the Soviets, and they were behind deportations of the Lithuanians. So, according to this theory, some Lithuanians joined the Nazis in 1941 to avenge their families. You know, this whole narrative is absolutely grotesque and absolutely surrealist. I would say it’s also profoundly immoral. But unfortunately, what seems like just a silly conspiracy theory, did in fact affect Lithuanian minds and the consciousness of the people and they started thinking in these terms. But I think that the situation has started to change, and it’s now possible to find more and more people who are putting this whole construction into question by saying that it’s nonsense to implicate Lithuanian Jews and that we were all victims of Nazism and Communism.

But in fact, this narrative, that of the double genocide theory [which seeks to create a moral equivalence between Soviet atrocities committed against the Baltic region and the Holocaust], has done much harm to Lithuania. First and foremost, it minimized and trivialized the Holocaust. […]

But Lithuania is not the same sort of country it was fifteen or twenty years ago.  Still, much remains to be done. Unfortunately, the idea that the Nazis were a lesser evil and that Communism was the only form of real evil for Lithuania [still exists in Lithuania]. Of course, I can understand the psychological reasons for this, because after 1940, after the occupation and annexation of Lithuania by the Soviets, there were some naïve expectations that Nazi Germany, as a seemingly civilized country, would allow Lithuania to restore its independence. But then, those same people found themselves absolutely astonished at the cynicism and overt contempt of Nazi Germany for Lithuania and the other Baltic states.

In any case, what we really need in Lithuania is to come to terms with this part of our history. We have to say it out loud and to put in black and white that, in fact, the double genocide theory, and this vulgarization and minimizing of the Holocaust was a great mistake made by those who represented our cultural, intellectual, and academic circles. And I think that the time has come to overcome this awful legacy. So,World War II still remains among the most problematic aspects of Lithuanian-Jewish dialogue, but I do believe that younger generations—especially people who are trained at American, British, French, and German universities—have adopted a very different world view, a very different political and historical narrative of the twentieth century. And I believe that somehow, this problem lies mostly with my generation—I’m 51—and with people who are older, who are in their 60s and 70s. Much to my regret, they have inherited these forms of bias and stereotyping from their parents. In a way, it’s a generational thing.

RN: How has Lithuania’s membership in the European Union (EU) affected Jewish-Lithuanian relations?

LD: Well, on one hand, the EU gave a very positive push, because no matter how critical one can be of some things about the European Union, one thing is absolutely obvious: this is a community and a union of values, of fundamental principles and fundamental values. I believe that the adoption of European standards for evaluating human rights and civil liberties was very, very good for Lithuania and the other Baltic states. No matter how European these countries have been in terms of experience and history, after five decades of isolation and Soviet disrespect and contempt for human liberties and rights, it was pivotally important to adopt these modern European and western attitudes.

So, at this point, I think that people started thinking about Lithuanian Jews in a very different way. For many decades, they had been focusing on finding something specifically and characteristically Lithuanian, as distinct from something Jewish, Polish, Belorussian, Ukrainian, or Russian, as a way of cherishing Lithuanian history. I think that it was precisely in the EU that Lithuanians started appreciating and celebrating their multicultural, multiethnic, multi-religious past, because they began to understand that in the context of Europe, Lithuania, with its Jewish past and multicultural aspects of history and culture, can be seen as quite an honorable and respectable country. So they started discovering this Jewish past and looking at it with more attentiveness, sensitivity, and respect. As a university professor, I believe very clearly that there is more and more demand in Lithuania for public events and public lectures about Litvak legacy, about Jewish culture.

So those things came along with the European Union. But at the same time, there are problems. I think that sometimes East European democracies—the newcomers, who joined the EU over the past ten years, including my country—sometimes try to put pressure on the old Europe (France, Germany, Britain) in order to sell their own version of the twentieth century. And this is clearly manifested in the Prague Declaration [the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, signed in 2008, which called for Europe-wide condemnation of the crimes of Communism].  In itself, it’s a very decent document. Of course, it was very important to update the history of Communism and to understand the evil role it played in Europe. But to equate the Holocaust with other war crimes and tragedies was a very bad idea. A very bad idea! It’s impossible to equate the Holocaust and other forms of evil, and the same applies to any kind of  equivalency between Communism and Nazism. Of course, they are both forms of evil, but they are not identical, and we know that the Holocaust was unique. There was no chance for a Jew to save his or her life, not even by paying the price of high treason, by joining the enemy camp. So, keeping this in mind, and understanding the horrible uniqueness of the Holocaust, it was a very bad idea to put pressure on Western Europe to adopt a unified historical and political narrative.

But I don’t believe that we will win this game. I think that, to the contrary, we will have to adopt more a moderate, subtle, and balanced approach to twentieth-century history. And I believe that these lessons will be very important for Lithuania, no matter how painful they are. And due to acceleration of time, we can’t expect to be able to take three, four, of five decades to learn these lessons.  After World War II, it was one kind of Europe.  But now the situation is very different. We cannot afford the pace of post-war European countries. We have to catch up, and we have to adopt a truly European narrative, giving our respect, and full attention to what happened during World War II.

Of course, it’s impossible to resurrect Jewish culture in Europe. What is important is memory. Well-documented, decent human memory. It’s very important for us to achieve something that I would describe as a silent European consensus that we won’t repeat the mistakes of the past, and will oppose the clichés and forms of bias that were instrumental in bringing tragedy to Europe.

HG: One last question: I was wondering if you could provide a few examples about how the organized Lithuanian Jewish community is trying to revive religious and cultural life, through education, projects, and programs?

LD: What is very important is infrastructure, such as museums and gymnasia [secondary schools]. So, we have Jewish schools in Lithuania, though not of course, in the same quantities we used to have in Lithuania, when Jewish life was flowering in the twentieth century. But in any case, an attempt is being made. So, we have Jewish schools, we have Jewish museums, like the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum and its Tolerance Center in Vilnius. These are highly prestigious institutions where many events take place, including political and intellectual events. Many embassies —such as the German, American, British embassies based in Vilnius—hold their events in those museums, as if to say that Jewish centers of life should be activated. And play a role.

At the same time, the Lithuanian Jewish community is trying to do something about Jewish cemeteries. We have programs for trying to preserve Jewish cemeteries. The situation has been quite horrible over the past decades, but now there are some projects to preserve Jewish graves and cemeteries in small towns. There are also projects to revive Jewish religious and cultural life through festivals like the Klezmer Festival.

And, of course, the size of the Lithuanian Jewish community has little, if anything, to do with the brightness and talents of people who are members of that community. I could engage in name-dropping, providing many examples of how bright and ambitious and important some Lithuanian Jews are in Lithuanian cultural life. There are opera singers, musicians, composers, academics, and intellectuals of Jewish background.  And I think that providing information about Jewish life and about Jewish talents who serve Lithuania is very important because this will allow the younger generations to have a very different attitude toward Lithuanian Jews than was the attitude after World War II.

For instance, our Vice Minister of Culture, Darius Mažintas, who is a Lithuanian pianist, is a great enthusiast of Jewish culture — he’s Lithuanian —and together with Rafailas Karpis, an opera singer of Jewish background, we started organizing music events. These are concerts in which I serve as narrator, trying to give as much information about Jewish life and the Litvak legacy as possible. Over the past month, we have had huge audiences in Vilnius and beyond Vilnius. The interest of people who are in their teens and 20s is growing. And this is just one isolated example, but I think that it’s quite important because, after a series of concerts in Vilnius, I started receiving more and more invitations to come to small towns, to shtetls that had a very rich Jewish life before the tragedy. These things indicate that there are some signs of change and I celebrate this.

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

This is the second installment of a two-part interview. The first  part was posted on January 31, 2014.