The Rescue Turn and the Politics of Holocaust Memory

By Natalia Aleksiun, Ido de Haan, Sofie Lene Bak and 8 more

This volume considers the uses and misuses of the memory of assistance given to Jews during the Holocaust, deliberated in local, national, and transnational contexts. History of this aid has drawn the attention of scholars and the general public alike. Stories of heroic citizens who hid and rescued Jewish men, women, and children have been adapted into books, films, plays, public commemorations, and museum exhibitions. Yet, emphasis on the uplifting narratives often obscures the history of violence and complicity with Nazi policies of persecution and mass murder. Each of the ten essays in this interdisciplinary collection is dedicated to a different country: Belarus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, North Macedonia, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. The case studies provide new insights into what has emerged as one of the most prominent and visible trends in recent Holocaust memory and memory politics. While many of the essays focus on recent developments, they also shed light on the evolution of this phenomenon since 1945.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Dec 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9780814349519

Book preview

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Praise for The Rescue Turn and the Politics of Holocaust Memory

The assistance, both individual and collective, provided to Jews by their neighbors during the Holocaust is one of the few heartening features of this tragic period. In recent years, with the widespread rise of populism, this has often been instrumentalized to provide a more positive image of the national past during the Nazi occupations and to obscure the fact that assistance of this type was never widespread and often went side-by-side with cooperation with the Nazis in carrying out the anti-Jewish genocide. This comprehensive and well-researched volume provides a balanced evaluation of these hotly disputed issues in ten European countries. It is essential reading for all those interested in the complex and difficult questions of assistance, indifference, and collaboration under Nazi occupation.

—Antony Polonsky, emeritus professor of Holocaust studies, Brandeis University

This volume is a significant multidisciplinary contribution to scholarship on the public valorization of narratives of rescue. Bringing together established and emerging scholars, this anthology draws attention to the different scales of the representation of rescue at transnational, national, local, and individual levels and explores their relationships in public discourse across different national contexts.

—Hannah Holtschneider, professor of contemporary Jewish cultural history, University of Edinburgh

In this timely volume, scholars from diverse disciplines scrutinize Holocaust narratives of rescue efforts in ten European countries. Illuminating the intricacies of memory deployment, they offer insightful analysis on the cosmopolitanization of memories and the contestations that ensue. A must-read for anyone interested in the politics of historical memories.

—Daniel Levy, professor of sociology, Stony Brook University

Since the Holocaust became a European foundational past, and the question of the reactions of ‘bystanders’ one of its most controversial themes, its better understanding is of more than academic importance. This comprehensive volume offers advanced analysis of relevant politics in key European countries and insightful case studies, pointing to some highly disturbing tendencies.

—Dariusz Stola, professor, Polish Academy of Sciences

This collection offers an enlightening European tour of Holocaust commemorations. The case studies analyze the rescue turn: a growing emphasis on assistance given to Jews in memory politics, observable at international, national, and individual levels. Written by an interdisciplinary team of proficient researchers, this volume gives fresh insights on how the image of the rescuer both relates to globalization of Holocaust memory and to scant national sensibilities, eager to promote a guilt-free and politically usable narrative, often tending to blur their responsibilities.

—Audrey Kichelewski, associate professor in contemporary history, University of Strasbourg

The Rescue Turn and the Politics of Holocaust Memory

The Rescue Turn and the Politics of Holocaust Memory

Edited by Natalia Aleksiun, Raphael Utz, and Zofia Wóycicka

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2024 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

ISBN 9780814350836 (paperback)

ISBN 9780814349502 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780814349519 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023932576

On cover: Photos of mural project commemorating Zegota secret council in Warsaw (images at right and top left). Mural designed by Adam Quest; painted by Good Looking Studio, 2017. Used by permission of Adam Quest Studio. Cover design by Shoshana Schultz.

Publication of this book was made possible through the generosity of the Bertha M. and Hyman Herman Endowed Memorial Fund.

The research and editorial work for this volume was possible thanks to the financial and logistical support of the Centre for Historical Research Berlin of the Polish Academy of Sciences; the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena; the German Historical Institute Warsaw; and the Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies, University of Florida.

Wayne State University Press rests on Waawiyaataanong, also referred to as Detroit, the ancestral and contemporary homeland of the Three Fires Confederacy. These sovereign lands were granted by the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot Nations, in 1807, through the Treaty of Detroit. Wayne State University Press affirms Indigenous sovereignty and honors all tribes with a connection to Detroit. With our Native neighbors, the press works to advance educational equity and promote a better future for the earth and all people.

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Contents

The Rescue Turn: An Introduction

Natalia Aleksiun, Raphael Utz, and Zofia Wóycicka

Part I: (Trans)National Memory?

1. Shame and Pride: The Memory of the Rescue of Jews in the Netherlands, 1945 to the Present

Ido de Haan

2. Danish Heroism Revisited: The Rescue of the Danish Jews between National and Global Memory

Sofie Lene Bak

3. The Rescue of the Macedonian Jews during World War II: Between Collective Agency and Individual Stories

Naum Trajanovski

Part II: National Memory—Local Memory

4. Bringing the State Back into Memory Studies: Commemorating the Righteous in France, 2007–20

Sarah Gensburger

5. The Righteous Resisters: Memory of Holocaust Rescue in Slovakia

Hana Kubátová

6. Constructing a Legacy: The Memory of Andrei Sheptytsky in Contemporary Ukraine

Liliana Hentosh

7. Belated and Incomplete: Recognizing the Righteous Among the Nations in Belarus

Anika Walke

Part III: Individual Memory—Public Remembrance

8. Commemorating and Remembering Jewish Rescue in Greece

Anna Maria Droumpouki

9. Irena Sendler from Żegota: The Heroine and Her Myth

Anna Bikont

10. Rescue from Memory: Wartime Experience in Postwar Perspective

Mark Roseman

Index of Names

Index of Places

Contributors

The Rescue Turn

An Introduction

Natalia Aleksiun, Raphael Utz, and Zofia Wóycicka

In June 1989, Yad Vashem informed Polish citizen Marianna Chęć-Wieczorkiewicz that it had decided to bestow the title Righteous Among the Nations on her and her parents for rescuing a young Jewish child in eastern Poland during the Holocaust. Part of the institution’s mission since its inception, the designation serves to recognize non-Jews who had risked their lives in order to save Jews.¹ While reflecting on the role of non-Jewish rescuers and seeking to honor and assist them dated back to the immediate postwar period, the category took formal shape only after Yad Vashem established its program for the Righteous Among the Nations in 1962.² Within a year it developed procedures for handling candidates’ files such as that of the Chęćs, who put their lives in danger not only during the war but also in its aftermath.³

In March 1943, two months before the destruction of the ghetto in Bełżyce, near Lublin, a Jewish tailor, Szmul Leib Sznajderman, asked Stanisław and Karolina Chęć, from the neighboring village of Jaroszewice, to hide his newborn son, Moszek (Moshe). Feeling sorry for the baby, they agreed.⁴ The Chęćs struggled to provide for the sick baby, whose parents perished shortly after they had handed over their young child. In his letter to the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, Stanisław recalled that even when there was no [money] for a piece of bread for me, we had it for milk for the child.⁵ The whole family cherished the boy, whom they called Mundek, and tried to protect him. Even after the area was liberated in July 1944, Moshe remained with the Chęćs. One day, however, Moshe’s maternal uncle, Szol Fersztman, arrived to claim the child, and he took Moshe back with him to Lublin. Marianna, the Chęćs’s daughter, who had looked after the boy and was especially close to him, accompanied Moshe to facilitate his adjustment to the new environment.⁶ The family’s attachment and continued devotion to the Jewish child met with communal censure.

The Chęćs struggled during the war, but after the war they faced continued threats and violence in retribution for what they had done. In 1947 Marianna’s father, Stanisław Chęć, sent a desperate letter to the Central Committee of Jews in Warsaw asking for assistance in his critical situation in the wake of a raid by a band of native fascists.⁷ The attackers had smashed his apartment, kicked and battered Stanisław, and cut the hair of his wife, Karolina, and daughter, Marianna. With their home destroyed, the family was forced to live in a stable. They were targeted for violence and humiliation as punishment for having rescued a Jewish child.⁸

Official recognition of the Chęćs’s courage during the German occupation was neither immediate nor a given. From the social censure and isolation of the Chęćs, who could only hope for the assistance provided by the organization created by the remnants of Polish Jewry, until the state authorities’ involvement in preparing their file and submitting it to Yad Vashem, much seems to have changed in the country’s treatment of Poles who helped Jews during the Holocaust. On the eve of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the authorities recognized the political potential of the award and more broadly of the discourse centering around ethnic Poles rescuing Jews under the German occupation. As a result of the application for the medal and of its approval, the family was presented with their certificate at a ceremony in Warsaw in 1991. By then Poland had already undergone a peaceful political transformation from communist dictatorship to democracy. Seen over time, the Chęćs’s story reflects shifting agencies and a growing public interest and investment in the recognition of the wartime sacrifices of non-Jewish Polish citizens who gave aid to Holocaust victims. With some variation, this dynamic web of changing social attitudes, institutions and their memory politics, and survivors’ efforts and agency applies not only to Poland but to most European countries.

In particular, over the last two decades in Europe and beyond, the subject of assistance given to Jews during the Holocaust has attracted tremendous attention among both scholars and the general public. This interest translated into numerous publications, conferences, commemorative initiatives, monuments, films, plays, museums, and exhibitions. Those partaking in academic, popular, and political discussions often invoked the category of the Righteous Among the Nations as established by Yad Vashem. However, in recent years the interest in this historical phenomenon has exceeded referencing the well-established honoring ceremony organized by Yad Vashem. One could even say that Yad Vashem has fallen victim to its own success, for it has produced a brand so appealing that it has been appropriated by a variety of actors with diverse agendas and has begun to live an independent life of its own.⁹

The fashion has been engendered by the mass media and most prominently by Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List.¹⁰ Furthermore, transnational and intergovernmental organizations, such as the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), as well as by transnational NGOs, such as Gariwo (Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide) have propagated the topic of the Righteous. In fact, the joint declaration signed in 2000 by the delegates to the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust already highlighted the importance of preserving the memory of those who defied the Nazis, and sometimes gave their own lives to protect or rescue the Holocaust’s victims.¹¹ In 2007 member states of the Council of Europe signed a Solemn Tribute to the ‘Righteous’ of Europe. In 2012 the European Parliament established the European Day of the Righteous. These international developments were triggered by and resonated with the politics of remembrance led by various governmental and civil society actors. In recent years, as discussed in this volume, a number of European states have established state holidays and organized official ceremonies predominantly honoring their own national Righteous. Indeed, streets have been named after the rescuers, and museums and monuments dedicated to them have been erected all over Europe.¹²

In some European countries the efforts to salvage and underscore the memory of people who rescued Jews during World War II were a direct response to scholarly and public debates about collaboration in the persecution and murder of Jews.¹³ Focusing on rescuers has seemingly helped to neutralize difficult and painful conversations about the past. It has offered a strategy for inscribing oneself into the global trend of commemorating the Holocaust without challenging or diminishing a sense of national pride. Moreover, the development of the human rights discourse and the growing tendency to universalize history increasingly have led people to understand the Holocaust as a reservoir of role models to emulate. This shift also helps to explain the fashion for the Righteous, who offer very persuasive examples of activism and courage in the face of undeniable evil.

In their important book, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, sociologists Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider suggested the emergence of a new, globalized, cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust. They argued that the process of the cosmopolitanization of memory, visible already in the 1980s, greatly accelerated in the early 1990s. After the end of the Cold War, as the binary world order collapsed and anticommunism as the common ideology of the West lost its power, public attention refocused on crimes committed by the Nazis. As a result of political transformation, in a short period of time archives in Russia, Poland, and other former Eastern Bloc states opened up to researchers, and the sites where many of the crimes of the Holocaust actually took place, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Babi Yar, Maly Trostinec, and the Operation Reinhardt extermination camps, became accessible to foreign visitors, making Holocaust history more tangible for them. These changes were also triggered by the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and to an even greater extent by the practice of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian War (1992–95) and the Kosovo War (1998–99). These tragic events made Europeans realize that war, ethnic hatred, and mass murder were still acute and present in their midst. As a result, these phenomena led to the strengthening of the human rights discourse for which the Holocaust served as a significant point of reference.¹⁴

The 1990s were also the period in which the Holocaust became an ever-more important element of the culture of remembrance in the United States, as exemplified by the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and the release of Schindler’s List, both in 1993.¹⁵ They represented a process that created a pervasive presence of representations of the Holocaust in American popular culture. However, the Americanization of the Holocaust meant not only that the topic was turned into a consumable media product, but also that it was taken out of its original geographical and historical contexts and redesigned into a universal story of the struggle between good and evil.¹⁶ Thus it became more appealing to people who had no discernable biographical or familial connection to these events. Consequently, the Jews became archetypical victims so that others could identify with their suffering, and the Holocaust became a globally understandable code for all forms of human rights violations.¹⁷ This mode of thinking about the Holocaust was also partly emulated in Europe and other parts of the globe. As a result, Holocaust memory was transformed into something more future-oriented and began to serve as a moral yardstick for contemporaries.¹⁸

The cosmopolitan memory, as defined by Levy and Sznaider, is characterized by its focus on victims of war and genocide. Such a focus has strengthened what historians Jan Eckel and Claudia Moisel called a culture of victimization, in which social groups increasingly define themselves not by their glamorous past and heroic deeds but by the suffering they endured.¹⁹ This new mode of remembering is highly personalized: Victims are no longer commemorated as a national or ethnic group but as individuals with whom everybody can empathize. At times the distinction between memories of victims and perpetrators gets blurred, and one makes individual choices about with whom to identify.²⁰

Finally, according to Levy and Sznaider, cosmopolitan memory is reflexive. It abandons the old heroic narratives in favor of a more self-critical vision of one’s own community, in which attitudes toward persecuted minority groups become the ultimate measure of good and evil: While traditional and exemplary narratives deploy historical events to promote foundational myth, the critical narrative emphasizes events that focus on past injustices of one’s own nation. Cosmopolitan memory thus implies some recognition of the history (and the memories) of the ‘Other.’²¹

Levy and Sznaider did not claim that this new form of memory eliminated traditional national master narratives altogether. They underlined that speaking about the cosmopolitanization of Holocaust memory does not imply some progressive universalism subject to a unified interpretation. The Holocaust does not become one totalizing signifier containing the same meanings for everyone. Rather its meanings evolve from the encounter of global interpretations and local sensibilities. The cosmopolitanization of Holocaust memories thus involves the formation of nation-specific and nation-transcending commonalities.²² Levy and Sznaider also recognized that there would always be tension between local, national, and global and cosmopolitan memories. Later focus group research conducted by Daniel Levy, Michael Heinlein, and Lars Breuer in Poland, Austria, and Germany confirmed that one can hardly speak about the existence of a unified European memory in regard to World War II and the Holocaust. Nevertheless, these scholars maintained that the new mode of remembering questions and weakens national frameworks and leads to shared cosmopolitan memory practices that manifest themselves in the following repertoires of memory work—affirmative but ambivalent perceptions of Europeanness, skeptical narratives about the nation emphasizing injustice and perpetratorship, and an increased recognition of the Other.²³

In their work, Levy and Sznaider did not make a clear distinction between global and European memory. Rather, it seems as if they saw both as moving in a similar direction. While their analysis focused predominantly on Israel, the United States, and Germany, they argued that, due to developments in Europe, the Holocaust has been firmly established as the negative founding myth of the European Union. Consequently, the recognition of its significance and singularity became, as formulated by historian Tony Judt, an entry ticket to Europe.²⁴

Over the last two decades, scholars have largely confirmed Levy and Sznaider’s insights while also honing their theory. The critique went in two directions. Some authors noted that cosmopolitan memory was not solely an analytical concept but also a normative claim.²⁵ In fact, Levy and Sznaider seemed to be fervent advocates of this mode of remembering, while other researchers hinted at its limitations, such as the sole focus on the victims and their individualized suffering, which neglects the biographies and motivations of the perpetrators and the mechanisms of escalating violence. This perspective—the critics argued—weakened the force of Holocaust education as a tool in preventing racism and genocide. As formulated by sociologist Geffrey Olick, coming to terms with the past requires learning from the experiences and perspectives of both victims and perpetrators: For only through developing realistic images of both sides [. . .] can we avoid turning ordinary victims into martyrs and ordinary perpetrators into psychopaths, as so many commemorative images and claims do.²⁶

Other commentators pointed out that the spread of a reflexive, unheroic memory leads to a blurring of responsibilities. The growing awareness that wide strata of nearly all European societies were in some way implicated in the genocide of the Jews—by showing indifference to its victims or by profiteering, or by directly participating in the mass murder—turned the Holocaust from a German into a European phenomenon.²⁷ However, this notion of wide-ranging implication in the Holocaust sometimes obscures the difference in the degree of responsibility and the form of complicity in the genocide among the Third Reich, its allies, and the governments and societies of the occupied and neutral countries. As critically noted by Eckel and Moisel, in the European politics of remembrance, the German responsibility for the Holocaust and other crimes committed during World War II [. . .] move into the background.²⁸

Furthermore, memory scholar Aleida Assmann pointed out that cosmopolitan memory could be, not without reason, perceived as a Western European project that was being imposed on others.²⁹ Taking this one step further, historian and political scientist Anna Cento Bull and memory scholar Hans Lauge Hansen argued that the cosmopolitan mode of remembering, far from having superseded the antagonistic mode associated with ‘first modernity’ in the European context, has proved unable to prevent the rise of, and is being increasingly challenged by, new antagonistic collective memories constructed by populist neo-nationalist movements.³⁰

Moreover, while Levy and Sznaider were among the first to highlight the impact of globalization processes on collective remembering, other researchers have nevertheless expressed doubts concerning the direction of these developments. Although we do not yet fully understand the nature and results of the interplay between the global and the local, scholars tend to agree that, contrary to initial optimistic assertions about cosmopolitanization of memory, recent changes have not led to a general alignment of local war narratives.³¹ Indeed, anthropologist and museologist Sharon Macdonald notes: What has emerged here, then, is a dynamic of potentially cosmopolitan developments that are sometimes appropriated to other ends or bump up against limits and other agendas in practice.³² In some cases the confrontation with transnational discourses even reinforces nationalistic master narratives.³³ Therefore, Macdonald proposed to speak not about globalization but rather about a glocalization of memory understood as the local reworking of global patterns.³⁴

As this volume demonstrates, the transnational context plays an important role in generating and shaping local rescue narratives. However, the essays included here also suggest that, despite the common subject, narratives vary from place to place, and in some cases the topic is presented very differently from the self-reflexive, inclusive, cosmopolitan mode of remembering. In fact, many of the case studies assembled in this volume demonstrate exactly the opposite: a process of claiming the Righteous for national narratives. By appropriating Yad Vashem’s moral standards of honoring outstanding individual behavior, they are, in fact, applied to entire populations and transformed into statements about societies and, indeed, national character.

Rather than universal values reflected in cosmopolitan memory, in many cases nationalism appears to be particularly relevant. In his influential study, Benedict Anderson identified the imagining of a particular community as the central element of any nationalism.³⁵ At the heart of this process is always a search for a politically meaningful way to link the past with the present and, indeed, the future—in other words, the creation of a usable past.³⁶ Furthermore, Liah Greenfeld has argued that the specificity of nationalism is one of perspective: It is not to look at a specific object but to look at an object in a specific way.³⁷ All this is at play in the present reframing of the Righteous as standard bearers of moral goodness, as examples of wider societal behavior and attitudes, as pars pro toto for entire nations.

How this process unfolds is illustrated well by the following episode from Poland. In 2017 the deputy minister of culture and national heritage, Jarosław Sellin, announced a plan to build a Museum of the Righteous of the Auschwitz Region (Muzeum Sprawiedliwych spod Auschwitz). The new museum was to be dedicated to those Polish inhabitants of Oświęcim and the surrounding villages who had aided prisoners of the Auschwitz camp during World War II. The overwhelming majority of these beneficiaries were political prisoners of Polish and other nationalities; only a few of them were Jews. The local authorities implementing the project pointed to the European Day of the Righteous, established by the European Parliament in 2012: Although it is a relatively recent holiday [. . .]—as explained on the Oświęcim district website—the varied forms by which it is commemorated in many countries show how important it is for Europeans to preserve the memory of good, selfless, decent and heroic people.³⁸ However, the International Auschwitz Council rejected the working name of the museum to avoid any confusion with the Righteous Among the Nations designation bestowed by Yad Vashem.³⁹ Consequently the institution was opened under the name Memorial Museum to the Inhabitants of the Oświęcim Region (Muzeum Pamięci Mieszkańców Ziemi Oświęcimskiej) in spring 2022.⁴⁰

What is remarkable here is not the eventual failure to make use of the concept and name of the Righteous but the explicit attempt to create a usable past repositioning and effectively marginalizing the history of the Holocaust by changing the contexts even while consciously preserving the original brand name. Even where such departures from the standard established by Yad Vashem do not occur, the case studies in this volume show how the narrative pattern of the Righteous has been implemented in different European countries. The pattern remains the same, but it is employed in diverging ways, and it is more often than not used as a tool to integrate the history and memory of the Holocaust into histories that remain predominantly national.

Composition of the Volume

The idea for this edited collection draws on the workshop Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust in European Memory, which was held in Berlin in June 2018, at the Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences.⁴¹ Co-organized by the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena and the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin, it brought together a diverse group of scholars from Europe, Israel, and the United States. Following productive and challenging discussions at the workshop, we asked some of the participants to build on their presentations and expand them into chapters. Additionally, we have invited Anna Bikont, Liliana Hentosh, Hana Kubátová, Mark Roseman, and Anika Walke to write about themes and countries not represented during the workshop. Thus this edited volume consists of ten chapters, each dealing with a different country—Belarus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine—and focusing on different aspects and manifestations of the memory of the rescue and rescuers of Jews. While the focus of most of the essays is on recent developments, these chapters also offer insights into how the treatment of the topic evolved after World War II.

Read together the chapters, authored by historians and social scientists, delve into a number of individual national case studies from diverse perspectives. They also look at the different scales on which memory operates and at how these different scales interact with each other.⁴² The volume proceeds from dealing with the interrelations between the transnational and the national and then moves down to the local and individual—though these distinctions may not always be clear cut. The first section, (Trans)National Memory? underscores the influence of global developments on national memory cultures and policies and the role of rescue stories in cultural diplomacy. It opens with a text by Ido de Haan, who examines the intertwined roots of recognizing the failure of Dutch society during the Holocaust and the nation’s pride in the rescue efforts undertaken by only a small number of citizens. Both narratives, that of shame and that of pride, coexisted with and competed against each other from the early postwar years. As argued by de Haan, the dynamic of this relationship and the evolution of the image of the rescuers in the Netherlands can be understood only by looking at the interplay between national and international memory agents. As one of the examples, the author cites the extraordinarily high numbers of Dutch Righteous Among the Nations honored by Yad Vashem and often referred to in public discourse. He claims that, far from being a reflection of historical realities, this phenomenon must be seen in the light of postwar developments, including the role played by networks of Dutch immigrants to Israel.

The chapter by Sofie Lene Bak also draws attention to how international developments influence domestic memory politics and national discourses. The author discusses the clash between the public memory of the famous Danish rescue operation from October 1943, on the one hand, and the latest historical findings on the subject on the other. During the rescue operation, nearly eight thousand Danish Jews, or 95 percent of the entire Jewish population, were transferred by sea to neutral Sweden, thereby evading the deportation to Nazi death and concentration camps. However, recent research shows that the rescue action would not have been possible if not for the specific character of the Nazi occupation of Denmark and the far-reaching collaboration of the Danish civil administration with the Germans in some areas. This modus vivendi allowed the Danes to first protect and then rescue the vast majority of Danish Jews from deportation and death with the tacit approval of the occupation authorities. Historians point also to the questionable practice of some of the fishermen, who demanded exorbitant prices for the boat transfer to Sweden. However, as discussed by Bak, this nuanced narrative, with its different shades of gray, is hardly received in Danish politics and by Danish society, even by those generally critical of their own national history. The main reason for this is that the nuanced narrative is not easily accommodated with the predominant cosmopolitan, universalized, and deterritorialized memory of the Holocaust and the Righteous, which often overlooks the local, specific circumstances and favors individual heroism and clear distinctions between good and evil.

Naum Trajanovski takes the discussion of the political tension a step further by examining how the topic of survival is played out in diplomatic relations. The author discusses the narratives of Jewish rescue in the Macedonian culture of remembrance and memory politics, and highlights the role these stories play in the relations between North Macedonia and Bulgaria. Fewer than two hundred of the more than seven thousand Macedonian Jews survived the Holocaust, most of them in Albania. Trajanovski shows how the topic was first appropriated by Macedonian and Yugoslav communists to highlight their antifascist stance and internationalism. After the establishment of the Republic of Macedonia in 1991, the stories of aid provided to the persecuted Jews were designed to reveal Macedonian heroism and suffering against the backdrop of the crimes committed by the Bulgarian occupiers. Needless to say, Bulgaria has strongly opposed this narrative, as it questions its own politics of remembrance, which celebrates the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews and places all the blame for the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria-annexed Thrace and Vardar Banate on the Germans. Trajanovski looks specifically at the Holocaust Memorial Center for the Jews of Macedonia in Skopje, opened in 2011, as a site of political and diplomatic dissent.

The second section, National Memory—Local Memory, explores what is happening at the level of national policy and in the interactions among the state and local administrations and civil society. However, as observed already by Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, today trajectories of memory on the local and national levels cannot be understood without a global frame of reference.⁴³ Sarah Gensburger’s chapter delves specifically into this triangle of local, national, and transnational memory politics and activism. She demonstrates how, after the meteoric rise of the Justes de France (Righteous of France), which peaked with their introduction to the Pantheon in 2007, French commemoration of the Righteous became in the last decade both much more widespread and more diverse and polyphonic. This diffusion of the category of the Righteous was triggered by a feedback loop among foreign institutions, such as Yad Vashem, top-down governmental politics of remembrance, and bottom-up commemorative and educational initiatives coming from both local administration and civil society. However, as Gensburger argues, in France the influence of public policy in the field of memory is restrained. Thus the state promotes certain topics but does not directly interfere in the content and form of such commemorations. This, she claims, is characteristic of a state that exercises its influence through infrastructural power rather than through despotic power and content-related memory politics.

Hana Kubátová writes about the challenges to official memory politics in a civil society influenced by right-wing agents. She examines Slovak memory politics and the public discourse about Jewish rescue, and the ways in which they are closely connected with the memory of Slovak resistance and, in particular, the Slovak National Uprising of August–October 1944. Kubátová also notes the influence of transnational developments on local policymakers. She describes how, on the eve of Slovakia’s accession to the European Union, the country’s political representatives expressed regret for the role played by the Slovak State in persecuting the Jews and confirmed their commitment to commemorating and educating about the Holocaust. At the same time, the story of the uprising and the help delivered to Jews by its supporters and participants served to mitigate the negative image evoked by such public apologies. It also served to boost Slovak national self-esteem and helped to unite society around an example of courage and resistance against fascism. However, this narrative was undermined by national conservative parties and organizations striving to rehabilitate the Slovak State and to present Jozef Tiso as a savior of Jews. The comparison of this case with the French example seems to suggest that in Slovakia—as in Poland and some other, mostly Eastern and Central European countries—official memory politics has a much more centralized and content-related character than in France and most other Western European countries, which makes divergent interpretations less visible.

The chapter by Liliana Hentosh traces the often ambiguous process of transforming helpers into national heroes. The author analyzes recent discussions in Ukraine surrounding the religious and national leadership of the former Greek Catholic archbishop of Lviv, Andrei Sheptytsky, and the role he played in rescuing Jews and at the same time supporting Ukrainian cooperation with the Third Reich during the German occupation. While in Soviet times Sheptytsky was portrayed as a Nazi collaborator, after 1991 he was made into a national hero and praiseworthy supporter of the Ukrainian national cause. However, it is only in recent years that his aid for Jews gained broader recognition in Ukraine. This shift must be seen against the backdrop of Ukrainian aspirations to join the European Union and NATO. Several actors, among them Ukrainian politicians, Jewish survivors who believed they owed their lives to Sheptytsky, and representatives of the Jewish community in Ukraine, have advocated for his recognition as Righteous Among the Nations. However, until now Yad Vashem has rejected their recommendation.

The Belarussian case, examined by Anika Walke, stands in stark contrast to the other national case studies. While most chapters in this volume describe different ways rescuers and rescue stories were appropriated by national policymakers, in Belarus the opposite seems to be the case—the few civil society actors seeking to commemorate this aspect of wartime history have met with total disinterest on the part of the state. Such policy stands in a long Soviet tradition of not recognizing the specificity of the Nazi genocidal policy toward the Jews and their fate during the occupation. In addition, Soviet state-sponsored antisemitism after World War II, life behind the Iron Curtain, and the rupture of diplomatic relations between the USSR and Israel in 1967 hindered the official recognition of Belorussian Righteous Among the Nations. Only in the 1990s did the remaining survivors—in cooperation with historians and memory activists—begin to document the rescue stories in Belarus. They were driven not only by the urge to inscribe Belarus in the global discourse about the Holocaust but also by a desire to honor their benefactors. These efforts, supported by Yad Vashem and other international organizations, ran against official memory policies. Belorussian state authorities, generally not interested in commemorating the Holocaust, were also afraid that dealing with the history of Jewish rescue could reveal other, less favorable aspects of the stance of Belorussian society under German occupation and so undermine the central narrative of the Great Patriotic War as a unified antifascist front of all Soviet nations.

The last section in this volume, Individual Memory—Public Remembrance, focuses on the interconnectedness between public remembering and personal testimonies, and foremost on how the former influences and alters the latter. Anna Maria Droumpouki examines changing oral history testimonies of Greek Holocaust survivors against the backdrop of official Greek politics of memory. As described by the author, in recent years Greek policymakers have discovered the stories of Jewish rescue as a tool of cultural diplomacy and an argument to refute allegations of Greek society’s indifference, profiteering, and participation in the genocide. Comparing oral history accounts given at different times by Greek Holocaust survivors living in Greece and North America, Droumpouki shows how individual accounts are altered and adjusted to the official interpretation of the past. She argues that such embellished narratives serve to uphold the image of good relations between the two communities, and also between Greece and Israel, and to confirm the sense of rootedness of the Greek Jews in the majority society.

While Droumpouki’s article analyzes the changing testimonies of Holocaust survivors, Anna Bikont and Mark Roseman underscore that accounts given by rescuers were also subject to constant reworking. Anna Bikont studies the story of Irena Sendler, a social worker from Warsaw. During the war, together with her mostly female colleagues from the Warsaw city council’s welfare department, and in collaboration with the Polish Council to Aid Jews (Żegota), Sendler rescued numerous Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. After 1945 her wartime activity, like that of others who helped persecuted Jews, was not a matter of public interest. However, after the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbors in Poland in 2000, Sendler was rediscovered and turned into a heroine, the mother of the Children of the Holocaust.⁴⁴ This shift was part of a backlash to the scholarly and public debate over Polish implication in the Holocaust, triggered by publication of Neighbors. Sendler’s deeds were to serve as a synecdoche for the stance of the entire nation. Bikont meticulously reconstructs Sendler’s biography, uncovering how it was turned into a myth and how Sendler herself largely contributed to this mythmaking process. The author describes how Sendler altered and enriched her personal accounts to better fit public expectations.

Mark Roseman problematizes the memory of the Righteous in Germany by examining postwar private and group narratives of the helpers in the Bund—Gemeinschaft für sozialistisches Leben (The league—Community for socialist life). During the Nazi era and World War II, members of the Bund, a leftist self-study circle formed in the Ruhr area in the 1920s, aided Jews and other people persecuted by the regime by helping them to leave Germany, providing them with shelter and false papers and later also by sending parcels to transit and concentration camps. Roseman discusses how the group narrated, and on various occasions rewrote, its experience after the war. While the basic facts remained intact, what changed was the overall interpretation of the group’s actions and the motivations they ascribed to their deeds. Confronting these postwar versions with earlier testimonials, the author argues that the shifts in the narrative were mainly due to the changing political situation in West Germany and the changing attitude of West German society toward the recent past. He also draws attention to the role of Yad Vashem in creating an image of the Righteous as selfless, lone individuals, acting out of an inner moral drive, which often overlooks many important aspects of the rescue stories, including the role of social networks and personal acquaintances. This image also impacts how the war experience has been retrospectively narrated by the helpers and the aid-receivers.

While the essays collected in this volume vary in the lens adopted by the authors, they all raise questions about the interplay of the local, national and transnational, social and governmental, Jewish and non-Jewish agents and initiatives, and their roles in creating (useful) national rescue narratives. They also show how individual testimonies of Holocaust survivors and their helpers can shape public discourse and vice versa. When read together, all the case studies assembled here provide new insights into what has emerged as one of the most important and most visible trends in recent Holocaust memory. As shown in the following chapters, in many countries this has become a rescue turn in its nautical sense indeed: a maneuver to change direction of a ship. Here, the meaning is a change of narrative direction by bringing (back) the tropes of rescuing the Jews and individual or collective righteousness into the center of Holocaust commemoration. The many ways this recalibration is underway across Europe highlights the importance of looking closely at those changes and their contexts.

We would like to thank the Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin, the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, and the German Resistance Memorial Center for hosting and co-organizing the workshop, Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust in European Memory. Zofia Wóycicka cowrote this introduction and completed her work on this volume thanks to the grant of the National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki, NCN) OPUS22, Help Delivered to Jews during World War II and Transnational Memory in the Making (grant no. 2021/43/B/HS2/01596). The Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin, the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, the German Historical Institute Warsaw, and the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida financed the editorial work on this volume, including the copyediting of the manuscripts and the translation of two chapters. We also owe gratitude to the copyeditor, Nicolas Hodge, and the two translators, Jasper Tilbury (translating from Polish) and Asia Fruman (translating from Ukrainian), for their tremendous job. Last but not least, our thanks to the two anonymous reviewers, whose feedback was very important in improving the texts.

Notes

1 See The Yad Vashem—Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority Law 5713/1953, Yad Vashem, https://www.yadvashem.org/about/yad-vashem-law.html, accessed January 30, 2022.

2 Boaz Cohen, Holocaust Survivors and Early Israeli Holocaust Research and Commemoration: A Reappraisal, in How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives, ed. Martin L. Davies and Claus-Christian W. Szejnman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 139–48; Kobi Kabalek, The Commemoration before the Commemoration: Yad Vashem and the Righteous Among the Nations, 1945–1963, Yad Vashem Studies 39, no. 2 (2011): 169–211.

3 The Righteous Among the Nations—About the Program, Yad Vashem, https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/about-the-program.html, accessed January 30, 2022.

4 See testimony for the Jewish tailor Shmul Leib Sznajderman submitted by Regina Sznajderman Tauber, in the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, Yad Vashem, https://yvng.yadvashem.org/index.html?language=en&s_id=&s_lastName=Sznajderman&s_firstName=&s_place=Belzyce&s_dateOfBirth=&cluster=true, accessed January 30, 2022. He was married to Leah Sznajderman, née Fersztaman.

5 Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute, hereafter AŻIH), CKŻP, Wydział Opieki Społecznej, 303/VIII, 223.

6 Yad Vashem Archives (hereafter YVA), M.31.2/4231.

7 AŻIH, 303/VIII, 223.

8 AŻIH, 303/VIII, 223. For the broader context see Alicja Podbielska, ‘That’s for Hiding Jews!’ Post-Liberation Violence against Holocaust Rescuers in Poland, 1944–1948. SIMON. Shoah: Interventions, Methods, Documentation 6, no. 2 (2019): 110–121.

9 One of the first scholars to describe this phenomenon was Sarah Gensburger. See Sarah Gensburger, La diffusion transnationale de la catégorie de ‘Juste Parmi les Nations.’ (Re)penser l’articulation entre diffusion des droits de l’homme et globalisation de la mémoire, Revue internationale de politique comparée 22, no. 4 (2015); Sarah Gensburger, National Policy, Global Memory: The Commemoration of the Righteous from Jerusalem to Paris, 1942–2007 (New York: Berghahn, 2016), 105–36. See also Alicja Podbielska, Toruńskie Yad Vashem, Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały 16 (2020), 874–883; Zofia Wóycicka, A Global Label and Its Local Appropriations: Representations of the Righteous Among the Nations in Contemporary European Museums, Memory Studies 15, no. 1 (2022).

10 On how the movie triggered the commemoration of the assistance given to Jews during World War II, among others, in Great Britain and Germany, see Erin Bell, ‘Britain’s Secret Schindler’: The Impact of Schindler’s List on British Media Perceptions of Civilian Heroes, in A Companion to Steven Spielberg, ed. Nigel Morris (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2017); Kobi Kabalek, The Rescue of Jews and the Memory of Nazism in Germany, from the Third Reich to the Present (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2013), 309–13.

11 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), Stockholm Declaration: The Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, January 27–29, 2000, https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/about-us/stockholm-declaration, accessed January 2, 2022.

12 On this, see also Gensburger, La diffusion transnationale; Gensburger, National Policy, Global Memory; Wóycicka, A Global Label and Its Local Appropriations.

13 Gensburger, La diffusion transnationale, 542–43; Gensburger, National Policy, Global Memory, 106–8; Dariusz Libionka, Polskie piśmiennictwo na temat zorganizowanej i indywidualnej pomocy Żydom (1945–2008), Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały 17, no. 4 (2008): 65–76.

14 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Sovereignty Transformed: A Sociology of Human Rights, British Journal of Sociology 57, no. 4 (2006): 669–70.

15 Hilene Flanzbaum, Introduction: The Americanization of the Holocaust, in The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 5–15.

16 Flanzbaum, Introduction, 7–8, Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 239–63.

17 Jan Eckel and Claudia Moisel, Einleitung, in Universalisierung des Holocaust? Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik in internationaler Perspektive. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus 24, ed. Jan Eckel and Claudia Moisel (Göttingen: Wallenstein Verlag, 2008), 18. (All translations by the authors.)

18 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, "Memory