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Opinion and Analysis
Marek Wojnar, The Holocaust Lessons
Various examples show that this lack of sensitivity towards the Jewish issue is on the rise. For example, in September 2011, the Estonian Historical Museum organised a special exhibition devoted to a “distinguished resident” of Tallinn, prominent Nazi Alfred Rozenberg, while a year later, the Estonian magazine Eesti Express placed an advertisement for diet pills with a recommendation to use the experiences of Buchenwald prisoners. Almost at the same time, a different Estonian company, Gas Term, placed an advertisement for its services in which it used the gate at Auschwitz with its infamous sign Arbeit Macht Frei. All these events indicate a serious problem. This problem is not limited to Estonian antiSemitism (which is its result, rather than cause), but rather to a dominant historical narrative. And this narrative is based on three assumptions. First, it reveals an absolute conviction about the innocence of the Estonian nation. Second, it puts a heroic areola around the ambiguous history of the 20th division of Waffen-SS. Third, it shows an unusual (in the European or even global scale) belief that the communist regime was worse than Nazism. All those assumptions make it difficult, or even impossible, to talk about the dark chapters in Estonia’s history. This is why, unless something is changed, Estonia will remain a strange country that combines incredible economic success with serious identity problems.
Estonia, when compared to the other states in the region, is less willing to confront the dark pages of its own history.
The Holocaust in Ukraine’s internal memory As opposed to Estonia, Ukraine did not pass the “Holocaust test” mainly because this painful issue has been placed in Ukraine’s internal memory conflict. When we look at the events that took place in the second half of 1941, we clearly see that the participation of the Ukrainian people in the Holocaust was limited to the region of Eastern Galicia, the very same territory that before the Second World War was the main centre of Ukrainian nationalism and later found itself in the hands of the Red Commissioners. The threat of repressions and exile was directed at everybody: Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. And yet, in Galicia there was potential, which allowed the Germans to effectively use anti-Semitic slogans. In all probability, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, which was the main political force in the region, did not distance itself from the Nazis’ plans for a “New Europe” and set up the ground. On June 30th 1941, the “Nachtigal” Battalion, led by the future commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army Roman Shukhevych, entered Lviv as the first German unit. Soon, there was an explosion of pogroms against Jewish people. Until today,