Like many of us, I have been heartbroken to see the news, images and footage coming out of Ukraine over the past week. Despite the foreboding news over the past weeks, I didn’t believe it would come to this; now that it has, it’s hard to imagine how we (Ukraine, Russia, the world) move forward from this. My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine and to the people of Russia, millions of whom are now stuck in the midst of a conflict that they did not want and certainly did not vote for. Families on both sides of the border will lose loved ones because of a conflict that no one, save for a very small group of people surrounding Putin, wanted. While I am very cognizant of my privilege of being able to write this from the comfort of my safe home in Duluth, Minnesota, the violence in Ukraine is particularly painful for me because of my personal connections to this country.

Three of my grandparents were born in Ukraine. My Jewish maternal grandfather was born in Artemovsk (present-day Bakhmut), a city within the Donbass region which lies close to the border of the current separatist regions of Donestk and Donbass. His parents spoke Yiddish but, growing up in Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg), my grandfather would recall his mother proudly saying “we are from the Donbass.” My maternal great-uncle perished during World War II when the Nazis attacked Borispyl airport, the same airport that is now under attack by Russian forces. My Jewish paternal grandmother was born in Kiev. Over a dozen of her relatives perished in Babii Yar during the Holocaust; she and her parents survived because they were evacuated to Kuibyshev (present-day Samara) in the nick of time. My paternal grandfather was born in Kiev and lived there through the Second World War. His parents came from Glukhov (current day Hlukhiv), a town in north-eastern Ukraine on the border with Russia; they were ethnically Ukrainian. My grandfather grew up speaking Russian at home but attending a Ukrainian language school. He lost his father during the Second World War; he has never learned the full story of how his father perished nor where he is buried. He met my grandmother at the Kiev Civil Engineering University and they later moved to Moscow where he pursued graduate study. They spent summers in Kiev and my grandfather’s greatest passion was to go fishing in the beautiful Dnieper river which snakes though the gorgeous Ukrainian capital. When my grandmother was pregnant, she decided to return to Kiev to give birth to her son, my father, so that she could be close to her parents. Thus, my father had Jewish and Ukrainian background; he grew up in Moscow but spent his summers in Kiev, a city he adored.

My family’s story is not unique. In fact, it is typical of millions of other stories of Russian, Ukrainian and Jewish families across the twentieth century. These family stories are marked by suffering, loss, and displacement. At the same time, they demonstrate the resilience of hybrid identities; family members spoke different languages, ascribed to different belief systems, and saw themselves as belonging to multiple communities. In some ways, these stories are iconically Soviet.

The events of the past week have made me think a great deal about these hybrid identities and their untenability in the 21^st century. Over the past decade, President Putin and his propaganda machine have worked very hard to construct their own (false) historical narrative, using terms that are familiar to the population and grossly mis-applying them. Putin has capitalized on a historical fact, the alliance of some Ukrainian nationalist groups with the Nazis during World War II, to claim (ridiculously) that the current democratic Ukrainian state (led by a President of Jewish background no less) is somehow a Nazi polity. Putin has used some elements of shared culture, history, and religion between Russians and Ukrainians to claim that Ukrainians have no right to their own nation-state, going so far as to claim that Lenin “invented” modern Ukraine in 1917.

Furthermore, he has used the history of a very real genocide of Jews during the Holocaust to claim that contemporary Ukraine has been perpetrating a genocide against Russian-speakers residing in Ukraine. To be clear, while Ukraine has pursued language policy encouraging the use of the Ukrainian language, there is absolutely no reason to claim that Russian speakers in Ukraine have been subject to a genocide. In fact, as we are seeing on our TV screens, most Ukrainians have been defiant in rejecting Russia’s incursion and Putin’s ludicrous claims of defending Ukraine from a “fascist” regime. Listening to this quasi-historical rhetoric often feels like living in a world of funhouse mirrors. You are able to recognize some of the elements but everything is distorted beyond recognition and, in some cases, these justifications are used to argue for something that is very opposite of what they refer to. A case in point is Putin, a dictatorial leader who has amended the laws in Russia so that he can continue to rule indefinitely and has repeatedly used state resources to attack and imprison his critics, arguing that he is fighting Nazism by attacking the democratically elected government of Ukraine. Yet, Putin’s misuse of historical narratives is rather clever. For those who are not paying too close attention, terms like Nazis or genocide evoke strong associations and emotional responses. 

For people like my grandfather, now 93, and millions of others who have relatives, loved ones, and friends on both sides of the Russian/Ukrainian border, the events of the past week have been particularly painful. The world of hybrid identities, of multiculturalism, of bi and trilingualism in Eastern Europe is being dealt a final death blow. It is worthwhile pointing out that this is particularly the case for Jewish families whose roots span the map of Eastern Europe, through present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, and whose family histories do not conform to strict geographical or cultural borders. There is no doubt that Hitler dealt the heaviest blow to the diversity and multi-culturalism of Eastern Europe. Today, Putin, who claims to be fighting against fascism, seems to be continuing Hitler’s campaign.

Natalie Belsky is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Her areas of specialization are Soviet history, Soviet Jewry, the Second World War, and the Holocaust and population displacement. Her current book manuscript examines civilian evacuation in the Soviet Union during the Second World War.

“Our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought Nazism together. Starting a war to satisfy the geopolitical ambitions of the leaders of the Russian Federation, driven by fanciful and dubious historical considerations, is nothing but betraying their memory.”
— Appeal By Russian Researchers And Scientists

A month ago, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, our colleague Catherine Guisan published on the CHGS blog a far-sighted article titled Why the Shutting Down of Russia’s Memorials Should Matter to Us. Prof. Guisan condemns the banning of two Russian NGOs in December 2021 that documented human rights abuses during the Soviet era, advocated for reparations to survivors, and defended human right victims in conflict zones, in and around modern Russia.

Today we watch in consternation the assault on the people of Ukraine and its outrageous justification by the Russian leadership (to “denazify Ukraine” and respond to “genocide” in the Donbas region). In the midst of uncertainty, we are reminded of our urgent mission to uphold truth, facts, and education. We see once and again that deliberate attempts to obliterate remembrance and convince people to disregard or misremember past violence are the prelude for further deadly violence. When lies about the past become a tool of state propaganda and a tactic of oppression, it is an unmistakable sign that that state is engulfed in violence. Czech author Milan Kundera, who witnessed the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, knew well what he was referring to when he wrote his famous line, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” 

Today, and every day, the Center stands for truth and justice, and we stand arm in arm with the Ukrainian people and their loved ones around the world. 

Our friends at the Ukrainian American Community Center in Minneapolis have information about ways to help Ukrainian relief efforts.

“There’s a swastika in the bathroom,” says a high school senior casually as he walks into my classroom at the beginning of the seventh period; “it’s carved into the toilet paper dispenser.” After the class begins working on the day’s lesson, I walk down to the bathroom and snap a photo with my phone camera. Hardly the first, this is just the latest in a rash of swastika graffiti drawn and carved in the boys’ bathrooms at the small school where I teach high school social studies in rural south-central Wisconsin. As a community, we are struggling to understand why swastikas keep appearing in the bathrooms, and, more importantly, we are struggling to respond to this hate speech.

Why do swastikas keep appearing in the boys’ bathrooms?

In a reflection activity that I conducted in my classroom regarding this latest incident of swastika hate graffiti, many students suggested that the swastikas are being drawn by kids who are either “just trying to be funny” or simply “do not understand what a swastika means.” 

Although most students want to minimize or dismiss the hate speech as juvenile pranks, one sophomore, in response to a reflection prompt asking why swastikas keep appearing in the boys’ bathrooms, wrote: “I think that there are more Jewish students in the school than we know about and they are drawing them.” This statement, suggesting that Jewish students are drawing and carving swastikas, is not simply an innocent misunderstanding; rather, it is part of a set of antisemitic myths that also claim that Jews caused the Holocaust. A recent study found that such beliefs are growing and are held by one in ten Americans under forty. This statement also reflects the pervasive and stubborn antisemitic beliefs of the predominantly white, working-class community in which the school is located.

Similar to the students, many of my colleagues minimize the repeated appearance of hate graffiti, dismiss the idea of punitive measures if the culprits of the swastika carvings were to be identified, and, instead, talk about the need for more education, specifically Holocaust education. “This is a learning opportunity,” they insist. I’m not sure that I agree that Holocaust education alone offers a solution. 

Holocaust Education

Despite having only a small number of Jewish families and teachers in the community, Holocaust education is a widely respected mainstay of the curricula and educational experience in the middle school and high school.

By the time they are high school seniors, my students have likely studied the Holocaust seven times across their mandatory middle and secondary Social Studies and English Language Arts classes: 5th-grade Social Studies; 6th-grade English; 8th-grade Social Studies and English; 10th-grade Social Studies and English; and 11th-grade Social Studies. By their junior year of high school, most have read Number the Stars, The Diary of Anne Frank, Letters from Rifka, The Book Thief, and Night. Most have traveled to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. or the Illinois Holocaust Museum and heard survivors or survivor-descendants speak. 

Indeed, a recent study conducted by Claims Conference revealed that Wisconsin Millennials and Gen Zers (current high school students are part of Gen Z) scored highest in Holocaust awareness in the United States. My students are no exception; they display a basic understanding of the Holocaust. 

While my students have studied the Holocaust, especially the murder of European Jewry at Auschwitz-Birkenau, multiple times over their educational careers, I have found that they rarely learn about European or Nazi antisemitism (and even less about American antisemitism) in the years leading up to the Holocaust. Indeed, in preparation for a unit on the Holocaust in my tenth-grade World History course, many students still do not understand why the Nazis and their collaborators targeted and murdered the Jews of Germany and Europe. “I don’t understand; why did the Nazis hate the Jews?” is a common question. Many students struggle even to recognize or define the term “antisemitism.” 

While the lack of understanding of antisemitism certainly suggests a need to evaluate the scope and sequence and, especially, the content of Holocaust education in the school, I am not convinced that even the best Holocaust education can adequately address the antisemitic hate speech that keeps appearing in the boys’ bathrooms. 

A Culture of White Supremacy

While the swastika graffiti in the boys’ bathrooms is a disturbing sign of an increase in antisemitism across the country and around the globe, such hate speech is also part of a larger culture of white supremacy, which is being allowed to flourish within the school and the community during the 2021-2022 school year. Indeed, experts remind us that antisemitism is the canary in the coalmine of hatred, and images from Charlottesville in 2017 and the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol show the clear linkages between antisemitism and other forms of hate and white supremacy. 

Replacing the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) hats that kids commonly wore during the last school year, white students in the school routinely wear and display “Blue Live Matter” and “Thin Blue Line” sweatshirts and decals. Students who are part of the small but growing number of students of color report that anti-Black and anti-immigrant hate speech goes largely unchallenged in the hallways and classrooms by students and teachers. Unlike in years past, white students’ use of the n-word goes largely unchecked in the current environment. Homophobic and transphobic hate speech is similarly unchallenged and, in some instances, even tacitly or openly endorsed by teachers.

In the past, when troubling instances of antisemitism from neighboring school districts in southern Wisconsin surfaced on social media, there was widespread outrage that teachers, administrators, and community members had failed to address such hate speech. Although, given recent shifts in national rhetoric over the past year, teachers and administrators now live in fear that efforts to combat antisemitic and white supremacist hate speech are increasingly likely to draw attention and condemnation as attempts to indoctrinate students with critical race theory. As a teacher, I fear that my efforts to draw attention to hate speech will result in public backlash. Similar fears have likely caused many teachers and administrators to remain quiet and hate speech to go largely unchecked. 

As of yet, there has been no formal communication from the school about the repeated appearances of the swastikas to students, staff, or the larger community. As I suspect is the case in many schools across Wisconsin and the country in the 2021-2022 school year, the swastika graffiti is quickly painted over and vandalized toilet paper dispensers are quietly replaced. 

While calls for “more Holocaust education” remain a popular solution to the growing antisemitic hate speech in schools, as a Holocaust and genocide educator and researcher, I am beginning to wonder about the limits of Holocaust education when confronting and educating students about the broader culture of white supremacy remains largely off-limits. I am, however, confident of one thing: with little response to the swastikas that appeared in the boys’ bathrooms this week, there are sure to be more drawn or carved next week. 

George Dalbo is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Instruction and Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota and a former Research Assistant at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. George’s research broadly centers on how the Holocaust, genocide, mass violence, and human rights are taught in K-12 classrooms. George is also a full-time high school social studies teacher in rural south-central Wisconsin. In his 16th year of teaching, George has taught every grade from 5th-12th in public, charter, and private schools in Minnesota and Wisconsin and two years in Vienna, Austria.

On January 27th, Professor Jelena Subotić delivered the Center’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day Lecture, titled “Yellow Star, Red Star: The Appropriation of Holocaust Memory in Post-Communist Eastern Europe.” Watch a recording of the lecture here. I had the opportunity to interview Professor Subotić on her 2019 book on this same topic, how it fits into broader remembrance contexts and debates, and her upcoming book project.

Jelena Subotić is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University. Her most recent book, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism was published by Cornell University Press in 2019 and translated into Serbian in 2021. Her first book, Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans, published by Cornell University Press in 2009, has been translated and published in Serbia in 2010. She is also the author of more than 30 scholarly articles on, among other topics, memory politics, transitional justice, and politics of the Balkans.

How has your research been received within the region of Eastern Europe? Have there been any positive or negative reactions?

East Europe is just as polarized politically as other regions and this polarization influences how scholarly works are perceived. My book is no exception – depending on what political perspective the reader has, the book was perceived either positively or negatively. There are groups in Serbia, for example, that are very sensitive to any criticism of Serbia’s remembrance practices, and they probably found the book to be too critical. There are other groups, many affiliated with new research centers on the Holocaust, that have been incredibly supportive and complimentary. I have given a number of lectures – some in person, some virtually – in the region since the book came out, and especially since it was published in Serbia in 2021.

How might your thesis in Yellow Star, Red Star on Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe be situated within broader contexts regarding memory politics and cosmopolitan memory? For example, how might European Holocaust remembrance compare to the ways that post-colonial countries frame their memories of colonial crimes?

The relationship between Holocaust remembrance and colonial remembrance is very important and has historically not been sufficiently studied. This is changing, however, with scholars taking a closer look at how one influences the other. The work by Dirk Moses, for example, very explicitly argues that what keeps Germany from more comprehensively dealing with the memory of its colonial crimes is its Holocaust memory, which is not supposed to be compared to anything that came before or after. But, histories of colonialism and reluctance to acknowledge colonial crimes or provide any restitution for colonial violence is related to reluctance to deal with collaboration and complicity in the Holocaust in the West, for example in France. There is a firmly established national narrative that claims that because France (or the Netherlands, or Belgium) resisted the Nazis, a nation so virtuous should not be accused of mass crimes, such as crimes of colonialism.

How does anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, related to memory politics of the Holocaust, fit with strong diplomatic ties to Israel for countries like Poland?

The relationship between antisemitism against the local Jewish population and foreign policy towards Israel has become almost completely decoupled, not just in Eastern Europe and Poland, but also elsewhere. Part of the reason for this is the politics of Israel itself, as Israel has increasingly cared more about how other countries support it in international organizations (such as the United Nations, for example) and whether they support its domestic policies or policies regarding the Palestinians, than how diaspora Jews are being treated. In other words, Israel cares much more about Israel and Israeli Jews than about diaspora Jews. It may issue complaints or stern warnings about an antisemitic incident here and there, but it is much more important if Poland continues to support Israel’s foreign policy at the UN. This is not necessarily a new issue as the tension between Jews in what was then colonial Palestine and diaspora Jews predates even the formation of the state of Israel. For countries like Poland, Hungary, and others, where there is clearly existing antisemitism, and even official antisemitism from the countries’ leaders, constantly pointing to the “friendly relations with Israel” serves to inoculate the country from criticism about antisemitism. In a sense, this state of affairs serves the political needs of both Israel and these countries, while it leaves local Jews very vulnerable.

At the end of Yellow Star, Red Star you call for “memory solidarity” across identity groups of Eastern Europe. Could you please share a bit more about what this more inclusive, alternative memory of the Holocaust might look like? Is there an Eastern European alternative to the “Western cosmopolitan memory” of the Holocaust which can account for local complicity but also non-Jewish suffering during World War II?

Memory solidarity is an idea, an aspiration, and I build here on the previous work on memory solidarity by Michael Rothberg. The idea is to have space in our memories – at the individual but also at the societal level – for the memories of others, and to make memories of other groups also important. This call for memory solidarity is a result of the observation that so much of political memory is memory of our own suffering, and that memory does not leave space for memory of the suffering of others. As I discuss at length in the book in the case of Lithuania, so much of Lithuanian political memory is the memory of Soviet occupation and deportations of Lithuanian citizens to Siberia. But that memory – however legitimate and important – is so overwhelming that it does not leave space for memory of the suffering of Lithuanian Jews, who were almost all murdered in Lithuania before the Soviet occupation. Memory of both should co-exist, even if the majority population is drawn to remembering only their own suffering.

Are you aware of any activism or other efforts to perform such memory solidarity in Eastern Europe? Are there any lessons activists or practitioners might take from your research?

Yes, there are a number of local groups that are trying to bridge this divide. In Lithuania, for example, there were civic groups of ethnic Lithuanians who wanted to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust and organized marches in small towns and villages in the Lithuanian countryside from where Jews were taken to be shot. These kinds of actions point to the possibility of memory solidarity – where one group remembers the suffering of the other and pays respect and memorializes it in a way that is inclusive.

In your talk, you mentioned a project you are working on now related to looted Holocaust art in Europe. Could you please tell us a bit more about that or any other upcoming projects for you?

I am working on a new book project that will be the history of international art restitution. Specifically, I will look at how restitution of art looted during the Holocaust has changed since WWII, with new understanding of art provenance and new norms about return to owners. I will then explore how these changing norms about art restitution are influencing current debates about return of art looted during colonialism.

Nikoleta Sremac is a PhD Student in Sociology and a Research Assistant at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. She studies gender, social movements, and collective memory of mass violence. Her dissertation focuses on gendered memory politics and activism related to the 1990s Yugoslav Wars in Serbia.

Tibisay is a PhD candidate in the History Department. She was born and raised in the city of Barcelona, Spain, and obtained her BA in History from the University of Barcelona (UB). During her bachelor’s degree she had the opportunity to spend a semester abroad in Mannheim, Germany, where after noticing how differently modern history was taught in Germany as opposed to Spain, she started to become interested in the ways in which past events of mass violence are remembered and taught in different countries. 

Tibisay moved to the United States in 2017, and after completing a MA degree in Anthropology and Archaeology from Rutgers University (New Jersey), she moved to Minnesota where she is now pursuing a PhD in History with a minor in Heritage Studies and Public History. 

Tibisay’s research interests focus on the emergence and development of politics of historical memory after events of mass violence, genocide, and violations of human rights. Her dissertation explores specifically the politics of historical memory around state-managed boarding schools for orphans and children of political prisoners during the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship. The generalized abuse that took place in some of these boarding schools is not well-known by most Spaniards, and she is interested in analyzing the different avenues of transmission of historical memory that the victims have had to communicate their experiences. 

In the Spring semester of 2022, she is working as an RA for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and collaborating with the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, while she prepares to conduct a year of archival research in Spain during the fall and spring semesters of 2022-2023. 

On January 17, 2022, the book The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan was published in a worldwide media campaign. In it, a self-proclaimed “Cold Case Team” identifies a new prime suspect in the alleged betrayal of Anne Frank and her seven housemates of the Secret Annex. Very soon after initial news reports faithfully reported on the team’s findings, a strong backlash arose from historians and others criticizing the study and its firm conclusion, based on empirical, epistemological, and moral grounds. To understand both the book’s findings and the criticism of them, it is necessary to outline the unique circumstances of this book and its research.

The “Cold Case Team” documented in the book was created in 2017 at the initiative of Dutch film and television producer Thijs Bayens. He gathered an international group of investigators led by former FBI agent Vince Pankoke to make another attempt to clarify the circumstances surrounding the arrest on August 4, 1944 of Anne Frank and the other people in hiding. The Frank and Van Pels families and dentist Fritz Pfeffer had been in hiding for over two years at the time of their arrest, and there were some indications that an informant had been responsible. On the morning in question, the police were informed of the people in hiding in the Amsterdam building via an anonymous phone call. A few burglaries, of which Anne writes in her diary, may also have led to the secret of the hideout getting out. A third possible source of betrayal lies in the intimate network built up to aid the people in hiding. But an unfortunate coincidence could not be ruled out either. Two police investigations, in 1946-48 and 1963-64, two biographies of Anne Frank and the 2003 book Who Betrayed Anne Frank? by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom did not establish a conclusive informant. It was clear from the start of the new book The Betrayal of Anne Frank that the Cold Case Team found the irresolute outcome of the earlier investigations “unsatisfactory,” which may have led to an over-desire to identify a prime suspect with great certainty.

While the author of The Betrayal of Anne Frank, Rosemary Sullivan, was not actually involved in the Cold Case Team’s research it serves as the basis for her book. As such, it is on this basis that historians should judge the research findings. The book takes the form of a loosely written report on the research process and its results. The investigators “Vince,” “Thijs,” and “Monique” are the main characters in this book. The book follows their investigative process in chronological order, but at the same time seems to be structured towards the revelation of the prime suspect. For example, the main piece of evidence, an anonymous note with a name on it, is only presented in the later chapters when in fact it logically must have been known about at a much earlier stage of the investigation. The desire for a dramatic book structure may have influenced its design, at the expense of faithfully following the research trajectory.

In the book and in the press release, after ticking off a series of “suspects,” the team determines the Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh to be the most likely informant, based on a triad of possessing the right 1) knowledge, 2) motive, and 3) opportunity to commit the betrayal. At that point, the reader is surprised because the team has brushed aside many other suspects due to inconclusive evidence. But with even less “evidence,” the notary was suddenly put forward as the prime suspect. In fact, the only evidence is the anonymous note with a name and address that Otto Frank seems to have received in 1945, but of which only a copy, retyped by himself much later, has survived. The rest of the argument is based on speculation and, above all, on the cessation of further investigation into the many remaining open ends.

To keep it short: There is no evidence that Van den Bergh knew about the Secret Annex. He, therefore, had no knowledge. Surprisingly, the team did not investigate whether the notary himself and his wife went into hiding. It now appears that they did, in the village of Laren. The notary, therefore, had no motive to reveal the hidden housemates of the Secret Annex. Due to the special circumstances of the phone call that fateful morning, the team claims the informant must have had some high-level connections to the German police or high-ranking officials. Van den Bergh had no special connections whatsoever. He was a member of the Jewish Council, but that did not give him privileged access to the officer who had been notified of the hideout. The notary therefore also missed something that you could reasonably call an opportunity.

Soon after the publication of the book, a storm of criticism arose. The historians Bart Wallet, Laurien Vastenhout, and Bart van der Boom, journalist Natasha Gerson, and Ruben Vis, the general secretary of the Dutch Israelite Church Association, were among the first to offer substantive criticism. The critics provided more biographical insights and other information that was widely available but not consulted by the research team. Partly via social media, many of the team’s findings were undermined within two days.

However, criticism also extended beyond the problematic empirical findings. Three weeks later, this additional criticism seems to focus on the following points:

1. The research team lacked a broader historical perspective, first and foremost with regard to the Jewish context during the war and in post-war Netherlands.
2. Partly due to the set-up and ambition of the investigation to reveal a prime suspect, the team suffered from a narrow “tunnel vision.”
3. The team was too focused on garnering media attention from the outset, partly due to the need to generate funds, which may have influenced their findings.
4. The prime suspect concerns a Jewish notary and a member of the Jewish Council. To what extent does this result depend on the reproduction of outdated stereotypes of the Jewish Council? In particular, experts have now falsified the assumption that the Council maintained a list with addresses of Jewish hiding places (Der Spiegel, January 25, 2022).

There is thus every indication that the investigation documented in The Betrayal of Anne Frank is far from definitive. A project in which financing and secrecy are more important than knowledge production is highly questionable. It is also problematic that in this project, the narrow question of “betrayal” is made central instead of a wider understanding of human figurations in times of genocidal violence. Just one day after the great media spectacle, the Dutch satirical website De Speld headlined: “New Research: Nazis probably responsible for Anne Frank’s death.”

Remco Ensel (Radboud University Nijmegen) has written in the field of Holocuast Studies, antisemitism and memory studies. He recently published Anne Frank on the Postwar Dutch Stage. Performance, Memory, Affect (Routledge, 2022).

Before I visited Laos, I knew little about the country and its history. My sister had recommended I go for its natural beauty and laid-back tourist atmosphere. While visiting the capital city, Vientiane, I passed by a few humble buildings, tucked away from the roadside: the COPE Center. Intrigued, I paid a visit.

The COPE Center provides prosthetic limbs and rehabilitation programs for people maimed (and the families of those killed) by UXOs (unexploded ordinances). The Visitor Center presents material about the bombing campaigns that were waged against Laos, as well as Cambodia and Vietnam, during what Americans call “the Vietnam War.” Estimates are around twice as many bombs were dropped on those countries between 1955 and 1975 than were dropped during all of World War II. The Visitor Center also presents current efforts to clear UXOs in Laos.

Decades after the bombs fell, their effects remain devastating. After being dropped from planes, large bombshells were set to open mid-air, releasing dozens of smaller cluster bombs (about the size of softballs), known as “bombies”. At the Center, I learned that today, both the larger bombs and their smaller bombies lay unexploded in 87,000 square kilometers of Laos, or about one-third of the country. Only forty square kilometers can be cleared of UXOs each year.

The Center displays some of the prosthetics it provides to maimed survivors of UXOs. Prosthetics for missing hands are designed to help someone complete a particular task, including separate extensions with a toothbrush or a spoon for example. These basic prosthetics are far simpler than the advanced, sometimes robotic, ones attainable by citizens in advanced industrialized nations.

The Center also presents pictures and videos of the individuals it serves. It upset me to hear stories of farmers and their families affected by UXOs, living in simple rural huts. These families now needed to both care for an injured family member and continue to farm manually.

Laos is a developing country. Much of it is rural, with some areas cultivated as farmland. Many farmers merely subsist and feel compelled to further develop nearby land to survive. Poverty, then, drives Laotian farmers into developing uncleared (or contaminated) areas. Also because of poverty, people who find such UXOs might try to retrieve and take the bombs themselves (rather than calling on disposal teams) to sell the shells. The value of the shells can be far more than what a farmer typically makes in weeks. Finally, unexploded bombies can be found by children who may not understand what they are, who might want to play with them, and who might not tell their parents what they have found for fear of having to give up their new treasure.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have visited the COPE Center. USAID is one of the Center’s several funders. But a horrific lesson I took from the Center is that it exists because of everyday, avoidable tragedies that the Center can only address after the fact. Indiscriminate bombing campaigns left behind bombs ready to detonate, and the countries which dropped those bombs seem to feel only limited responsibility to remove those UXOs.

The COPE Visitor Center demonstrates the organization’s efforts to help Laotian victims of bombs dropped decades ago that still lie in wait. Instead of presenting righteous anger toward those whose attacks are still maiming and killing Laotians today, the Center’s simple slogan is “helping people move on.”

Individuals maimed (and their families) can need life-long assistance. To donate to COPE, visit: http://copelaos.org/donate/.

Kurt Borchard is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska Kearney. He was a participant in the 2019 CHGS summer workshop for teachers. He teaches an undergraduate course on the Holocaust and has written extensively on cultural studies and homelessness.

For anyone caring about ending mass violence, memorialization, reparations, and the role of civil society in democratization, the closing down of Russia’s Memorial International and its sister organization the Memorial Human Rights Center by the Russian Supreme Court in late December 2021 is cause for mourning. These are concerns, which the University of Minnesota’s Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center has promoted unstintingly.

Since 1989, the two Russian NGOs have accumulated impressive archives documenting human rights abuses during the Soviet era, advocated for reparations to survivors, and defended human right svictims in conflict zones, in and around modern Russia, as well as the rights of minorities such as LGBTQ Russians.[1] Having played a major part in the ongoing efforts to democratize Russia, they have vowed to fight the closing down of their activities in court and to pursue their work. So far, their homepages are being updated regularly and accept gifts from overseas.[2] The US media covered the news; and petitions of protest are circulating.[3] But rumors of a pending Russian invasion of Ukraine soon distracted minds.[4]

As talk of war between Ukraine and Russia reach a higher pitch, and NATO and the US exchange threats with the Putin regime, it seems counterintuitive to recommend more contact between Russian and Western civil societies rather than less. And yet, history and memory should guide us. Here are two examples.

In the post-Stalin years from 1955 to the early 1990s, Soviet, American and European scientists collaborated to propose actionable plans on arm control and nuclear disarmament, which made a difference to the senior leaders’ negotiations at the height of the Cold War.[5] Meanwhile Fulbright exchanges of US, Soviet and Russian scholars and students have continued for over 60 years. Although it is impossible to assess the program’s causal impact quantitively, one of the first Soviet Fulbright scholars was Aleksandr Yakovlev who spent a year at Columbia University in 1959, and attended George Kennan’s lectures. Over time he changed from a young Stalinist into a promoter of democratization, and he became the closest adviser to the Soviet Union’s reforming Secretary-General Gorbachev’s on glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s. He devoted the last years of his life to the Rehabilitation Commission, which helped publish archives of the Soviet years of terror and extermination. By 2005, when Yakovlev died, 43 books had come out. “Clearing the names of tens of millions of Soviet citizens” had become his “volunteer” calling.[6]

When I addressed Russian scholars and activists at the 24^th Bathhouse Readings of the New Literary Observer in the Moscow Memorial Center in 2016,[7] I suggested that the Russian and Soviet pasts should be revisited not only to repent and repair, but also to remember a tradition of non-violent and collective self-transformation, which unfolded in the Soviet Union by fits and starts during the Kruschev-initiated Thaw (1956-1964) and the years of perestroika and glasnost (1985-1991). My audience was skeptical. Paradoxically Russian liberals and opponents of the Putin regime have forgotten these accomplishments just when Putin is working on a restoration of the cult of the Russian empire and Stalin. It is true that political, economic and judicial institutions and an effective state have failed to develop in Russia, at the cost of much suffering. This explains also why President Putin has remained in power for over 21 years: most Russians prioritize economic and political stability over human rights and civil freedoms.

Yet former US ambassador to Russia and Stanford professor Michael McFaul remembers experiencing a “euphoric moment” as a graduate student in 1991 in Moscow. The Russians “were victors as well in the Cold War and Ukrainians and Estonians and Georgians whom I knew at the time as well.”[8] Thousands of individual and collective acts facilitated the largely peaceful transition from a totalitarian regime to an emerging democracy, and Soviet Russian voters endorsed the almost-entirely non-violent disintegration of the vast Soviet empire, a first in world history, enthusiastically.[9]

It is, of course, much easier for external observers to be hopeful about the political future of Russia than for those who live under its authoritarian conditions. McFaul stresses agency beside structural factors. Even if Russians are shaped by historical legacies, cultural norms, and static institutions, “they are not trapped forever by them.” In the 1990s Russia was confronted with the unusual challenge of undergoing a triple transformation, from  “empire to nation-state, dictatorship to democracy, and command economy to capitalism.” Political science cannot predict, but McFaul thinks it more unlikely that Putinism will survive another two decades than for a new system, possibly a democratic one, to emerge.[10] Maria Zavialova, the Russian-born and trained curator of the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis-Saint Paul notes that, although the Russian system has become more repressive, “society is full of a lot of free-thinking people.”[11]

Since the 1970s, the Twin-Cities area has attracted some 50,000 people of Russian origin, half of them Jewish. The community has its media, a charter school, churches, synagogue and grocery stores. Like many other immigrants, Russian-speaking Twin Cities residents keep many connections with their home countries while observing public reserve on the US-Russian state relationships.

Sound information, however, is different from partisanship. Twin Cities businessman Todd Lefko, who is married to a Russian citizen, has chaired since 2019 the Russian-American Business & Culture Council (RABCC), which offers programs on Russian culture, but also current events, including “What’s really up between Russia and Ukraine?” in December 2021 with the participation of US, Russian and Ukrainian scholars.[12]

At the University of Minnesota, the Center for German and European Studies is sponsoring with the support of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) a research seminar in fall 2022 with senior scholars from Russia, the UK and the US, which is entitled: “Civil society in Germany, EU, and Russia and the ‘new Cold War:’ Learning from History; Planning for the Future”. A publication will follow. The scholars will examine how to think through the many manifestations of Russian civil society for democratization beside the Navalny movement, and its historical and sociological roots; and they will discuss whether Germany and the European Union should do more to support Russian civil society actors who work for democratization. They will also discuss what Western pro-democracy activists can learn from Russian civil society actors who have worked under duress for a long time, at a time when Radical-Right populism and authoritarian tendencies are growing in the European Union member states and the US. One wishes this last question would not be so relevant today.

Catherine Guisan is an independent scholar and Visiting Associate Professor affiliated with the Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Her research interests include European politics, politics of reconciliation, social movements for democratization, political theory. To read more of her work see: Un sens à l’Europe: Gagner la Paix (1950-2003), A Political Theory of Identity in European Integration: Memory and Policies, “Of Political Resurrection and ‘Lost Treasures’ in Soviet and Russian Politics.”

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)

[2] https://www.memo.ru/en-us/memorial/departments/intermemorial/news/667

[3] https://www.change.org/p/hands-off-memorial

[4] For an excellent op-ed article comparing memory in Russia and the US, see John Rash, “Echoes of Stalinist past as Russia silences its top human rights group,” Star Tribune, Saturday January 15, 2022.

[5] Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999.

[6] Masha Gessen, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, London: Granta, 2017, 143-149, 250.

[7] The US State Department’s Speaker’s bureau sponsored my lectures in five Russian academic institutions, April 2016.

[8] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/putins-russia-today-former-ambassador-michael-mcfaul-intelligence-matters/ (downloaded January 12, 2021).

[9] For more on this, see Catherine Guisan, “Of Political Resurrection and ‘Lost Treasures’ in Soviet and Russian Politics”, Europe-Asia Studies, 2018, 10 (9), 1381-1406.

[10] Michael McFaul, “Russia’s Road to Autocracy”, Journal of Democracy, October 2021, https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/russias-road-to-autocracy/ (downloaded January 15, 2022.

[11] Cited in John Rash, ibid. See also https://tmora.org/.

[12] https://rabcc.org/online-event-archive/2021/12/6/what-is-really-up-between-russia-and-ukraine (downloaded January 19, 2021).

January 27th marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the date on which the Red Army liberated Auschwitz in 1945. Although a monumental moment in the history of the Second World War, the war itself did not end in Europe until May, and globally the death and destruction continued in the Pacific theater until August of that year. This simple reminder of the war’s timeline illustrates the ways Holocaust, which did not end on January 27th with the liberation of Auschwitz, is difficult to confine to a set of dates within the larger sequence of global events. 

In the Center’s collections are photographs taken for the UNRRA by Maxine Rude. Rude, originally from southwestern Wisconsin, traveled throughout Europe while on assignment to document the plight of “Displaced Persons” (DPs) living in allied-run DP-Camps. The images include a variety of subjects, from refugees working in trades they occupied prior to the war (or newly learned at some point in the interim), to Jewish war orphans looking after other vulnerable children. One takeaway from these images, is the lack of certainty many faced for years following the war’s end. Liberation might have occurred abruptly, but normalcy and stability did not. Jewish DPs languished for years before receiving entry visas, or the ability to enter the British Mandate of Palestine. Many non-Jewish DP’s were “repatriated” nationals with newly-drawn borders in Eastern Europe, where they faced uncertain fates. As we mark this important day in the history of genocide, we remind ourselves of the provisional nature of liberation. 

These realities are apparent in David Feinberg’s (Professor Emeritus of Art) collaborative project, Voice to Vision, where survivors of genocide and mass violence created works of art using oral histories and objects of signifance as sources of inspiration. For example, Lucy Smith recalls the months she and her mother spent returning to Lublin (then the provisional capital) after the Red Army kept advancing westward. They hitched rides with soldiers in exchange for vodka, while also staving off extreme hunger. Even as the war was nearing its end, its effects were long-lasting. 

Similarly, it is important to remember that mass violence occurred for years prior to the outbreak of war, and that survivors’ paths to safety still encompassed hardship and death. In another Voice to Vision series, Margot De Wilde recounts how her family had received visas to enter the US, only to have them revoked with the United States’ entry into World War II. She, her husband, and extended family were ultimately deported to Auschwitz, resulting in what she calls “the twins that never met,” the life she might have had, had she been able to enter the US as planned. 

One final example involves the ways children and descendants of those fleeing genocide and mass violence experience the past. Whether from Lithuania, Greece, Bosnia, or Sudan, the subjects on particular series chose objects that harkened to their families’ experiences fleeing violent conflict, and how the trauma indirectly shaped them decades later on a personal level, away from collective amnesia and public commemoration alike. 

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies highlights these primary sources from its own archive and from its affiliate faculty to capture the complications of memorializing these events, and the aftermaths of which that continued to unfold for the months, and even years, to come. When teaching about these subjects, these realities should not be ignored due to their continued for groups today affected by genocide.

Meyer Weinshel is a Ph.D. candidate in Germanic studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where he is the educational outreach and special collections coordinator for the UMN Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In addition to being an instructor of German studies, he has also taught Yiddish coursework with Minneapolis-based Jewish Community Action and at the Ohio State University.

Flying the wrong flag can get you a lot of flak and usually from the wrong folk. Which is what French President Emmanuel Macron found out earlier this month when he had the flag of the European Union raised—blue with a circle of golden stars—in place of the French tricolor to mark France’s turn at the rotating EU presidency. Given the hysterical, mouth-foaming outrage of Macron’s conservative and rightwing rivals, it might as well have been the Union Jack of Boris Johnson’s Britain, France’s new-found favorite enemy.

Macron caved to the protests, and the EU flag, which was meant to make a symbolic appearance for some time, came down again after just one full day. Marine Le Pen, leader of the anti-immigrant Rassemblement National, celebrated its removal as a “great patriotic victory.” A patriotic victory for the French, really? Not if you’d ask German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine who spent half his life in Paris. He wrote in 1836 that French patriotism “warms and expands the heart so that it includes the entire civilized world.” And since he spent the other half of his life in Germany, he also had something to say about patriotism across the Rhine: “A German’s patriotism means that his heart contracts and shrinks like leather in the cold, and a German then hates everything foreign, no longer wants to become a citizen of the world, no longer a European, but only a provincial German.” No longer a European? It sounds like Macron’s adversaries are unknowingly turning into old school Germans—or new school, if you include the populist far right Alternative für Deutschland, which currently holds a sizable chunk of seats in the German parliament. Their Bundestag members are known to be the only ones to wear lapel pins with an oversized German flag. The bigger the flag, the browner the shirt, I guess.

What’s with the flag fetishism these days? You wouldn’t have known that West Germany had a flag in the 1970s because it was hardly ever used—not even during soccer games. Fast forward to 2021 and you have Germany’s head coach assure the nation that even in retirement his heart will continue “to beat in black, red and gold.” This is not just cringeworthy fatherlandish kitsch (at least in my mind) but also utter biological nonsense and even more bizarre than bleeding in red, white and blue, as patriots on this side of the Atlantic like to do.

Macron’s ill-fated attempt to publicly emphasize the supranational and European flavor of French patriotism happened at the Arc de Triomphe. This monument in the center of Paris commemorates those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Beneath the arch lies the tomb of an unknown French soldier from World War I. Therefore, members of Les Républicains, the GOP’s doppelganger in France, have called flying the EU flag an erasure of French identity and an affront to France’s heritage and veterans.

I bet those veterans would be happy to hear that their sacrifice ultimately contributed to a peaceful and united Europe. And I don’t think they would mind receiving a blue and golden thank-you note from the EU.

Henning Schroeder is a professor at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.