Our Dialogues in Holocaust Education series continues with a fascinating discussion with Prof. Dr Anika Walke about her research into the Holocaust in Belorussia. Dr Walke, Associate Professor of History; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies; and of Global Studies at Washington University in St Louis, has researched and written extensively on the experience of first-generation Soviet Jews during the Holocaust.
In this blog we briefly explore Dr Walke’s research and discuss how it might be valuable to teachers seeking to address three misconceptions that students have when learning about the Holocaust.
1) Pre-war life for Jews across Europe was all the same
The discussion began with a look at who the Jews in Belorussia were and what their lives were like prior to the Holocaust. Many students’ encounters with pre-war Jewish life is limited or focussed primarily on those Jews who lived in western Europe before the Holocaust, generating the assumption, in my classroom at least, that pre-war life for Jews was the same across Europe. Dr Walke gave a tour d’horizon of the diversity of Jewish life across the European continent, encouraging us to understand that there was no single experience. In the Soviet territories Jews were experiencing a period of profound change with the advent of the USSR in 1922 and the end to the restrictions that had been imposed by the Tsarist regime such as the Pale of Settlement and the curtailment of religious traditions and customs. The removal of these impositions results in the 1920s and 1930s being a period of the possibility of equal participation in secular life and a fairly vibrant Jewish cultural life in terms of publication houses, theatres, Yiddish language being promoted and the involvement of many Jews in social, economic and political life than before. On the other hand, the process of secularisation implemented by the Soviet authorities was not welcomed by everyone, particularly older Jews who had perhaps been brought up in more religious households. What this leaves us with is a Soviet Jewry that is both distinct from Jews who lived in western Europe and not an homogenous group themselves with differences between generations, urban and rural communities and Jews from the Baltic States experiencing changes differently from other in Belorussia, for example.
2) All Jews experienced the Holocaust in the same way
Many students see the experience of victims of the Holocaust through the lens of German Jews. Dr Walke expertly informed us that Jews in Soviet territories such as Belorussia experienced it in a very different way. In contrast to the decade long process of discrimination and persecution that German Jews experienced prior to the imposition of systematic violence and murder, Soviet Jews in places like Belorussia were subject to genocidal actions almost immediately after the Nazi invasion in June 1941. The wave of killing by Einsatzgruppen and destruction of communities occurred incredibly quickly in comparison to that experienced by German Jews and this has implications for how Belorussian Jews responded. For example, in Minsk, home to around 80,000 Jews at the time of its capture by the Nazis in late June 1941, a ghetto was established within a month and roundups of Jews and mass murder of Jews similarly began in August. Therefore, unlike in Germany, the process of coming under Nazi rule, being stigmatised for being ‘the other’ and being the target for massive violence occurred incredibly quickly for Jews in Belorussia. Similarly, the ghettos themselves were unlike the longer lasting entities that students may come across when they study places like the Warsaw Ghetto. Often, small town ghettos were just one building, a school building for instance, surrounded by a barbed wire
fence rather than the more permanent walls of the Warsaw Ghetto. This lack of permanence of ghettos in places like Belorussia hints at the fact that mass murder was always thought about from the earliest days of Nazi occupation. This was borne out by the fact that most Jewish victims of Nazi mass murder were killed, by shooting, between the summer of 1941 and the summer of 1942. The Jews in these territories were killed very soon after the start of the Nazi invasion of the USSR and they were mostly killed very close to where they lived. Again, this is in contrast to the conception that many students have that all Jews murdered during the Holocaust were deported to be killed in the gas chambers of places like Auschwitz-Birkenau later in the war.
3) Jewish responses to the Holocaust were uniform
It’s often the case in my classroom that students are unsure of how the Jews responded to the genocidal actions of the Nazis. Frequently, students believe that the Jews, as a whole did nothing or, at the other end of the scale have picked up something of a Hollywood-style view of armed resistance along the lines of Daniel Craig in the film Defiance. Dr Walke was able to point to a much more nuanced picture of responses to the genocide that Soviet Jews faced. First of all, there were underground groups, primarily consisting of young Jews many of whom who had been members of the Communist Party, Komsomol, trade unions or, prior to the secularisation drive of Jewish political organisations. These groups, once they realised what the Nazis had planned for the Jewish people, began to think what they could do in response. For instance, in the Minsk ghetto, members of these groups began to think about escape from the ghettos, about joining of partisan groups, about undertaking acts of sabotage, about evacuating Jewish children. Others sought to hide, some thought to rescue – Dr Walke told us that there were 800 Righteous Amongst the Nations from Belarus. Nonetheless, Dr Walke set these within the context of the fact that given the speed and complete militarisation of the occupation the vast majority of Belorussian Jews had very little chance of survival.
The discussion continued with Dr Walke offering fascinating insights into reactions of local, non-Jewish people to what they saw going on around them, with some collaborating, some being victims of Nazi violence themselves and many acting as bystanders. Dr Walke also touched on how the Holocaust is remembered in current day Belarus, with the current regime keen to rewrite the history of World War Two and focus on the genocide of the Belorussian people, which clearly marginalises or ignores the fact that the vast majority of victims were Jews.
Dr Walke very generously encouraged any teachers who wanted to explore elements of the discussion further to contact her. Details of her research and contact information can be found on her Washington University-St. Louis website profile page.
