by Mallory Bubar
On behalf of the BAHS, I would first and foremost like to congratulate Magdalena Waligórska on winning this year’s Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History article prize for her work “Remembering the Holocaust on the fault lines of East and West-European memorial cultures: the new memorial complex in Trastsianets, Belarus.” Her reflections on Belarus’s recent memorial at Trastsianets to the Jewish victims massacred there provides an insightful perspective into the creation of more recent Holocaust memorials and the socio-political influences at play in order to make them a reality. Waligórska, herself a scholar with both Polish and Belarusian roots, and currently an assistant professor of Eastern European History and Culture at the University of Bremen, works from a perspective that has the ability to cross the “fault line” of European memory that she discusses in her article. I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Waligórska last month to discuss not only her recent article, but also her start in the field, future projects, and insight into the current state of Holocaust memorialization.
How did you start working in the field of Holocaust Studies?
My work on Holocaust memory has in a sense been unavoidable. I was born and raised as part of the third generation in post-World War II Poland, where a sense of void left by the Holocaust is permanently palpable. It was, however, during my university studies in Krakow, where I lived in the Jewish district Kazimierz, in a house overlooking a Jewish cemetery, that I was directly confronted both with this sense of a haunted place and different, often controversial, ways that Poles were dealing with Jewish heritage around them. The subject then found its way into my 2013 book Klezmer’s Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany, as I tackled the topic of coming to terms with a difficult past through the medium of music.
How did you get interested in Holocaust commemoration in Belarus?
My explorations of Holocaust memory in Belarus started by utter coincidence, as I was asked by the Bremen city authorities to join a municipal delegation to the 2014 ceremony of placing a foundational stone for a Holocaust memorial in Trastsianets. Bremen Jews were deported to Minsk ghetto and murdered in the vicinity of Trastsianets and therefore the city participated in the fundraising to cover the costs of the memorial. Going to Minsk together with some of my students, as part of an official delegation, gave me an insight into the “backstage” of German-Belarusian memorial negotiations.
What is particularly interesting about Holocaust memory in Belarus?
I find Belarus’s engagement with Holocaust memorialization to be a unique one, as it sits on a fault line of eastern and western European modes of remembrance. Soviet templates of remembering the Second World War as a heroic victory clash here with the attempts to open up for the “western” European, victim-focused discourses. Western templates of memory—both aesthetic and discursive—thus make their way into the memorial landscape in Belarus, as Western European actors, particularly Germans, engage into these projects. Imported formats, however, are not always the best, as they might be incompatible with the local sensibilities and the particular needs.
Holocaust memory in Belarus also has a very unique grassroots quality. Many assume that in the post-Soviet space Holocaust was just erased from public memory, silenced or subsumed into the suffering of “Soviet civilians.” And yet, as I have found on my trips to the country, the collective memory of what happened to the Jews is actually quite vivid and vibrant, and the grassroots and local memory sites show the quality of a fresh wound. I interview many residents in the smaller towns, who were bystanders during the Holocaust, and their pain is often very evident, as many of them were only children at the time of the atrocities. Interestingly, it is often these older members of society, who have felt the urge to commemorate the Jewish heritage nearly lost to time and fuel the grassroots movements at the local level – often as it is less dangerous for them to take action.
Why is Holocaust commemoration so politically charged in Belarus today?
For grassroots initiatives, campaigning for a victim-focused memory of the Second World War is also a way to remember the civilian victims of the Stalinist terror—who are still forgotten in the state-level commemoration. At the same time, for the state authorities, suffering from international sanctions, Holocaust memorialization is an important window of opportunity to open a conversation with the West. Given the political significance of Holocaust memory in Belarus today and the tension between the grassroots and state-level endeavours, the question of how to mourn the Jewish victims in Belarus remains a difficult one.
What is your next research project in the field?
My future work will remain in the realm of memory. In my next project, together with two Belarusian colleagues, I will investigate the erasure of Jewish spaces in the Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian borderland in the post-1945 period. We will continue interviewing the local activists and witnesses in a few former shtetls to record both the process of the “overwriting” of Jewish spaces and the recent rediscovery of Jewish heritage.
As Waligórska’s work shows, even though Holocaust memorialization is expanding to new physical spaces – and attempts are being made to capture the histories we thought lost – the question of “how” remains very much alive.
The British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies 