from Part II - Geography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2025
Focusing particularly on Poland and Ukraine, with less detailed considerations of other parts of eastern Europe, this chapter examines the politicization of Holocaust memory in the post-Cold War period. An attempt to forge a new, postcommunist identity in eastern Europe also entailed an evasion of wartime reality. The all too real suffering of Poles or Ukrainians during the Second World War was conflated with, or even substituted for, the extermination of east European Jews. The tragic reality that collaboration was commonplace among non-Jewish Poles or Ukrainians was denied. Even more strikingly, Poland and Ukraine tried to use the power of the state to craft a new, revisionist mythology about the past in which Poles and Ukrainians were rescuers, Jews were largely absent (or even blamed for their own murder), and only Germans did anything bad. This revisionism was part of a revived nationalism that sought to ground new, postcommunist, often authoritarian regimes in a comforting mythic history.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge-org.demo.remotlog.com is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.