The erasure of a people
Gaps in Lithuanian Holocaust memory
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21748032 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Audre Jarmas (0009-0004-6845-8402, Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2025-03-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1556-9187 • E-ISSN: 1742-3341 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/aps.1896 |
| OpenAlex | W4404821616 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 24 |
This paper examines a 1950 essay published by my immigrant father in the Lithuanian‐language press in the U.S. By focusing exclusively on the brutal Soviet occupation during WWII, his piece erases Lithuanian Jews and the Holocaust. Lithuanians' “chosen trauma”, using Vamik Volkan's term, lasted 5 decades and remains the cataclysmic event in their historical accounting. Caught between Stalin and Hitler, however, Lithuania was also a site of the Holocaust by bullets, where many Lithuanians assisted Nazis in murdering over 90% of the country's approximately 200,000 Jews. Afterwards, Lithuanians clung to an idealized Lithuania, characterized by victimhood, washed clean of collaboration in nationwide massacres, and largely erased of the memory of its once‐thriving Jewry. As a psychoanalyst born to postwar Lithuanian immigrants, I discovered this essay while researching the intergenerational impact of that whitewashing. Its dramatic language reflects the mindset of the Lithuanian American community in which I was raised. Without any reference to either Jewish Lithuanians or the Holocaust, the piece creates an alternate reality that conjures a shadow tragedy precisely by what is not said. Whether through deliberate obfuscation or dissociative mechanisms, a collective failure to grapple honestly with culpability may have left Lithuania suspended between an unsustainable illusion of innocent victimhood and an enactment of unconscious guilt. Global threats of authoritarianism and antisemitism underscore a need to grasp how unprocessed shame and guilt can fuel resurgent fears, prejudices and the repetition of atrocity. Granular exploration of the kind of thinking represented in the essay offers an opportunity
Antisemitism · Collective memory · Criminology · Culpability · Judaism · Lithuanian · Nazi concentration camps · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Holocaust · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies · Psychology
The Origins of the Final Solution
The Evolving Self
The Implicated Subject
The two‐person unconscious
The Other Within
Mystery, Recognition, and Revitalization
Large-group identity, international relations and psychoanalysis
Yellow Star, Red Star
Bloodlands
“Containing the Uncontainable”
Black Earth
Suicide in the World
The Holocaust in the Soviet Union
Postmemory as historical reckoning
Partners in Thought
| Highly cited | No |
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