Collaboration And Resistance During The Holocaust

THIS will be more a meditation than a review: a meditation on killing. There are nineteen essays by nineteen different hands in this large book, the product of a conference held at Södertörn University College and Uppsala University in April 2002. There is also a substantial introduction. Six of the essays are in German; the remainder are in English. Most are considered. Only one seems to this reviewer so passionately patriotic as to be obfuscatory: readers (who are not Latvian) will still feel themselves unsure as to the extent of Latvian participation in the murder of Latvian Jewry. There is no doubt at all about Lithuanian involvement: it was, in a phrase, passionately patriotic. In the three Baltic countries, though not in present-day Belarus, there was provocation for a patriotic response. In Latvia it is emblematised by the so-called ‘Shustin List’, a memorandum from Semën Shustin, the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic's People's Commissar for State Security. Compiled on or around 26 June 1941, it comprises a list of 78 names of prisoners arrested between 23 and 25 June, and bears the statement: ‘In view of the social danger, all are to be shot’. On the reverse of the document is a note stating that 62 had been handed over for execution. In all three countries, the recent Soviet regime was almost universally detested, by Jews as well as others, apart from a handful of young Jews who, like some young Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians, were themselves communists. The Soviet authorities deported hundreds of thousands there, just as they were doing in that part of Poland which they had occupied since September 1939. In all instances, Jews were among the deportees. In the final days of June 1941 before the Germans arrived, the Soviet authorities also killed as well as deported, the Secret Police killing their prisoners when they retreated. Indeed, the volume of killing taking place in the last days of June and the first days of July was prodigious. As one essayist points out: ‘the killing of the Jews was embedded in a broader canvas of death, which, particularly in Ukraine and Lithuania, included thousands of Gentile unfortunates of various categories’. He tells us who they were: ‘real or alleged Communists killed by anti-Soviet partisans or simply by vengeful neighbours’; ‘political prisoners and other “suspect” elements murdered by Stalinist forces’; ‘unlucky peasants and priests randomly gunned down by the retreating Red Army’; ‘civilians and even anti-Soviet partisans shot by nervous German troops’

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