The erasure of a people: Gaps in Lithuanian Holocaust memory

Abstract

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.