Abstract
This introduction highlights the analytical potential of “belonging” for those studying the social processes of Jewish exclusion in the Holocaust. It does so by proposing a tripartite definition of “belonging,” one that bridges emotions, everyday practices, and generational memory. Offering a close reading of diaries, memoirs, memorial books, testimonies, trial records, oral interviews, and individual and group chronicles, articles included in this special section capture the experiences of those who have been rejected from historically multiethnic and multireligious communities and the ways in which this process took place at the time and was narrated later. By examining physical and symbolic encounters between individuals and groups, we show how those at the margins negotiated and expressed their changing place in the broader community, how they interpreted and appropriated social engineering by the regime, and how they responded to their categorization by neighbors and the authorities which ultimately marked them for murder. The advantage of this approach lies in inviting and enabling comparison, and in its relevance for individuals and groups that were either included in or excluded from the locally redrawn categories of “national communities.”
Everyone comes from somewhere and seeks to belong somewhere. Indeed, it is almost as if the self relies on the mapping out of our physical and symbolic place in a community or group. To belong seems natural, and we rarely inquire about the inbuilt meaning of the term. What is the “belonging” we hear so casually referenced not only in conversations among friends and acquaintances but also in politicians’ platforms and speeches? 1
The notion of “belonging” has become commonplace in academic debates. Scholars across the social sciences and humanities draw on the concept of belonging, applying it to matters of identity, citizenship, nationalism, and multiculturalism, to name only a few examples. 2 Within Holocaust studies, a field that bridges multiple disciplines, “belonging” has become a widely used concept as well. It encompasses a range of questions to explore, including ethnopolitical tensions in interwar and wartime Europe, the redrawing of group boundaries, the forging of male bonds, social engineering, the destruction of Jewish communities, the return of survivors after the war, and the representation and life-writing of survivors and their descendants. 3 “Belonging” is central to questions of diversity, cohesion, and coexistence. Treated as self-explanatory in many historical works, the concept has been left to geographers and scholars of nationalism to define. 4 Until now, there has been no framework to help theorize the concept during and after the Holocaust. This is all the more surprising given that in Europe of the 1930s and 1940s, the period we address, “belonging” to a community or group could determine not only the social standing and daily lives of individuals and groups but also their chances of survival.
One impetus for this special section comes from the continued social and microhistorical turn in Holocaust research, and more specifically, a shift of scholarly attention away from the history of states, political events or from scrutinizing motives and aims of the Nazi government and actions of perpetrators, to capturing the narratives of victims and investigating social processes that involved mostly overlooked “ordinary” people. While in the first postwar decades scholars often overlooked the community of survivors, the 1960s and 1970s generated new perspectives and arguments in Holocaust historiography. 5 Rather than focusing on the “activities of articulate elites,” practitioners of social history “legitimized new avenues of research and expanded the content of the modern Jewish experience.” 6 Returning to research agendas formulated by pioneering survivor scholars, this experience gradually included both Jewish voices and the decisions of “bystanders.” The latter category was first reserved for the Allies and neutrals, and later expanded to include individuals and entire societies. 7 In her recent work, Elżbieta Janicka has proposed a new category of participant bystander. 8 Turning from the privileged to the marginalized and from the few to the many has fruitful implications for assessing the role of antisemitism in the Holocaust, both as an underlying cause and a motivating factor in the persecution of others. 9
The works of Christopher Browning, Marion A. Kaplan, Jan T. Gross, Omer Bartov, and others who have followed in their footsteps raise questions about how individuals and groups understood, negotiated, and used their place within kinship and local networks in the context of institutionalized persecution, the breakdown of social norms, and communal violence during World War II and the Holocaust. 10 This said, until recently, belonging has been more of a by-product of historical inquiry than a subject of investigation. Debates on the concept of Volksgemeinschaft and its utility for the historiography of Nazi Germany offer one example. 11
In National Socialist promises of Volksgemeinschaft, the “racial community” overrode any other classification, conclude historians Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, leading to “notions of belonging that had to be biologically legitimized and performatively underpinned by acts and declarations of loyalty.” 12 Here, we see belonging closely aligned with the concept of the Volk. In the Nazi era, the meaning of Volk went beyond “people” or “nation,” and could be translated as “all the members of a race, both living and dead, as well as future generations.” 13 While emphasizing the changing variables rather than the fixed conditions, and the dynamic rather than the static processes, the focus of scholarly scrutiny was on the end result, the Volksgemeinschaft, the binary character of inclusion and exclusion, and whether a propaganda construct can serve us as an analytical tool. Among his many objections to the application of the term Volksgemeinschaft, historian Ian Kershaw asked: If not all Germans were members of it, how can the same concept capture opponents of the regime, the silenced, and above all, those excluded and forcibly ejected from the community? 14 In his 1920 speech “Why Are We Antisemites?”, Adolf Hitler explicitly excluded all national minorities, especially the Jews, reducing them to the “vermin of the Volksgemeinschaft” in the Nazi racial hierarchy. 15
The theoretically driven essays included here highlight the dynamic and multifaceted nature of belonging. In looking at emotions, attitudes, local identities, everyday practices, and life writing, the research featured in this special section captures the experiences of those who have been rejected from historically multiethnic communities and seeks to give agency to individuals and groups on the political margins.
As we demonstrate, thinking critically about “belonging” helps scholars construe how individuals and groups negotiated and expressed their place in the community; how they interpreted and appropriated social engineering by the regime; and how they responded to their categorization by the authorities and neighbors who ultimately marked them for murder. This approach invites and enables comparison, and applies to individuals and groups that were both included and excluded from the redrawn categories of “national communities.” In doing so, this special section expands on the explanatory potential of the concept of “belonging” for understanding Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
Belonging as an Emotion, Practice, and Generational Memory
The contributions included here reflect a threefold definition of “belonging.” First, it is analyzed as an emotional attachment to a place, or what the social geographer Marco Antonsich called “place-belongingness.” 16 As an emotion, sentiment, or feeling, belonging aligns with the notion of “home,” and as such is often the product of autobiographical factors, including childhood memories and experiences. Writing about her journey back to her native Kentucky, feminist scholar bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins) notes that a “true home is the place—any place—where there is constancy,” familiarity, and where an emotional sense of belonging in the community is nurtured. 17 This underscores “an inherently geographical concept” that connects emotions, memories, objects, people, and practices to a specific place. 18 That belonging cannot be separated from geography is also acknowledged by social psychologists who coined the term “place attachment” to capture the manifold yet enduring connections between an individual and their physical surroundings. 19
Of course, not every place forms a “home,” and not every interaction proves positive, which is also the case with one’s place of birth or origin. The nurturing feeling that one “belongs” to a particular place depends on another factor, alongside familiarity and constancy: relative security. Writing about nationalist claims following the end of the Cold War, political theorist Michael Ignatieff argued that belonging is not only a matter of being recognized and understood, speaking the language, and “knowing” that you form a community without having to verbalize it, but also being safe. “Where you belong is where you are safe; and where you are safe is where you belong.” 20 Ignatieff suggests that belonging is “first and foremost protection from violence.” 21
Several contributions to this special section explore the connections between belonging, home, and safety or lack thereof. Delving into the different layers that formed the idea of home for Tonia Lechtman, “a Pole, a Communist, a mother, and a Jew,” Anna Müller highlights the role played by Lechtman’s native Poland, or rather her idea of Poland, as she lived most of her life away from it. During and after the war, Poland, real or imagined, remained Lechtman’s home, “a place of safety and a place where she could build relationships based on who she was.” Similarly, Natalia Aleksiun and Karolina Szymaniak analyze what the destruction of a home representing both a physical place and space of safety and communal harmony meant for Polish-Jewish women and men. They argue that the home in Jewish wartime and early postwar autobiographical texts signifies both a nostalgic longing for the place and objects that represent belonging, and at the same time, a marker of profound losses expressed through uncanny memory.
Examining a diary account that captured a Ukrainian nationalist’s view of the extermination of the Jews in Buczacz, Omer Bartov’s essay uses personal accounts to reconstruct the inner lives of interethnic communities in Buczacz, a town inhabited by Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. He also explores how the mortal danger experienced by Jews was appropriated by Poles and Ukrainians. While Bartov focuses on reconstructing group perspectives on the personal, intimate level, Tomasz Frydel looks at the interplay between safety and communal belonging by turning to social structures in the Polish countryside at the meso-level. Examining the role of village heads, and especially their relative power to influence the actions of individuals in the Polish countryside, he suggests that “notions of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’ evolved relative to notions of ‘security’ and ‘self-preservation.’”
Both here and in Hana Kubátová and Monika Vrzgulová’s account of eastern Slovakia, the idea of home during the Holocaust is considered at the crossroads of the public and private realms. Likewise, Agnieszka Wierzcholska’s nuanced investigation of primary and secondary schooling in interwar Poland adopts this perspective. Her essay delves into dense urban contact zones that linked national and local identities.
The home’s dual role of providing private space and safety brings us to the political and social conditions of belonging. Gender scholar Nira Yuval-Davis argues that it is important to differentiate between the emotional side of belonging and what she terms the “politics of belonging.” To be a fully recognized member of a group or a community, with the same duties and rights as others, depends not only on the individual’s emotional attachment and claims to participation but also on institutions and political and administrative processes and actions. 22 The politics of belonging is expressed, writes geography scholar Tovi Fenster, in “formal structures as citizenship definitions and in their personal, intimate, private expressions in daily practices.” 23 These structures, as many scholars including John Crowley underline, go well beyond being formally awarded citizenship or a residence permit. 24 As Yuval-Davis concurs “The boundaries the politics of belonging are concerned with [. . .] sometimes physically, but always symbolically separate the world population into ‘us’ and ‘them’”. 25 In this sense, the politics of belonging is associated with notions of the “outsider,” “alien,” and “stranger,” and with the maintenance and reproduction of social and political boundaries. 26 Not surprisingly, given that politics is hegemonic and that belonging allows for multiple, if seemingly contradictory expressions, attachments, and loyalties, the first two elements of belonging often clash. 27 The contributions in this section explore belonging in connection to interwar nationalizing projects and wartime institutionalized persecution. Kubátová and Vrzgulová analyze the geographical, societal, and political dimensions of the shifting meanings assigned to “locals” in eastern Slovakia in the 1930s and 1940s. Wierzcholska’s essay delves into schools and sport clubs in Tarnów, a town in western Galicia, Poland, as they transformed from spaces of interaction and shared experience to arenas for maintaining difference between Poles, as the now “titular” nation, and “others,” meaning Jews. In contrast, Jeffrey Koerber argues that in Soviet Vitebsk of the 1930s, policies on religion and nationality shaped Jewish life and resulted in cultural capital that would prove instrumental for their survival strategies during the Holocaust. The Polish-Jewish autobiographical texts analyzed by Aleksiun and Szymaniak recall not only the loss of home, intimacy, and safety but also the irrevocable end to local belonging. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir’s article focuses on one communal act of violence in Przedbórz, Poland, namely, the killing of Holocaust survivors on the night of 26 May and the following morning, 27 May 1945. Using a biographical approach to reconstruct events, Tokarska-Bakir demonstrates the long-lasting effects of anti-Jewish violence during the war but also in its aftermath. Building on an unpublished memoir and oral history–interviews with a Jewish Red Army veteran, Shternshis argues that familiarity with the sites and the locals determined the Jewish soldier’s ability to know the fate of his family and his longing for revenge and retaliation. She also underscores the roles played in the Holocaust by former neighbors, prewar friends, and colleagues as critical to rebuilding a sense of communal belonging.
Sociologist Karl Mannheim examines how generational memory, situated at the intersection of shared experience and shared location, conditions belonging. 28 A generation, contends Mannheim, is not only an age cohort; it relies on the mobilization of past experiences and contexts. Some scholars argue that for our life stories to make sense, they must be culturally intelligible, or sharable with others. 29 Sociologist Arlene Stein argues that the need “to construct coherent, continuous biographical narratives” is typical for late modern societies in general and genocide survivors and their descendants in particular. 30 The sociologist Kaja Kaźmierka, who studied the return of Holocaust survivors to their native Poland, describes a “biographical compulsion,” a need for closure and a longing for a sense of being rooted. These essays demonstrate how generational memory is performed through self-narration. 31 Activating the past turns belonging into a communal experience. Noting the proliferation of Holocaust diaries, chronicles, and testimonies, cultural historian Amos Goldberg stresses the shared “drive to write” among Jewish authors during the Holocaust. 32 Fueled by different motivations—from documenting for the future and capturing one’s own struggle for survival to appealing to the conscience of the world—there seems to have been an “impulse of narrators to tell their stories and of writers to write their diaries.” 33 Emmanuel Ringelblum (1900–1944), the historian of the Warsaw Ghetto and organizer of the underground Oneg Shabbat archive, confirmed the compulsion to record Jewish suffering during the Holocaust: “The drive to write down one’s memoirs is powerful: Even young people in labor camps do it. The manuscripts are discovered, torn up, and their authors beaten.” 34 The 272 diaries held at the Jewish Historical Institute (in Polish: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny) and at least 100,000 survivors’ accounts collected around the world testify to a shared sense of duty and a desire for emotional release. 35
Whether a cultural construct or a psychological need, belonging entails not only feelings and practices but also the multiple ways in which individuals and groups make sense of them. This special section rests entirely on personal accounts, understood as early and late testimonies, witness statements, trial records, diaries, and letters. It is these intimate sources that allow us to explore how belonging was understood, articulated, and appropriated by individuals and groups, while events took place as well as decades later. Our framework underscores that the geographical and biographical elements of belonging matter at the personal, communal, and national levels. Herein lies the broader contribution of these essays: they demonstrate how wartime experiences and memories of the past were locally situated while drawing on and depending on their national context.
The National and the Local in Belonging
A discussion about the role of “the national” in “the local” is connected to another recent trend in Holocaust research, namely, a microhistory that focuses on cities, towns, and even neighborhoods, streets, and houses. Scholars argue that examining everyday life, rather than the national context, is better suited to analyze how diversity could turn into rejection and how rejection enabled violence. For these scholars to uncover the making of a communal genocide, to paraphrase Bartov and his understanding of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe as a shared, intimate event, one needs to engage in analysis at the personal level to see how shared places became sites of violence. 36 The ground-level view renders visible what was previously invisible, revealing otherwise hidden elements of the breakdown of local communities. 37 As historians Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann observe, “[S]hifting the level, or scale, of analysis reveals the diversity and complexity of processes by deconstructing an entire monolithic approach without limiting oneself to the borders of a particular locality of group.” 38
The essays offer further empirical evidence of the advantages of applying meso- and micro-level analysis to study the Holocaust. And yet the essays included here show why coexistence at the local level cannot be studied in opposition to national developments. Indeed, the “local/national divide” has come under scrutiny. 39 In their work on diversity, nationalism, and multiculturalism, Antonsich and other scholars, including sociologist Mette Strømsø, have observed that the “local and the urban are considered the lived and experienced scales, with the nation relegated to an abstract—not experienced—imaginary.” 40 Antonsich sees the roots of this divide in the 1990s, when concepts of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism were introduced as a much-needed alternative to nationalism. Moving away from the nation-state and to the local scale, “the city—conceptualized as the main site of these everyday encounters—has been narrated in opposition to the nation: celebrated as dynamic, inclusive, heterogenous, and empowering the former, dismissed as static, exclusive, homogeneous and constraining the latter.” 41
One might argue that this observation does not fully apply to the examination of diverse societies in the past, including the history of the Holocaust, since many of the works referenced here focus on precisely how coexistence was under threat at the local level before the genocide. 42 Recently, however, a number of studies on the Holocaust have attempted to challenge national narratives, proposing, as in the case of historian Ola Hnatiuk, to describe relationships “not from the perspective of ethnic communities, but from individual points of view.” 43 Yet these works have inadvertently avoided discussing thorny questions of national collaboration and complicity, as is the case with Hnatiuk’s portrayal of Lviv during World War II. Scholars have also increasingly criticized the tripartite division of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, problematizing national identities that are often implied by these categories. 44 We also see growing calls for “an integrative and integrated history” of the Holocaust, which raises questions about how to reconcile the local (or personal and intimate) experience with the national framework. 45 For a number of years, “integrated” and “holistic” have become buzzwords for approaches in historical research, that seek to bridge the divide beween the papertrails of perpetrators, the voices of victims, and the choices of bystanders, while engaging in locally situated analyses that remain mindful of the macro-context. These approaches offer new avenues for writing an integrated history of the Holocaust. 46
As the articles included here show, physical and symbolic encounters between individuals and groups bound the local and the national, majority and minority perspectives, and societal and political structures. Historically coded as the “meeting of opposites,” encounters refer to meetings and connections that “also make (a) difference.” 47 Encounters of “us” versus “them” did not begin in the 1930s but had their roots in the rise of nineteenth-century nationalism and the ways the intelligentsia imagined their respective national communities, and transformed societies into ethno-religious clusters. The brutality of World War I, and especially the bloodshed of World War II and the ideology of exclusive nationalism, caused individuals and groups, quoting from Bartov’s essay, to see “the same world and each other through different eyes.” Much of what people felt and experienced, and how they would explain the past, was determined by their ethnicity, or the ethnicity that was ascribed to them.
The authors in this special section analyze encounters to show how connections across class, social and economic position, ethnicity, and religion were mobilized by the authorities and local elites to produce a sense of commonality (togetherness), difference and rejection. 48 In her essay, Tokarska-Bakir examines just a few hours in one place, while Diana Dumitru and Müller look at the life stories of an individual in different periods and localities. Shternshis’s lens of inquiry is that of the soldiers’ hometowns. In works by Bartov and Koerber, the focus is on a single town, and in essays by Wylegała, Frydel, Kubátová and Vrzgulová, and Wierzcholska, on particular counties and districts.
Biographical Research and the Role of Personal Accounts
Alongside our threefold framework of belonging and the micro- or meso-perspectives of inquiry, the source base used in these essays binds this section together. It is worth remembering that biographical research has long been the historian’s “unloved stepchild, occasionally but grudgingly let in the door, more often shut outside with the riffraff.” 49 Only in the 1980s did biography, by then well-established in social research and migration studies, fully make its way into historiography. Despite the eventual “boom” of biographical research, culminating in Ian Kershaw’s two-volume examination of Adolf Hitler, 50 many historians of World War II remain skeptical of biographical approaches, even more so when they involve the inarticulate masses.
The same can be said about the use of the “highly personalized source base” on which biographies necessarily rely: testimonies, letters, witness reports, and other personal accounts that authors included in this special section all utilize. 51
Scholars have raised two main objections to using personal accounts in historical research, pointing to their inherent subjectivity and bias. Unlike institutional sources, diaries and testimonies are purported to offer particular and single-sided accounts of events while the context in which they were produced allegedly diminishes their reliability. The distrust for ego-documents is especially striking when considering that material collected during the war by Ringelblum and his collaborators, as well as research published by pioneering historians, many of them survivors themselves, relied on biographical accounts. Memorial (yizkor) books published by Jewish witnesses and survivors from Eastern Europe brought together collections of biographies of individuals who shaped their communities and personal accounts of daily experiences during the war. Despite the availability of these and other Jewish narratives, it was only following Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland that historians increasingly came to appreciate the value of ego-documents when exploring the Holocaust and its aftermath. 52 Still, some concerns remain, and we wish to conclude this introduction by addressing them.
In this section, many of the examined personal accounts, written down and recorded by Jews but also by Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, and others, were compiled in gruesome conditions, and with an understanding that death was near. Reading them carefully and having the broader context in mind, we see that their content reflected diverse experiences of belonging for groups and communities. While Jewish diarists, for instance, often focused on the destruction of their own families and communities, diaries written by Poles and Ukrainians offer us a glimpse into the moods and attitudes of majority societies. Although many testify to emotional detachment from the suffering and sorrow of their neighbors, they present a rare opportunity to decode how the locals internalized the policies and propaganda of both the state and occupation authorities.
Personal accounts represent subjective experience. Diaries, memorial books, testimonies, and individual and group chronicles were often motivated by emotions, a sense of duty, desire for future justice, as well as the search for meaning. The purpose and intent behind these accounts differed, of course. For instance, testimonies in the postwar trials that Tokarska-Bakir cites in her essay were compiled for legal reasons. Tonia Lechtman’s letters, which Müller reads, are personal, and memorial books utilized throughout the section were written primarily in Yiddish and thus by definition remain closed to a more general audience. The autobiographical texts analyzed by Aleksiun and Szymaniak were addressed to the Jewish community, future historians, and the world at large. Different personal narratives were often designed for different audiences, as Shternshis points out about one of her interviewees: “He wrote the memoir as a legacy for his children and gave the interviews as the public version of his story, his contribution to an under-studied topic of history.” A number of essays, including those by Dumitru, Kubátová and Vrzgulová, Wylegała, and Wierzcholska, rely on late witness testimonies collected by museums and foundations decades after the events in question. Unlike early accounts and diaries, these late witness testimonies included predetermined questions and were collected to be shared with others. Notably, Wylegała’s essay provides us with a methodological approach that helps to delineate the multiple narratives within late testimonies.
In his essay, which serves as a continuation of Anatomy of a Genocide, 53 a book that can be read as both an intimate family memoir and a universal account of destruction, Bartov reminds us that it is “essential to listen to all protagonists[...] because that enables us to gain a richer, three-dimensional picture of events that are seen radically differently by particular groups and individuals.” The passage of time, external circumstances, knowledge, education, and post-Holocaust commemorative tropes and symbols are perceived as undermining the credibility and analytical utility of late witness testimonies. Historians, including Henry Greenspan, Christopher Browning, and Jan Grabowski, and political scientists such as Evgeny Finkel have challenged assumptions of a deteriorating survivors’ memory over time. 54 Psychologists such as Nancy L. Stein, Sven-Ake Christianson, and Daniel Schacter, who have studied the effects of emotions on memory, claim that “emotional events are remembered accurately because of their personal relevance to the subject.” 55 With respect to late witness testimonies, Dumitru observes in her essay for this special section, “biographical text bears the marks of time, society, and culture in which it is articulated, written, and read.” She also reminds us that these accounts are often tailored to fit the larger narratives of groups, the moment, and the surroundings.
All in all, we argue, is not the perceived subjectivity or objectivity of sources. Neither is it about which protagonists and groups one trusts over others. Müller’s essay offers an example of the approach advanced here, by combining organizational and institutional accounts with intimate family correspondence. She sees the variety of sources as powerful evidence of the subjective nature of all historical documentation. Still, all the sources give us insights into a life and reality from a certain angle.
For anyone tracing the decline and destruction of communal belonging in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and beyond, the way forward is to listen to protagonists while reading sources against each other. Our special section shows that theoretically driven research that integrates a variety of personal sources offers new insights into the crisis of communal belonging in the region before the war, and its destruction in the Holocaust and the violence that followed. Likewise, this special section demonstrates how communal belonging has since been recalled, studied, commemorated, and mythologized.
