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The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses
Silence has many shame, embarrassment, ignorance, a desire to protect. The silence that has surrounded the atrocities committed against the Jewish population of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during World War II is particularly remarkable given the scholarly and popular interest in the war. It, too, has many causes―of which antisemitism, the most striking, is only one. When, on July 10, 1941, in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, local residents enflamed by Nazi propaganda murdered the entire Jewish population of Jedwabne, Poland, the ferocity of the attack horrified their fellow Poles. The denial of Polish involvement in the massacre lasted for decades.
Since its founding, the journal Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History has led the way in exploring the East European and Soviet experience of the Holocaust. This volume combines revised articles from the journal and previously unpublished pieces to highlight the complex interactions of prejudice, power, and publicity. It offers a probing examination of the complicity of local populations in the mass murder of Jews perpetrated in areas such as Poland, Ukraine, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina and analyzes Soviet responses to the Holocaust.
Based on Soviet commission reports, news media, and other archives, the contributors examine the factors that led certain local residents to participate in the extermination of their Jewish neighbors; the interaction of Nazi occupation regimes with various sectors of the local population; the ambiguities of Soviet press coverage, which at times reported and at times suppressed information about persecution specifically directed at the Jews; the extraordinary Soviet efforts to document and prosecute Nazi crimes and the way in which the Soviet state’s agenda informed that effort; and the lingering effects of silence about the true impact of the Holocaust on public memory and state responses.
Since its founding, the journal Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History has led the way in exploring the East European and Soviet experience of the Holocaust. This volume combines revised articles from the journal and previously unpublished pieces to highlight the complex interactions of prejudice, power, and publicity. It offers a probing examination of the complicity of local populations in the mass murder of Jews perpetrated in areas such as Poland, Ukraine, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina and analyzes Soviet responses to the Holocaust.
Based on Soviet commission reports, news media, and other archives, the contributors examine the factors that led certain local residents to participate in the extermination of their Jewish neighbors; the interaction of Nazi occupation regimes with various sectors of the local population; the ambiguities of Soviet press coverage, which at times reported and at times suppressed information about persecution specifically directed at the Jews; the extraordinary Soviet efforts to document and prosecute Nazi crimes and the way in which the Soviet state’s agenda informed that effort; and the lingering effects of silence about the true impact of the Holocaust on public memory and state responses.
265 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
About the author
Michael David-Fox
14 books2 followersA historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union, Michael David-Fox is professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
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July 1, 2026
Nine scholars open a border zone that war atlases once skipped, and the ground gives up its bodies in patterns instead of single graves. David-Fox frames the puzzle plainly. Soviet history kept the war at arm's length for decades, treating it as a disruption to the real plot of collectivization and the five year plans, so the genocide that unfolded across that same territory got filed under someone else's archive.
Marci Shore takes Jedwabne as her opening grave site. Polish neighbors burned a barn full of Jews in July of 1941 while German cameras rolled from a polite distance, and six decades later a letter from Montevideo cracked the official story wide open. A murder doubled, victims and killers drawn from the same small population, and Shore traces how the word żydokomuna turned grief into accusation, blaming Jewish neighbors for the Soviet occupation that preceded the German one.
The debate over coercion becomes its own genre of evasion, a string of softened verbs auditioning for the role of "ordered." Poland looks peripheral on a map and central on a body count, and Jedwabne stands in for a whole continent's appetite for scapegoats with familiar faces.
Solonari crosses the border south to Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, where Romanian troops returned home instead of invading, and home turf made for crueler welcomes. Locals here required less German encouragement and supplied their own venom, peer pressure and plunder doing what ideology did elsewhere. Solonari holds two occupations side by side until the differences squeal under pressure. A family feud with rifles.
Berkhoff, Asher, Sorokina, Amar, and Dumitru turn from the killing fields to the filing cabinets of the state that claimed to have liberated everyone equally. Soviet wartime reporting tracked atrocity in numbing detail while scrubbing the Jewish particularity from the casualty count, every murdered Jew reclassified as a generic Soviet citizen, friendship of peoples extending posthumously and with maximum convenience.
Sorokina's Extraordinary Commission produced volumes of testimony edited for political comfort before historians ever got near them, and Amar names the resulting condition an anti site of memory, a place where quiet carries its own kind of speech. Dumitru's postwar trial records show prosecutors building cases that name everything except the specifically Jewish victim, justice rendered in a deliberately blurred font.
Gitelman closes the volume by asking why Jewish studies so often hands the Holocaust off to history departments and looks away, a disciplinary modesty that costs the field its own catastrophe.
Micro history, he argues, exposes what statistics smooth over, neighbor by neighbor, barn by barn, ledger by ledger.
The collection fills its subtitle twice, once for the killers next door and once for the state that buried their motives under bureaucratic euphemism.
Anyone tracking how antisemitism survives translation, from prewar slur to wartime alibi to postwar archival evasion, finds the receipts here, dated, filed, and finally read aloud.
When mamdanistan officials use antisemitism as a vote booster, and when Boston's William Diamond Middle School Principal Johnny Cole said he was “sorry” for the impact a Holocaust lesson had on muslim students: “Some of you felt unseen. Some of you felt like your own history, your identity, or your community was left out or erased. Some of you left that session feeling less safe, not more,” — a book like this is very very timely and holds a historical mirror to current bigotry and contemporary hypocrisy.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Marci Shore takes Jedwabne as her opening grave site. Polish neighbors burned a barn full of Jews in July of 1941 while German cameras rolled from a polite distance, and six decades later a letter from Montevideo cracked the official story wide open. A murder doubled, victims and killers drawn from the same small population, and Shore traces how the word żydokomuna turned grief into accusation, blaming Jewish neighbors for the Soviet occupation that preceded the German one.
The debate over coercion becomes its own genre of evasion, a string of softened verbs auditioning for the role of "ordered." Poland looks peripheral on a map and central on a body count, and Jedwabne stands in for a whole continent's appetite for scapegoats with familiar faces.
Solonari crosses the border south to Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, where Romanian troops returned home instead of invading, and home turf made for crueler welcomes. Locals here required less German encouragement and supplied their own venom, peer pressure and plunder doing what ideology did elsewhere. Solonari holds two occupations side by side until the differences squeal under pressure. A family feud with rifles.
Berkhoff, Asher, Sorokina, Amar, and Dumitru turn from the killing fields to the filing cabinets of the state that claimed to have liberated everyone equally. Soviet wartime reporting tracked atrocity in numbing detail while scrubbing the Jewish particularity from the casualty count, every murdered Jew reclassified as a generic Soviet citizen, friendship of peoples extending posthumously and with maximum convenience.
Sorokina's Extraordinary Commission produced volumes of testimony edited for political comfort before historians ever got near them, and Amar names the resulting condition an anti site of memory, a place where quiet carries its own kind of speech. Dumitru's postwar trial records show prosecutors building cases that name everything except the specifically Jewish victim, justice rendered in a deliberately blurred font.
Gitelman closes the volume by asking why Jewish studies so often hands the Holocaust off to history departments and looks away, a disciplinary modesty that costs the field its own catastrophe.
Micro history, he argues, exposes what statistics smooth over, neighbor by neighbor, barn by barn, ledger by ledger.
The collection fills its subtitle twice, once for the killers next door and once for the state that buried their motives under bureaucratic euphemism.
Anyone tracking how antisemitism survives translation, from prewar slur to wartime alibi to postwar archival evasion, finds the receipts here, dated, filed, and finally read aloud.
When mamdanistan officials use antisemitism as a vote booster, and when Boston's William Diamond Middle School Principal Johnny Cole said he was “sorry” for the impact a Holocaust lesson had on muslim students: “Some of you felt unseen. Some of you felt like your own history, your identity, or your community was left out or erased. Some of you left that session feeling less safe, not more,” — a book like this is very very timely and holds a historical mirror to current bigotry and contemporary hypocrisy.
❤️ 🇮🇱
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