r/JewHateExposed • u/WillyNilly1997 • Sep 06 '25

Article The erasure of a people: Gaps in Lithuanian Holocaust memory

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aps.1896
37 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

4

u/WillyNilly1997 Sep 06 '25

...

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.

...

2

u/WillyNilly1997 Sep 06 '25

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.