The Holocaust killed eleven million people. Six million were Jews. The other five million included Roma and Sinti, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political prisoners, along with millions of Polish and Soviet civilians murdered as part of a deliberate programme to destroy their nations. How those non-Jewish dead are remembered, acknowledged, or quietly set aside varies enormously from country to country, and the variation tells you a great deal about how national identity is constructed from historical memory.
Poland
Poland lost approximately six million citizens in the Second World War, of whom roughly half were Jewish and half were not. The non-Jewish Polish dead included members of the intelligentsia shot in mass executions in the first weeks of the occupation, civilian hostages killed in reprisals, forced labourers worked to death in Germany, and the population of Warsaw, 200,000 of whom were killed in the 1944 uprising and its aftermath. By any measure, the Polish experience of German occupation was catastrophic.
Polish national memory has nonetheless been contested ground. For decades the Catholic Church and successive governments framed the war primarily as Polish national martyrdom, a framing that tended to subsume Jewish victims into a general category of Polish suffering rather than acknowledging the specifically antisemitic character of the genocide. The two were different things: Poles were targeted for subjugation and partial extermination as a national and racial group; Jews were targeted for total extermination as Jews. The distinction matters, and resisting it has been a feature of Polish political culture.
What Polish national memory has been most reluctant to confront is the degree to which Poles participated in the killing. This was not merely a German operation carried out on Polish soil. Polish neighbours denounced Jewish families in hiding to the German authorities. Polish blackmailers, known as szmalcownicy, extorted money from Jews in exchange for not reporting them. Polish policemen participated in roundups. At Jedwabne in July 1941, Polish townspeople murdered their Jewish neighbours directly, without German instigation, burning at least 340 people alive in a barn. Jan Gross documented this in his 2001 book Neighbors. The reaction in Poland was a national crisis. President Aleksander Kwaśniewski formally apologised; the Catholic Church acknowledged complicity. But the backlash was also substantial, and successive Polish governments have oscillated between acknowledgment and denial ever since.
In 1946, a year after liberation, a pogrom in Kielce killed 42 Jewish Holocaust survivors who had returned to their home town. The perpetrators were Polish civilians and police. The Kielce pogrom accelerated the departure of the remaining Polish Jewish population: within two years, most of the Jews who had survived the war and returned to Poland had left again. The message was not subtle.
The 2018 Polish Holocaust law, which criminalised attributing responsibility for German crimes to the Polish state or nation, brought the argument into the open internationally. Israel recalled its ambassador. The Israeli government stated that the law sought to rewrite history and suppress discussion of Polish complicity. The United States expressed concern. The law was amended under pressure but the impulse behind it has not disappeared, and the historical argument it attempted to close off remains very much open.
The Roma
The Porajmos, the Roma genocide, is the least acknowledged of the Holocaust’s components in the national memories of the countries where it happened. Germany did not formally recognise the murder of Roma as genocide until 1982, nearly forty years after the fact. A central memorial to the Sinti and Roma murdered in Europe was not unveiled in Berlin until 2012. In many Eastern European countries, where the majority of Roma victims lived, official recognition remains minimal or absent.
The reasons are not difficult to identify. Roma communities have limited political representation and voice. Anti-Roma prejudice remains widespread across Europe. The same societies that participated in or acquiesced to the murder of Roma in the 1940s have had little incentive to memorialise the fact. In Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, where significant numbers of Roma were killed, the subject receives nothing like the institutional attention given to Jewish victims. The Porrajmos Memorial in Berlin is exceptional; in most of Europe, the Roma dead remain largely unremembered in any official sense.
The Soviet Union and Russia
Soviet memory of the war, and Russian memory after it, was framed from the outset as the Great Patriotic War: a national struggle in which Soviet citizens of all backgrounds died together. The specific targeting of Jews was actively suppressed in Soviet historiography. At Babi Yar, where 33,771 Jews were shot in two days in September 1941, the memorial erected in the Soviet period made no mention of Jews. The inscription referred to “Soviet citizens.” Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s 1961 poem Babi Yar, which named the Jewish dead explicitly, was a political provocation in the Soviet context.
This erasure was partly ideological: acknowledging that Jews had been singled out for special persecution was inconvenient for a system that officially denied the existence of ethnically based discrimination. It was also partly antisemitic: the Soviet Union had its own tradition of state antisemitism, which intensified in Stalin’s last years. The result was that Soviet Jewish memory of the Holocaust developed largely underground, in samizdat and private transmission, while the official memory was a nationalist one that absorbed Jewish suffering into a universal Soviet category.
In contemporary Russia, the framing of the war as a Russian national triumph makes acknowledgment of specifically Jewish or Roma victimhood still more difficult. The memory is instrumentalised for political purposes that have nothing to do with honest historical reckoning.
Germany
Germany has done more than any other country to confront its responsibility for the Holocaust, but even German memory has its hierarchies. The primary focus of Erinnerungskultur, the culture of remembrance, has been the murder of Jews. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, opened in 2005, is the centrepiece. The central memorial to the murdered Sinti and Roma was not opened until 2012. A memorial to gay victims has existed since 2008. A memorial to the disabled victims of the T4 programme was opened in 2014, seventy years after the programme ended. The sequencing reflects the political difficulty of acknowledging each group: the further removed from the primary Jewish narrative of the Holocaust, the longer it took.
Why it matters
The gaps in national memory are not merely historical oversights. They shape contemporary politics. A Poland that frames itself primarily as victim rather than also, in some instances, as perpetrator is a Poland less equipped to reckon with its own antisemitism. A Russia that absorbed Jewish suffering into a nationalist narrative produced a political culture in which Holocaust inversion, the comparison of Israeli actions to Nazi ones, is entirely mainstream. Countries that have not acknowledged the Porajmos continue to treat Roma as a problem population rather than a community with historical claims on the state.
The Holocaust was not one event with one set of victims. It was a programme of murder that targeted multiple groups for different reasons with different methods and different scales of destruction. How each country remembers the victims who were its own nationals is a measure of how honestly it has confronted what was done in its name or on its soil.
See also
Sources
- Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, Princeton University Press, 2001
- Michael Shafir, Between Denial and Comparative Trivialization: Holocaust Negationism in Post-Communist East Central Europe, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2002
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Babi Yar, 1961, translated by Benjamin Okopnik
- Ian Hancock, We Are the Romani People, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002
- Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, Cambridge University Press, 2001
- Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz, Ohio University Press, 2006