“Taken by Germans to an Unknown Destination”: Holocaust in the Texts of Authorities in the Mid-1940s (On the Example of the City of Lviv)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15407/uhj2023.06.214Keywords:
Holocaust, Jews, Lviv, politics of memory, World War II, texts of the authorities, censorship, narrative analysis., Holocaust, Jews, Lviv, politics of memory, World War II, texts of the authorities, censorship, narrative analysisAbstract
The aim is to explore how the information about the Holocaust in Lviv was given in the documents of the Soviet authorities in 1944—1945.
The purpose is to analyze how functionaries at the local level identified the mass “disappearance” of Jews in letters of response to numerous appeals about their search, and what linguistic constructions were used, what they wrote about the enemy, and how they explained the stories of the rescued, how censorship worked, as well as how the image of post-war Lviv rises.
The methodology is based on general scientific, special, and interdisciplinary methods of scientific knowledge (narrative and textual analysis, content analysis, biographical method, and tools of social anthropology are used in particular).
Scientific novelty. Narrative analysis of previously unpublished texts (by authorities in the city of Lviv in the mid-1940s) deepened the knowledge of concealment by the Soviet power of the tragedy of the Jewish people at the final stage of the war.
Conclusions. The authorities avoided any mention of the isolation of Jews to the ghetto; there was no mention of numerous individual appeals as a mass extermination of the Jewish people. At every request for the search for specific residents or the whole family, several persons at different addresses of residence, the city authorities gave individual and distinct answers about the “disappeared”, who were “carried out”, “taken” or “evicted” by Germans “to an unknown destination”. The research deepens the knowledge about the creation of the Soviet discourse of the World War II at its final stage, complements the established in historiography the image of the Holocaust in the USSR not so much as a slurred but an unwelcome memory that had a framework and opportunities to be spoken loud at the same time.
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