Analyzing Grievability and Identifications of Victimhood at Holocaust Heritage Sites

• In Event: Perspectives on Holocaust Heritage

Abstract

This paper critically analyzes the language of victimhood and the label of “victim” as it is differentially applied to various groups of people who suffered and died during the Holocaust. It specifically focuses on national cultures of Holocaust remembrance: who is remembered as one of “our” victims and who is not. The “cosmopolitan” or “European Union” model of Holocaust remembrance is criticized for its elision of fundamental regional differences in how the Holocaust was carried out and the specific local circumstances in which perpetration, collaboration, and bystanding occurred. Concurrently, national cultures of remembrance often face critique for whitewashing, excusing, or ignoring local perpetration, collaboration, and bystanding. However, for millions of Holocaust victims, their experience was literally pan-European: arrested or rounded up close to home, they were sent to transit camps and then further deported, crossing multiple borders. Many forced laborers were moved from camp to camp over months and years, and many people died abroad. Therefore, their experiences cannot be fully encompassed by only identifying their country of origin. As a case study, approximately 974 Estonian Jews died during the Holocaust, usually shot within the first months of German occupation, and approximately 10,000 Jews from other parts of Europe died after being sent to concentration camps within Estonia. This paper analyzes how Holocaust victims are defined and identified at different Estonian heritage sites and museums as well as the different political and sociocultural ramifications of various identifications and levels of grievability.

Short Bio

Dr Margaret Comer is a Research Fellow on the AHRC- and DFG-funded project “Good Citizens, Terrible Times: Community, Courage and Compliance in and beyond the Holocaust.” She is based at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust & Genocide Studies at University College London. Her current research focuses on the heritage of mass repression, Holocaust memorialization and heritagization, the memorialization and heritagization of Soviet repression, and contested memory. She is specifically interested in how post-repression societies variously portray violence, suffering, perpetration, bystanding, and victimhood at sites associated with mass violence. From 2020 to 2023, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the European Research Council-funded project 'Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena', based at Tallinn University (grant agreement no 853385). In 2019-20, she was the Research Assistant on ‘Safeguarding Sites: The IHRA Charter for Best Practice’, an interdisciplinary project funded by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

Author

• Margaret Comer, University College London