Sovietinės sistemos kinas kaip Holokausto atminties palimpsestas

ENAfter World War II the movies concerned with the Jews were eliminated from the Soviet cinematography. Even though there were scenes of Nazi massacres of the Jews or related episodes, the word ‘Jews’ was never mentioned. The Jews as a nation ended up outside of the screen and became implicit characters because the Holocaust and Nazi crimes and their perception were unified, making the Jews to ‘share’ the victim status with other ‘peaceful citizens’. The concept ‘Holocaust without Jews’ came into life as an identity of Nazi victims could have been guessed only through allusions in the movies (archival footage from Jews’ mass killing, ghettos, and concentration camps). Movies, as audiovisual representations of the past, tended to retouch the Holocaust and sort of erase it from history. It was not in the best interest of the Soviet regime to recognize the Jews as a focus group of the Third Reich genocide politics. The Holocaust representation in the movies of the Lithuanian SSR was in line with the ideological line of the Soviet historical memory politics. The allusions to the Holocaust were symbolic and had the function of a stenographic element in the background of the main plot line. It was noticed that the Star of David was often used to indirectly convey the passivity and insensibility of the people around in the films of Soviet Lithuania. On the other hand, unlike the communist Polish cinematography, less significant artistic expressions, there were no Jewish preservation moments and no intentions to condemn antisemitism. There were no Jewish characters in the Lithuanian film studio. It may be assumed that the indoctrination of the ideological mythology of the fascist crimes through cinema was one of the elements, which produced a distorted perception of the Holocaust in the Lithuanian collective consciousness. [From the publication]

• Cold War cinema and the traumatic turn in Europe: fact (1980) as a Soviet mirror of the Holocaust film / Violeta Davoliūtė. Studies in Russian and Soviet cinema. 2020, 14, 1, p. 57-71.
• Genealogical writing and memory of the Holocaust in Lithuania / Violeta Davoliūtė. East European Jewish affairs. 2021, Vol. 51, no. 1, p. 70-85.
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