Jews who lived in the Soviet Union and managed to survive the Holocaust could not make aliyah to Israel after the new state was established in 1948. They remained in the countries that became the living monuments for their deceased relatives.
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The survivors in Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus walked by remnants of the ghettos and the mass graves every day. In most places, the authorities banned any official memorial or any marking to indicate the horrors that had taken place. The Jews tried to change that by raising funds for such remembrance projects only to be met by rejection by the regime.
In the few cases where they were given a green light, there were strings attached: The memorial could only refer to the murdered as Soviets who were killed by fascist occupiers, without mentioning that the victims were Jewish.
A senior member of the Communist Party in Belarus explained at the time that the prohibition on referring to Jews was issued because nationalist Jews wanted to show that they are different from all other ethnic groups in the Soviet Union and blamed the Russians and Belarussians for not doing enough to save Jews during the war. But it was an open secret that the Nazis had collaborators and those who could not escape the German invaders were killed in ghettos and death camps with the help of the locals.
Jews also had to contend with efforts to steal headstones from cemeteries. Public commemoration of the perished was made possible mostly on May 9th, the anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. Each year on that day they would gather at the sites of the mass slaughter, in synagogues and the cemeteries; those with military background would arrive with decorations. And despite this being frowned upon, they would recite the Kadish prayer, making V-E Day a day of remembrance as well.
Over the years, the memories were only nominally there: Many Jews lived near what were once glorious centers of Jewish life, but no real commemoration could take place because the collective Soviet memory was that of shared suffering as Soviets, with no room to differentiate. After all, more than 20 million Soviets did not survive the war.
With the fall of the Iron Curtain two things happened: On the one hand, the authorities of the former USSR states allowed monuments and even let the community mark them with Stars of David and mention that the victims were Jewish. On the other hand, many of the Jews were finally allowed to make aliyah, only to discover that the official Holocaust commemoration ethos had already been formed in the Jewish state without their input.
The discriminatory way in which their memory is preserved was obviously not intentional. Until the 1990s, most of the Holocaust survivors in Israel had originally arrived from elsewhere, and as such, most of the testimonies of the horrors were not from the Soviet Jewry. But today, we, the third generation, have tried to right the historical wrong and give them a voice.
With each day that goes by, fewer Holocaust survivors live among us. It is high time that their story is told and written it down for posterity.
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