Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania: People, Places and Objects

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Description

Once regarded as a vibrant centre of intellectual, cultural and spiritual Jewish life, Lithuania was home to 240,000 Jews prior to the Nazi invasion of 1941. By war's end, less than 20,000 remained. Today, approximately 4,000 Jews reside there, among them 108 survivors from the camps and ghettos and a further 70 from the Partisans and Red Army. Against a backdrop of ongoing Holocaust dismissal and a recent surge in anti-Semitic sentiment, Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania presents the history and experiences of a group of elderly Holocaust survivors in modern-day Vilnius. Using their stories and memories, their places of significance as well as biographical objects, Shivaun Woolfson considers the complexities surrounding Holocaust memory and legacy in a post-Soviet era Lithuania. The book also incorporates interdisciplinary elements of anthropology, psychology and ethnography, and is informed at its heart by a spiritual approach that marks it out from other more conventional historical treatments of the subject. Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania includes 20 images, comes with comprehensive online resources and weaves together story, artefact, monument and landscape to provide a multidimensional history of the Lithuanian Jewish experience during and after the Holocaust.

Reviews

[A] remarkable and moving study in the recovery of an endangered past ... This wonderful book has recovered an important strand of Holocaust history for students, scholars and general readers alike. * Journal of European Studies *
A book which deserves a good readership; and this is because of its raw material [It] sticks in the mind by virtue of the strength and value of its primary material. * The Slavonic and East European Review *
This is an important study of the difficulties Lithuania faces in coming to terms with the legacy of the Soviet and Nazi occupations and how these are being dealt with. * Social History *
Woolfsons thought-provoking study makes a valuable contribution to the history of Lithuanian Jewry. * Journal of Modern Jewish Studies *

Author Bio

Shivaun Woolfson has a PhD from the University of Sussex, UK.