Ep. 34- The Holocaust in Belarus with Franziska Exeler

Historian Timothy Snyder wrote that, between 1941 and 1944, Belarus was the deadliest place on earth.  And he was right.  The population there, both Jewish and non-Jewish suffered under the full weight of the Nazi genocidal project from the Holocaust by Bullets to the Hunger Plan.

In this episode, I talked with Franziska Exeler about the Holocaust in Belarus as well as its aftermath in postwar justice and its place in postwar memory.

Franziska Exeler is an assistant professor at the Free University Berlin and a research fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge.

Exeler, Franziska. Ghosts of War: Nazi Occupation and its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus (2022)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.144)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Bourne. And today we are talking about Belarus or the area of the occupied Soviet Union that would become Belarus. It's an area that Tim Snyder mentioned in his book and said that between 1941 and 1944, this area of the world was the deadliest place on earth. And I have with me a great scholar on this topic, Franziska Exeler.

who is going to talk to us about the way the Holocaust and Nazi occupation unfolded in Belarus. And also, and this is really interesting, the memory politics, both in terms of prosecuting those responsible and the general memory of the war and the Holocaust in Belarus. So, Francisco, welcome to the podcast.

Franziska Exeler (00:54.193)
Thank you so much for having me.

Waitman Beorn (00:56.054)
And can you start by telling us how you got interested in this particular topic and I guess this particular angle on this topic?

Franziska Exeler (01:04.561)
Sure, of course. maybe I'll take you back to 2009, which was the first time that I traveled to Belarus. By that time I was a PhD student at an American university, but I'd done my undergraduate degree in Berlin. I'm a German citizen. I grew up in Germany, particularly Western Germany, and then for graduate studies went to the US. And what was...

common to do at our university were so-called pre-dissertation archive trips. while we're still pursuing our master's degree but preparing for the PhD, for summer we would go to the places that we're interested in and visit archives to get a better sense of their holdings and to get a better sense of the place and the questions that we'd like to develop. And I knew that I was interested in the history of the Second World War and I was interested in the history of the German occupation, of the Soviet Union.

I'd previously worked on that, I'd written a master thesis on women, so female soldiers in the Red Army, and I knew I wanted to do Soviet history, I wanted to do the history of the Second World War. And I first started out in Ukraine. if, you know, for anyone who's interested in the German occupation of the Soviet Union, and particularly sort of those parts of the Soviet Union that were, you know, prior to the German invasion in 1941.

were Soviet for more or less 20 years. And then as well, those parts that the Soviets only annexed in 1939 or 1940, there are really two places that one can go to, which are Ukraine and Belarus, which are very similar in terms of that, you by 1941, they consisted of what we can call an old Soviet part, the Eastern parts, and then the Western part with the Soviet Union annexed in 1939 from Poland. And so I first traveled to Ukraine and I went to...

Kiev, Lviv, Chernivtsi and Kharkiv and saw the archives there. And then I took a night train from Kiev to Minsk. And so for whatever weird reasons, there wasn't a tourist guide on Belarus. There was a really outdated lonely planet on Russia and Belarus, which in itself is somewhat telling or problematic. And I didn't purchase that. So essentially I went completely ignorant. And I had a friend by that time who was originally from Vitebsk and I know.

Franziska Exeler (03:32.401)
sort of heard his family stories growing up in Belarus, but as I like I was pretty much clueless. And I got out of the night train from Kiev. So I arrived on a Sunday morning and, you know, this being a European city on a Sunday, everything's closed essentially. And it was also the time before smartphones. So there was no internet and I didn't really know where things were. So I started walking around the city and...

Minsk, for those who've been, know, it's a very, it has a very classical post-war Soviet layout. So the main avenue, the Independence Avenue starts at what's today called Independence Square, but used to be called Lenin Square with a Lenin statue. And then it goes along sort of post-war buildings, along to October Square.

and then ends at Victory Square. So again, this is a very typical Soviet geography, which we also see in other places as well. But then I started to sort of, know, meandering through the city, take little streets here and there, and all of a sudden, although I still remember in the city center, I was in a very different part of the town. This is the so-called Nemigo, Nemihia historical region, which

felt somewhat eerie at some point. was walking along there, there are smaller streets, the entire layout didn't seem to make sense, so to say. You you were in the heart of the capital of Belarus, and all of the sudden, A Street would end, and houses there looked very different. There were smaller houses, two stories, sometimes family, single-family homes, wooden houses even, again, in the very city center. And it just started to feel...

strange, sort of say. Like I was thinking something happened here, there. So one or two, you know, places where houses were still burned out, looked a little bit dilapidated. Things have changed in the meantime, but I had a sense of I want to know what that is. And so then to make this long story short, what happened at night, then I finally found an internet cafe. So I found a place where I could then, you know, Google the city and the particular layout. And then I realized that this was the region

Franziska Exeler (05:48.697)
This was the part of the city where the Germans had established a Jewish ghetto during the Second World War, which was the longest operating ghetto on the territory of the Soviet Union, which was destroyed in 1943. And it was really only then when I started to think about the post-war period. So until then, I'd been interested mostly in the wartime period, but it was then that I started to think about, okay, if, you know, even in 2009,

the scars of the war are still so visible. even if you come with somebody like me, who has no sense of the specific layout of the city, and even if you don't even know where the ghetto was, but you walk around with open eyes and try to take in the city and try to understand what happened, what must it then happen like here in 1945?

in 1944, when the Red Army returned to Belarus and pushed out the Germans, what must it have been like to live in such an utterly destroyed place after so much death and destruction that the Germans brought over Belarus and the Soviet Union at large? And so, yeah, so that was the beginning of that, that I started then to wonder and my interest shifted to the post-war period and I became more interested in the legacies or the

the social, political, personal, legal consequences of Nazi occupation.

Waitman Beorn (07:14.014)
I mean that that's fascinating and it's already sort of we were talking before we started recording sort of experiences working in Belarus, which is because I was there for a little bit. It's interesting. It's interesting place. Maybe we should talk before we start talking about the war. Because one of the things that. I always thought as someone who is not necessarily a Soviet historian, I'm not definitely not a Soviet historian, you know, but I always found interesting is that Belarus.

in comparison to its neighbors like Ukraine and the Baltic states is kind of an interesting place in terms of its sort of history and its political and ethnic makeup. Can you talk a little about about sort of what is Belarus? Because Belarus hasn't really been a country, you know, until until the liberation, until until until 1990s or whatever. Right. When it becomes

an independent state, it's a Soviet state, then, you know, what is its sort of historical background? What is it composed of, et cetera?

Franziska Exeler (08:21.297)
Belarus, I think, could perhaps be best described as an as an East European borderland of some sort. So in the sense of place that historically has been contested with different states and empires laying claim to it. I mean, if we go back sort of in time, at some point it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. So the territory of Belarus today was part of the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

then the Russian Empire, then the Russian Empire then crumbles in war and revolution. This is really a period as elsewhere, along what some of know, Omar Barthoff and Eric Weitz have called the shadow zones of empires, a period of war and transition that follows with very different political entities being created, recreated, abolished in a short period of time.

in the years of so-called Russian civil war, 1980s, 1920, 19... know, 1918, 1990, 1920, 1921, and including sort of, you know, independent, quasi-independent Belarusian states. But then with the Treaty of Riga, stability comes to this region in some form. And the, again, the territory of what's today Belarus is then

finds itself part of two different states. So the eastern part is part of the emerging Soviet Union and the western part is part of eastern Poland. So the northern part of eastern Poland in the interwar years. And this is really a borderland in that sense also too that it's multilingual, it's multi-ethnic, it's multi-religious. People speak, you

Belarusian, but at the turn of the century people, the majority is probably Belarusian speaking. Then Polish is especially in Western Belarus, also the language of the elites, the language of the Catholic clergy. Russian is also more of a language that's spoken in the city dating back to the time of the Russian Empire. So the city of the state, the language of the state, Yiddish. This is one of the

Franziska Exeler (10:45.89)
So this was part of the so-called Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, so the areas that the Russian imperial state had designated for Jewish communities to be allowed to live in. we have cities would be mostly Polish and Yiddish or Russian and Yiddish speaking, whereas in the countryside, know, it's mostly Belarusian.

but really a mix also of languages, lots of dialogues, like linguistic boundaries are shifting and fluid here. To the southern part, Ukrainian comes in as well. There's some Lithuanian as well spoken. So it is also a place where most people will have a basic understanding of more than one language, know, for interactions in the market, even if they might not be necessarily even literate, but they will know, be able to navigate.

you know, at least with a couple of words or sentences in different languages. So that is a world that was no longer exists in that that way. And one of the main reasons is the German occupation of the Soviet Union of Belarus that destroyed and murdered so the Germans who murdered Belarus's Jewish communities, the majority of them. It's also and has to do with the

So the end of that world in parts also has to do with the Soviet Polish population exchange that takes place from 1944 to 1946. And there's a kind of linguistic standardization taking place, which has a lot to do with urbanization, Russian becoming the language of the city, the lingua franca of the Soviet Union, which means that today,

It's mostly that's Russian that's being spoken in a country that officially still has two languages, Russian and Belarussian.

Waitman Beorn (12:47.406)
And is there, this is a question that I've always had too, is there a sense of, maybe you can punt this if you want to later on, but is there or was there even before World War II a sense of Belarusian nationalism in the same way that there is in Ukraine and in the Baltic States?

Franziska Exeler (13:09.851)
There are. So, Rutling, for example, has written a book about the rise of Belorussian nationalism. It's a bit of a more complicated story. say, so Belorussian as a literary language emerges relatively late, towards the late 19th century. So again, the language that people will have spoken in villages is then not the same as the literary version that's being invented. I mean, it's the same language, but you know, there are

the ones spoken in the countryside is more fluid, so to say, than the standardized literary language. But Belorussian nationalism also emerges around the turn of the century. And Vilnius, or Vilna, really was one of the centers of Belorussian nationalism. Interestingly, Vilnius being really the historical heart of the region in many sense.

So Minsk in the kind of nationalist Belarusian imagination wasn't as important back then as Vilnius was. Vilnius obviously being a city that other nationalists also laid claims to. So Lithuanian and Polish nationalists also claimed it as their city. But so did Belarusians who, know, it's a circle of intellectuals, elites who are active nationalists as well.

But I think, and that matters now for the history of the Second World War, what we see is that Belarusian nationalists in the interwar period tend to have more socialist leanings. So many of them were from Northeastern Poland slash what then becomes Western Belarus in 1939. And during the war, for example, we do have armed formations, Belarusian nationalists who

fight in the name of Belarusian nationalism under German tutelage, but there isn't, we don't have an organization that is as strong, for example, as in essence, also, you know, bottom line, to say as violent as the organization of Ukrainian nationalists. So that's the difference and that's important later on for what happens during the Second World War and also how the Holocaust then.

Franziska Exeler (15:30.641)
unfolds in many ways, especially the summer of 1941, where we really see a difference, which maybe we'll talk later about that. to say that, so the general kind of argument often made in literature is that Belarusian nationalism exists, but it's not as strong as in the Baltics or in Western Ukraine. And we see that then having an impact on how also local sort of cooperation with the German unfolds during the Second World War.

Waitman Beorn (15:59.822)
And that's a great segue, I think, into precisely that, which is, can you talk us through a little bit about the Nazi invasion of Belarus and then the occupation and the unfolding of the Holocaust there? And that's a lot, but you

Franziska Exeler (16:19.675)
Sure. Yeah, I'll try to be as sort of concise and as possible and also not, I mean, it's as you're saying, I mean, this is an extremely rich topic. There's a large scholarly literature on that. There's the on German occupation regime. There's the work by Christian Gerlach. There's of course your book. There is, in terms of.

memory and oral history interviews. There's the really important work by Irina Romanova, Irina Mokhovskaya, Annika Walke has written about partisans and were female partisans in memory of that. You know, just to name a couple of books here, but to kind of quickly walk us through that. So on June 22nd, 1941, the Germans invade the Soviet Union and

They divide Belarus as in general, you know, the Western parts of the Soviet Union that come under their control into different occupation regimes. And the biggest difference here is between the civilian and the military occupation regimes. Although, and so Belarus is particularly being divided into five different units. But for the general outline, especially how the Holocaust then proceeds, that isn't

quite as important. There are some regional differences because the set of this different administrative set up, but regardless of whether a region was under civilian administration or under the military administration, the essence of occupation policy is essentially the same. So the essence of German occupation policy is the mass murder of the Jewish communities, the enslavement of the Slavic population.

the economic exploitation of the occupied territories, and then the destruction of communism as a political system. So that's really at the core of Nazi rule. In the long run parts of Ukraine, the Baltic states and then district Białystok, which is the westernmost part of Belarus at that time, they were to be settled with German farmers and the rest was to be economically exploited. again,

Franziska Exeler (18:39.159)
all of these regions, whether designated as so-called Lebensraum later on for Germans or not, were designated as food producing colonies. So was really about trying to extract as many resources as possible.

Franziska Exeler (18:58.417)
And in order to do that, the government in Berlin or the Nazis plan to get rid of 30 to 45 million people. This is the so-called hunger plan that they devised of people that they deem useless eaters. In the case of Belarus, sort of the most radical pre-war plans envisioned the death through starvation of the whole urban population and then half of the rural population. I mean, it's unimaginable, the scale of destruction there.

and death, really. And the, you know, just to say that obviously the death and destruction that the Germans brought over the Soviet Union in the end already is unimaginable. But what happens then is then when the Wehrmacht invades the Soviet Union, the Nazi government soon realizes that it cannot just easily starve millions of people to death. And so, and that they need more local labor than they thought initially, and that they also need sort of the

they need the limited involvement of some in the occupation regime. So they need the participation of non-Jewish locals in the occupation regime. So perhaps this in general for the German occupation policy, the Holocaust itself then also proceeds in different steps. in here we see some differences between the military and the civilian part.

It really starts with the German invasion of Belarus. Initially it's mostly male Jews who are singled out for killings, but then it shifts in the fall of 1941 already towards the ghettoization of entire Jewish communities. so that, so the beginning is the individual killings of select male Jews to then

the ghettoization and eventual killing of entire Jewish communities.

Waitman Beorn (20:59.758)
And so, mean, I think we should go into more detail about some of other stuff as well, because I was thinking about this as I was getting ready for this podcast. I interviewed a woman, when I was in Belarus, she was a witness to one of the Jewish mass shootings near the town of Krupki. And before she told that story, she wanted to tell her family's story.

And she basically said that her father and brother had been burned to death in a house by the Nazis. Her other brother had died at the front in the Red Army. Her mother had died in a concentration camp in Belarus. And she had survived by running into the forest with her aunt.

And that, you know, it seemed to me that that was not an atypical sort of family history because this region was just, I mean, it had all of these sort of four horsemen of the apocalypse descending on it at the same time. know, there's the war, there's the Holocaust, and then there's also all of this, what I call now sort of the Nazi genocidal project, which is all the other stuff that they're doing to

to re-engineer or change, literally change the landscape by removing people from it, this kind of stuff. What is the response of individuals during the war to Nazi occupation?

Franziska Exeler (22:42.886)
So it varies. think that's maybe in some ways encapsulated the entire very complex story. maybe just to follow up on what you were just saying, think one of the things, for example, when I was first visiting Belarus and with the knowledge that I had about the German occupation is that

I sort of the way in which, you I grew up in West Germany is that students in high school would learn quite a lot about the Holocaust, but meaning you would learn quite a lot about Auschwitz and the extermination camps. There was less knowledge, I thought, much less knowledge about the German occupation as such of the Soviet Union and very little knowledge of the actual places in the Soviet Union.

I think as you were mentioning, one of the important differences here is also that in the occupied Soviet Union the killings took place in the towns and near the places where people had lived. So with the exception for example in Belarus with the exception of district Białystok, some people were then sort of Jews were then

taken transported to the extermination camps further west on Polish territory. the west of Belarus and Ukraine as well, then individuals are being shot and killed near their homes. And so this was very visible and it was very known to everybody, but it also means that

is as people, if you travel through Belarus or Ukraine today, essentially near every larger or smaller town there is an execution site, often still unmarked. locals, to the extent that they are still with us today, know, and these stories were then also, know, their knowledge was passed on through families. that's a very important difference to the Holocaust more for the West.

Franziska Exeler (24:55.205)
That's also something that scholars like Timothy Snyder thinks of, and I have, I think, highlighted really well on that crucial difference. But another thing that I found growing up in West Germany is that usually, well, maybe you can also say to this day, there isn't that much knowledge about is the destruction, the whole scale, large scale destruction of villages in primarily Belarus, but also northern Ukraine and then Western Russia of

of villages that the Germans deemed partisan friendly. So collective punishment for partisan activities or preemptive. So it's a mix of preemptive and then responding to a perceived or real partisan threat. And in Belarus itself, so that's a strategy, these so-called burned villages or the really raising them to the ground that is also then, it's also taking place in the.

in southeastern Europe, in Greece and the Balkans, where the Germans employed that strategy. Later on, also on the Western Front, there are a couple of cases in France which are really well known, but Belarus is really at the heart of it, and the reason for that is also that Belarus was at the heart of the Soviet partisan movement. So in Belarus we have over 9,000 villages that were destroyed by the Germans, really, and literally raising them to the ground and with...

killing all or some of the inhabitants and the ways in which they were killed was also very personal, so to say, it was very intimate in that people were often shoved together in a barn and then burned alive. that's a story, that is a particular history that in my, I think is really not yet part of...

even today, of discourses in Germany about historical responsibility for the crimes that Germany committed during the Second World War. And so these family histories that you were talking about, I think are very typical. And even though people have very complicated family histories too, and also very complicated histories to tell about the partisan-civilian relationship, I would...

Franziska Exeler (27:13.213)
guess that there's hardly any family that was left untouched, that didn't at least have a brother, an uncle, a father who died at the front, a mother, a grandmother in some ways, herself victim of German violence, or also complicated relationship with the Soviet partisans who came at night to take food.

Waitman Beorn (27:35.342)
Yeah, I mean, and I want to touch on this piece as well, because I think this is one of the really fascinating things that you're doing. And I think I also want to highlight what you said earlier, because I think you're right. was thinking about this as you were talking, that I think now we scholars, we the general public, we know the Holocaust took place in Eastern Europe. We know about the Einsatzgruppe and the mass shootings. But I think you're right that

these sort, the crimes against civilians in the sense of the desert zones and the destroying of villages, mean, that still I think is sort of masked as these kinds of outliers, onesies and twosies of sort of military violence, whereas it's actually a systematic program. I mean, it's a policy.

that sort of deserves its own, not a name necessarily, but its own kind of term that encompasses all of it. And then it needs to be studied as such, but that it, think, and I think the Holocaust suffered this way for a long time as well. It sort of subsumed under this barbarization of war on the Eastern Front. The Eastern Front is full of war crimes and atrocities because it's the Eastern Front.

And only has been, you know, in the last 20, 30 years or so that we've sort of unpicked the Holocaust from that and said, no, like the Holocaust is part of that war and systematic, et cetera, et cetera. And I think you're right that more work needs to be done to make visible these sort of systematic outrages against civilians, whether it's the whole scale murder of

entire villages or the deportation of the people to work as forced laborers to the expropriation of property and this kind of stuff. mean, there's just there's a lot there, but it's it's more than just, you know, the Wehrmacht behaving badly. I mean, this is actually like systematic policy that I think that I think is important. So let's talk about collaboration, because that that's going to be a significant.

Franziska Exeler (29:51.633)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (29:59.854)
concept or significant area of debate moving forward when we think about the the immediate post-war period so what what is the What is the nature of collaboration? In in Belarus and How does it compare to? Again the Baltic states and Ukraine because one of the things that you do in your book I think is really great is you're always kind of it's it's not a comparative book, but you're keeping an eye on these other places and sort of

because it's a natural question to ask, know, sort of how do we compare collaboration in these places where there's, when I'm speaking now of the Baltic States and Ukraine, where there's sort of significantly energetic collaboration to Belarus, where certainly for me as well, it seemed like at some level there is less sort of fervent and widespread collaboration, but that may be.

That may be more a function of sort of the visibility of the history than the truth itself.

Franziska Exeler (31:07.057)
Yeah, I think it's important to, again, like taking us back to the summer of 1941 to keep in mind that the Germans pursued different strategies to do in different population groups. by the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, it is clear that they want to murder the Vigents Jewish communities. And so for

Jews in occupied territory, there's very little space within which they could act. Obviously, that doesn't take away anybody's agency, but just to say that there is very little space to act in the first place, because German policy here is really clear. It's a genocidal policy set with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. And so that's then how the Germans then proceed in stages, but as the Holocaust unfolds in the occupied territories.

With the non-Jewish population, whether it's Slavic speaking or in the Baltic countries speaking Baltic languages, it's a little bit different in that it's the Germans, as I mentioned, the so-called hunger plan or hunger plan, soon early on the Germans realized that it's not a feasible plan to really sustain the occupation. And so they need the select cooperation of some and they proceed with this mix of brutality.

and cooperation towards the non-Jewish, rather Baltic Slavic speaking population. And if we stay in the territory of Belarus, that also means Ukraine as well, and the Germans simply don't lack the capacity to really be able, they can't reach the lower levels of their, know, any form of administration. So meaning by that,

They bring some personnel, but they really need to have, in order to establish their occupation regime, they really need local personnel. And what that means in practice is that they more or less keep the lower levels of the Soviet administration intact. So somebody who finds herself or himself working at a desk as part of the Soviet city administration, within a couple of weeks finds himself or herself working.

Franziska Exeler (33:32.285)
in the German occupation regime, sitting at the very same desk, so say. So at the level of the rayon or district, the Germans use what's there, the administrative structures. They also install in every town, especially also the smaller towns, a mayor, and then they recruit locals to work in the local police forces. And so these are really the pillars of the German occupation regime.

especially later on, once Soviet partisan warfare in Belarus starts to pick up in mid-1942. And at some point, German soldiers are really afraid to travel out into the countryside. So they prefer to stay in the larger towns, traveling out in the countryside is dangerous. So they depend on local, specifically local police forces and the mayors to enforce their policies.

And then when we go down to the level of the villages, here they appoint a so-called starter, a village head, who then often is the one who has to deliver the grain that the Germans request or provide the list with the names of those who are being taken as forced laborers to Germany. And so these are, again, like really the lower levels, the pillars of the German occupation regime, the village heads, the local police forces and the town mayors.

who are Soviet citizens and non-Jewish Soviet citizens and who become entangled, know, very complicit along a spectrum between, you know, willingly, unwillingly in German crimes in some sorts. Especially the local police forces are often heavily implicated also in the shootings of the Jewish communities. So they're the ones who are then

do the legwork really of the occupation regime, so they are the ones who would collect people, they are the ones who search for Jews and hiding, and the Germans need that local knowledge as well because they don't speak the languages. They have some translators but here too they need locals for that. it is really interesting if we look at the memoirs of people as well. So now you know Soviet citizens who survived the occupation is that

Franziska Exeler (35:52.517)
When people talk about what happened in occupied territories, on the occupied territory, the Germans are often faceless because they are not known to anyone, to local residents. And they all look alike, so to say, you know, and they come during the day and then they leave again and they're in some ways interchangeable. But then with local police forces, very different.

These are often people that people went to school with or they knew somehow through prior interactions. so that is, I think, very important then also for when we talk later about post-war prosecution and when we talk about what historical sources that we have and also the difference perhaps between trials of Soviet citizens versus German soldiers that it's really...

locals involved in the German occupation regime that are visible and the representatives of the Germans in the countryside in particular.

Waitman Beorn (36:49.974)
Yeah, I mean, I think this is really important and it's something that I always that I've picked up on as well. You know, even in in Poland, occupied Poland as well, that, the Germans are sort of seen often by Jews as this kind of as a natural disaster. You know, it's like a flood or a tornado or something. As you say, sort of the sort of faceless force of nature where, you know, Nazis kill Jews, that's just what they do in the same way that a flood destroys bridges. But, you know,

Franziska Exeler (37:08.081)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (37:20.832)
the Jews often have much more visceral and specific memories of individual neighbors who do something because they're different. That's not what their purpose in life is not to or wasn't to destroy Jews. So I think it's interesting that it takes place. You see that in Belarus as well. And I wonder then if that leads to the question of a depiction of anti-Semitism in

in Belarus. if you can talk us a little bit through again, and for those of you that are that are interested, I highly recommend getting the book because Francisco is incredibly nuanced in the book, which can be really irritating. But I do the same thing, you know, because it's because it's it's you know, it's it's not as simple as saying yes or no. You know, these are these are very the answer always. And it's the correct answer is it depends. Right. But, you know,

Franziska Exeler (38:05.113)
You

Waitman Beorn (38:18.638)
Can you talk a little bit through sort of anti-Semitism and, because one of the things you do that I think is really, really interesting and you, it's something that I hadn't picked up on in my work, which is obviously not nearly as in depth in this topic as yours, but the effect of sort of the parts of what becomes Belarus that were sort of long-term parts of the Soviet Union and the parts that really were only part of the Soviet Union.

from 39 to 41 because they were really parts of Eastern Poland, but they got occupied. Because you argue in a certain sense that that also has some impact on anti-Semitism and therefore also on collaboration.

Franziska Exeler (39:01.393)
Yeah, so that's one of the initial questions or one of the main questions that was really also interested in my research is what was the influence of prior Soviet rule on the choices that people make? So the bigger question that I wanted to answer is what choices do people make under German occupation and how are these choices influenced by how they prior to 1941 experienced Soviet rule? So another dictatorship.

And then in a kind of second step that looks at the post-war period, how do these choices then haunt people's post-war encounters, haunt kind of post-war life, always sort of carrying with oneself this idea, this question of like, what did my neighbor do during the war? What did my friend do during the war? What did I do during the war? So the aesthetic that the prior and the experiences with the Soviet rule differ in this region in that

that as I mentioned earlier, Eastern Belarus was part of the Soviet Union since its beginning, so by the time the Germans made for roughly two decades, and as such underwent profound Sovietization processes, most notably the collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s, the great terror of the 1936 to 1938, but also

sort of Soviet modernization processes as well. really kind of a large social engineering project that the Bolsheviks bring about in the early Soviet Union. Whereas the western part of Belarus is only annexed from Poland in 1939 and a lot of what scholars have identified as sort of the main kind of pillars of civilization only happened then later on after the war.

So Western Belarus is under Soviet rule for two years. And then the Germans invade in 41 and by 1944, the Soviets return. Meaning by the time when the Soviet authorities return in 1944, Western Belarus has actually been longer under German than under Soviet rule. And so I wanted to understand in the book, I've called this, you know, the, the Sovietization of Eastern Belarus as a revolution from within. then boring from Jan Gross's book on

Franziska Exeler (41:28.017)
Western Belarus and Western Ukraine. What's happening in the formerly Eastern Polish regions slash Western Belarus, Western Ukraine in between 1939 to 41 is a revolution from abroad, so to say. And the way, so what I found is with the exception of the summer of 41, of which I'll say a little bit more in a second,

I couldn't really find large, big differences, big noticeable difference between the western part of Belarus and the eastern part of Belarus in terms of the choices that people make under the Germans. what I see, what I've saw in the material is that initially people's choices in the summer of 41 were often influenced by their prior experiences with Soviet rule or the relationship to the Bolsheviks. And here too we have to remember that a lot of people

There was a lot of discontent and dislike of Soviet rule as a result of the collectivization of agriculture before 1941 as well in eastern Belarus. And so both in western and eastern Belarus, there are people who join the local police forces because they hate communism. They lost family members who were arrested, deported, taken to the Gulag. And so in both cases, that is initially a big factor.

Party members or individuals who held important positions within the Soviet party state were more likely to flee east, while, as said, those who had previously suffered under the Soviets were among those who then would join the occupation regime. But then that picture changes when Soviet partisan warfare begins to pick up in mid-1942, and civilians really increasingly come under pressure from both sides. So I mentioned earlier, like, one thing that in oral history interviews

if people talked about the partisans and they felt comfortable talking about them. One thing that I've heard quite often is people saying, you know, the Germans came during the day to our village and then the partisans came at night when they requested food. so there is a power imbalance here in the civilian partisan relationship, which is also very fragile and unequal. And there was individual violence towards civilians too.

Franziska Exeler (43:54.097)
So in any case, civilians in Belarus are increasingly under pressure from both sides. And so by that time, the space for individual action wasn't just circumscribed by one power, the Germans, but it's really by two groups, Germans and Soviet partisans. And then in those regions of Belarus were Polish or Ukrainian nationalist partisans on the southern and the western parts where they are active, there are then multiple groups.

which are fighting against one another in the really a life and death struggle and civilians are sort of trapped in between. And as result of that, people's actions and choices come much more determined by situational factors. So, you know, this includes the will to survive, coercion, violence, patriotism, which is not the same as fighting for Soviet communism, but really fighting for one's home country or home.

or also simply the proximity of your village to either German garrison or Soviet partisan zone. Sometimes that also just didn't shape people's which side to align themselves with. And then there's what in the book, what I've also called choiceless choices, where I've adapted a term used by the Holocaust scholar Lawrence L Langer, by which I mean that these are choices where either choice

or either option has an equally destructive effect on one's families or local communities. So to give an example, when a head of a village has to decide whether to hand over local villages as forced labors to the Germans or to deliver grain, and then as a result of doing that has to fear sort of a punishment from the Soviet partisans, or

when a village aligns themselves with the Soviet partisans or provides foods to the partisans and then has to fear German collective punishment. so these are really, I think, choices, choices, I think, which we can adapt to these situations as well.

Waitman Beorn (45:58.318)
course, there's also the temporal element too, right? Because, you know, for some of these people, they're kind of sitting on the fence to see who's going to win, right? And so then the fortunes of the war itself add another variable to this because, you know, in the summer of 1941, you might think, well, you know, the Germans are here to stay, they're winning. That's going to impact my calculus is sort of to what side I want to be on. But then, you know, you get to 43.

Franziska Exeler (46:01.242)
Mm-hmm.

Franziska Exeler (46:14.726)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (46:27.054)
44, now you're like, well, they're not going to win. So how do I, need to make sure that I'm, you know, trying to ally with the side that's going to ultimately win. And that's, that's, that's completely divorced from any other potential motivations as well. So it just adds another, another complication to this. and, and in a certain sense, my sense has also been that

Franziska Exeler (46:33.105)
Mm-hmm.

Franziska Exeler (46:44.859)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (46:51.03)
and you can correct me if I'm wrong, which is possible, but that there never is the sort of the same desire for a Belarusian state, independent state that there is in places like Ukraine or in the Baltic states, which actually had been independent states. And so I always sort of looked at those places and saw one explanation for particularly for sort of the

the uniformed and organized collaboration with the Nazis as, know, the Nazis, you know, were duplicitous about this, but they did hold out theoretically, you know, the idea of an independent, in some sense, Ukraine and independent Baltic states, you know, that had now been liberated from the Soviets. And so for people that were sort of these fervent nationalists in those regions, there was a bit more to fight for perhaps than in Belarus where

this really necessarily wasn't a kind of a demand in the same way? that fair or?

Franziska Exeler (47:54.769)
I think so, two thoughts here on that as well. So one thing is that, you you mentioned or you ask about anti-Semitism. So I couldn't find a set like major difference between Western and Eastern Belus apart for the summer of 41, again, which I'll say in a second more. in that, you know, we see

a whole sort of range of human behavior or behavioral spectrum. They're acts of rescue, people are sheltering neighbors or even unknown, people unknown to them. But we see a lot of expropriation of Jewish property. There's blackmailing, denouncing neighbors and hiding. Some people even take part in the killing process.

is that I couldn't find any quantitative difference. One could say, people in West Berlin were more anti-Semitic than in Eastern Belarus. But one difference that I found is that, and that goes back to the years of prior Soviet rule, is that the support networks that Jews could draw on differed.

So in Eastern Belarus, there were inter-communal relations between among certain urban groups, so mostly younger people, those who no longer adhere to religion, people who identified with the Soviet project, were less defined by sort of traditional social markers of religious markers of identity in Western Belarus. I think there were higher rates of inter-ethnic integration because of the Soviet projects than in Western Belarus, where to a large extent,

Jews and non-Jews lived side by side, but very separate lives, mostly for regions or reasons of religion, but also social life. And so the support networks during the war differ. But there's something, a very important difference, which is the summer of 1941, when we see sort of the transition from German to Soviet rule, where...

Franziska Exeler (50:04.515)
a wave of pogroms erupts in these East European borderlands. And there's an important link here to the presence of paramilitary, almost strong nationalist formations here. So while there is this wave of communal violence sweeping through the East European borderlands in the summer of 1941, which Jan Gross has written a book about, which became very

well known, you know, the phenomenon of neighbors committing violence against neighbors. We can see that the level of local anti-Jewish violence was highest in the Białystok region, which was the westernmost part of Belarus at that point, but handed back to Poland in 45. This was a largely Polish speaking Catholic region in today's northeastern Poland. It was also high in western Ukraine.

And then in parts of Romania and Bessarabia, and then in parts of the Baltics and Lithuania, particularly, we have high levels of anti-Jewish violence, neighbors committing violence, pogroms, essentially, during that transition period. That violence also exists in parts of Western Belarus, but the level of violence was much lower. So here it's small scale programs against individual Jews.

particularly around Vilejka, Baranovich, Novogrudok and then in the east of Pinsk in the westmost southern part on the Ukrainian border. And in the eastern part of Belarus as well as in most of the other sort of old eastern Ukraine, old Soviet regions, those programs don't take place. Now that might also have to do with the timeline, simply that

this region is taken later by the Germans. And so the transition is really the most chaotic in the Western parts. But I think it also has a lot to do with prior experiences of Soviet rule here. And again, but most importantly, with the presence of strong nationalist formations. We can see that the violence is highest in regions where there is, as nationalists have...

Franziska Exeler (52:27.665)
entire kind of organizations that they can draw on and networks. And so the absence or the presence of small group of radical nationalists really matter here, which I think we can perhaps even universalize that would be really interesting for further research that that's something that scholars working on war and occupation and civil war and violence also have seen that it's often small groups of radical

Now, people, radical nationalists or others who are willing to pursue violent means, to pursue their political projects, who then act as catalysts of violence and who then might also draw in people who otherwise would not act violently towards others and create these highly explosive sort of settings in which then neighborly violence becomes possible.

Waitman Beorn (53:20.818)
And I should, before I forget it, I should mention Barbara Epstein's book on the Minsk ghetto, which is really interesting. It goes to a comment that you made earlier about sort of the relationships between non-Jewish Belarusians and Jewish Belarusians. I'll give a shout out to that. That's really interesting because it talks about sort of how they work together in ways that you don't sort of see elsewhere. But I really want to get now to this post-war period because, you know,

A lot of your book is on that post-war period, but it's also really fascinating. Let's start with sort of where we were with collaborators. What does the state, and I'm already being sort of, this is the part where you're gonna say what part of the state, because it depends, right? But what does the state do to bring

these collaborators and sometimes Nazis themselves to justice, right? Because we know that there's also, there's sort of the high Soviet Union as a state, but there's also the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic as a state. And that these, one of the things that you do that I think is really, really interesting in the book is sort of show how these are not necessarily always in line. And again, you have the sort of shifting terrain of what we should be doing. So can you talk us a little bit through post-war justice and what the.

what its goals are and then how it handles the Holocaust and these other things.

Franziska Exeler (54:54.497)
Sure. So initially, very early on into the war, the Soviet government's line that it sort of gives out publicly is that traitors, meaning those that the Soviet authorities deemed to be traitors, or what we today would call collaborators, traitors receive, so this is from a Stalin speech in the summer of 1941 where he says traitors only deserve one fate, which is death.

Franziska Exeler (55:26.84)
And morally one can say, or in terms of the discourse that continues throughout the war years, and we see that too in what's happening on the ground in the occupied territory. So one of the main tasks of the partisans is fighting against those who represent the German occupation regime in the localities.

There's in later on in Soviet sort of the portrayal of what partisans were doing. It's mostly, you know, laying mines to German railroad tracks and killing German soldiers. And that's what was one part of it. But really, because the Germans at some point prefer to stay in the larger cities and are afraid to wrench out into the countryside, the primary focus of partisan activity

are the local policemen, are the town mayors, but really anyone they deem to be working for the Germans. so we mentioned, I mentioned earlier the large scale destruction of villages as a kind of pre-emptive and punitive policy that the Germans presume. The violence that the Germans commit against the population in Belarus is much, much, much larger than what the partisans do.

But there's also sort of, I mean, the partisans also commit violence against civilians, particularly against, as mentioned, against the representatives of the German authorities. They sometimes, in some instances, also employ collective punishment. So there are a couple of villages that were burned down by partisans. This is all part of later on, which cannot be mentioned, part of the taboos that people couldn't talk about.

because it didn't fit in a certain very classical black and white narrative where, according to which, in the post-war Soviet Union, a few people, the so-called traitors, had served in the local police forces, but everybody else had stood united behind the partisans. So that is during the war. So essentially, if you were working for the local police forces under German control, then

Franziska Exeler (57:47.799)
you had to fear being killed by the Soviet partisans. Once the Red Army regains territory, then punishment becomes more regulated, so to say. So then it becomes part of the criminal justice system. Initially, the first prosecutions take place, then there are Red Army tribunals or courts that are part of the Red Army. And then once the Red Army has retaken the territory,

the Soviet state security forces take over. the NKVD, is then, and the entire prosecution or the entire punishment of those considered traitors is then being channeled into the criminal justice system, but into the military justice system. And here we see that already during the war, Soviet, sort of the, what I call the politics of retribution in the book, really undergoes certain shifts.

So for one, there's a move towards trying to clarify local behavior under German rule, because the Soviet authorities soon realized that there is a whole range of different ways in which people could become entangled with the German authorities. We've spoken a lot about the policeman. That seems quite clear and easy to solve. But what about somebody who worked as a translator?

What about somebody who worked as an office clerk? What about a cleaning lady who worked for, worked or had to work for the, for the local military commander? And initially in the first reconquest phase, so in regions in Western Russia, Vanessa Wozom, for example, has written a really important book about that. We see the punishment is particularly strict and somebody who worked as a cleaning lady for the Germans, you know, ended up receiving the same sentence as a local policeman. But that then

changes and in general, we're broadly speaking, we can see how the Soviet punitive process goes through, you know, from more expansive to less expansive, stricter to less stricter faces, which is very similar to what we see happening as well in Western Europe, that the punishment and the prosecution of suspected wartime traitors or collaborators is often influenced by a whole range of different factors.

Franziska Exeler (01:00:10.479)
domestic and some point also international that need to be balanced against each other. And in the case of the Soviet Union, we find that punishment was still harsh, you could say, and these are not fair trials and this is not a fair prosecution. I mean, it's not the assumption of innocent until proven guilty. There are no independent lawyers if they are present at all. But punishment is being mitigated in that it becomes less strict and people who in, let's say,

42 or 43 during the early reconquest phase of the Western Soviet territories would have received the death sentence, then by 44 only receive a prison sentence. And so there is a limited kind of mitigation of punishment that is taking place between 44 to 47, 48 roughly, after which the Soviet courts hand out longer sentences again.

Then there's an amnesty and a period in the 1950s where we don't see a lot of prosecution happening and then a second wave of trials that is picking up again in the 1960s. And then people are being prosecuted all the way until the end of the 1980s.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:25.262)
I mean, and one of the things that's really interesting that you talk about is, and again, there's this running throughout the book is this theme of the Western Belarus, Eastern Belarus sort of issue. And that, of course, one of the challenges that the new authorities of the Belarusian state are encountering is that in Western Belarus, they're basically having to sort of create communism.

in a way that they didn't have to in Eastern Belarus. And so that also, you know, that project is also influencing how they attempt to prosecute people. And conversely, you know, you have really great examples of this, but you know, there are people who kind of reinvent themselves during the war, right? It's people who were collaborators, some of them even sort of bad collaborators who then

join either the Red Army or the partisans or sort of claim to as a way of sort of, know, laundering their past. So that later on when someone comes and says, you know, were a collaborator, they say, no, I was a partisan. And sort of they're both, those are both accurate statements. And so then the question is, which identity is the one that we're going to sort of take official action on?

Franziska Exeler (01:02:49.903)
Yeah, so that's a really interesting case too. It's these that during the war, the general staff of the Soviet partisan movement. this is an official policy coming from the very center in Moscow, which is directing the Soviet partisan movement from the rear. They give out this policy that they are trying to attract people coming, you know, who work as in the police forces, for example, under German control. They're trying to attract them to come over to the German side. And

The reason for that is really quite pragmatic. These are people who know how to fight and they have also the guns that they can bring along and they are young men usually. there's also, I think, another factor in that now one of the problems is that the Soviet authorities in the postwar period, they are never really able to resolve what entirely working for the Germans, quote unquote, as it's put in the sources.

what that really meant because it was such a broad term, just as treason, of course, is also very broad term that which can be applied and, you know, very flexibly. But but they are never quite able to to figure out in each case, you know, what exactly had this entailed, how implicated that somebody really become. Because, for example, with us, so with the police forces under German command, there's there's a phase initially in the summer of 1941 where people joined voluntarily.

But starting from 42, the Germans also simply just draft or force people to work for the police forces. And so these are then, and that doesn't mean that people don't become implicated or complicit in crimes. You you could be drafted or taken into the police forces against you will, but then you still participate in the murder of the Jewish community communities, for example. what it means is that there is an extremely complex situation unfolding in the occupied territories where

you see, partisans are also drafting by force, know, villages, young men and villages receive these summons where in each case one would have to look really, really closely to understand what individual factors motivated somebody's choices. And of course, that's something that when the Soviet authorities return, the criminal justice system can't do, also because it's an illiberal criminal justice system.

Franziska Exeler (01:05:15.451)
But it's also simply a question of capacity. So a lot of people are trying to hide what they did or might have done under the Germans. Especially policemen flee with the Germans in the summer of 1944, which becomes a big issue, for example, in the second wave of trials in the 1960s when the Soviet authorities especially accused West Germany, but also in particular the UK and the US and Canada of harboring war criminals.

and in many cases correctly so. So these are people who took part in, know, Soviet citizens who took part in the Holocaust and then left with the Germans in 44 and via the DP camps in Germany and then made the way to the US or the UK. But what I think is important is like having lived under German occupation, even just as a child carried a huge stigma with it in the post-war period. So even if you're a civilian, had, you you

You weren't aligning yourself with Germans in any way possible, even if you hadn't worked for the Germans, quote unquote. Even then, you would try to hide that as much as possible because there was a general suspicion towards those who had stayed in occupied territory in the post-war Soviet Union. And whenever somebody wanted to enter university, for example, or begin a new job, there was a question on the questionnaires, the standardized questionnaires that people had to fill out. And that was...

Did you live in occupied territory? And if so, when and where? there's the kind of trying to hide that. But then there's that very complicated category of what you could call, again, like in quotes, the traitor turned partisan, that there were some people who went over to the partisan side during the war, then would still be prosecuted after the war. But in their cases, Soviet courts actually allowed for mitigating circumstances. So they would say,

Yes, were fighting with the Germans, you were in a police force, maybe even in an SS unit, but later on you went over to the Soviet side, especially if you were wounded or in other ways had some sort military achievements, that could then lessen your punishment.

Franziska Exeler (01:07:33.787)
But that's not something that's publicly being talked about or that the Soviet authorities make public. mean, that's also something that doesn't fit because it doesn't fit within the official war narrative of the all people's partisan war which had taken place in the Western Soviet Union. It meant that the Soviet Union or the Soviet authorities who would turn this question of

of people's choices into a moral choice. They said, whatever you said, whatever you did was a moral choice that you made under Nazi occupation. But it kind of contradicted that because it showed that the Soviet authorities were also able to make pragmatic choices.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:10.882)
Well, of course, this also, you know, this highlights the challenge that all of the communist states had in dealing with this issue, even in East Germany, which was sort of the the mythic sort of party line is that all these people in Eastern Europe are really, you know, oppressed, you know, communists waiting to rise up against the Nazis. And so, of course, then any any narrative that kind of says,

how do we explain all these people that sided with the Nazis? That's not helpful because that defeats this idea that everyone is in the resistance. It's like, as you talk about in the book, the idea that everybody in Belarus was a partisan, which it's uncomfortable for the myth, for the state to allow that to percolate. But conversely,

there's a certain amount of sort of real politic where they have to recognize that there were bad people and we have to punish those bad people in such a way that it doesn't challenge our official narrative of sort of what everyone did. And of course, I guess one of the most for our listeners, think one of the most egregious examples of this are the, there's a very small number of Soviet prisoners of war who survive

not only being peers, prisoner of war, but being sent to Auschwitz. And then a good number of them are liberated in Auschwitz and then turned around and sent off into the Gulag system. Because as as Francisco just points out, one of the challenges of the Soviet take on. What did you do during occupation is that is that being in the being living in under German rule and or being captured by the Germans sort of suggests that you have.

made some kind of conscious choice to sort of ally yourself with them, which is, you really not helpful because, you know, it's not necessarily as easy to just say, well, the Germans are coming, so I'm going to uproot all of my family and possessions and everything else and try to move to move elsewhere. What did Jewish survivors, how did they engage in this system? Like, how did they? How do they?

Waitman Beorn (01:10:33.154)
you know, accuse their oppressors or try to get justice for what happened to them. You you talked about how for Jews, you know, the Nazis are kind of a faceless, you know, machine, for the, their neighbors are very specific. And so were they able to sort of point out, like you did this and get justice for it?

Franziska Exeler (01:11:01.487)
Yeah, so perhaps quickly on this question of myth, again, like the Soviet Union is not unique in that, right? And the construction of a resistance myth, as you also pointed out, Tony Judd had a really interesting article, I think by now about 25 years ago, where he points to the persistence of resistant myth in Western Europe as well, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and how long it took societies to actually confront that.

I guess in the case of, know, West Germany, certainly East Germany, you know, they were all anti-fascists, but West Germany, the myth then was that it was all the SS, it was all Hitler, you know, it was a small group of people, but my grandfather in the Wehrmacht didn't have anything to do with that. And then, you know, your book and many other books that have showed, or other important books showed how, you know, how implicated the Wehrmacht was in...

and how complicit and actively involved in the Holocaust are examples as well.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:04.302)
And have in France, have, know, Philippe Rousseau wrote a book that is called the Vichy Syndrome, which is, know, and part of it has to do with this idea of like, you know, we were all partisan, we were all in the resistance, even though of course the people that were the most active French resistors were communists, you and nobody wants to be a communist, but you know, you're right. mean, there is, this is not unique to Belarus, but you know, is a challenge, you know, to the Soviet state.

Franziska Exeler (01:12:22.928)
Yeah.

Franziska Exeler (01:12:31.683)
It is a challenge and I think it's also a challenge. This is another big topic, but the history of the Second World War and the narrative of the Second World War is so contentious and essentially in the former Soviet republics today, but at the same time in places like Russia and Belarus, where, especially in Belarus, where we essentially see very

similar narrative to the Soviet one still in place, like the official narrative of the Belarusian state today, of the history of the Second World War, is very similar to the Soviet one, where we see it's so essential to statehood and how difficult it is to just question that narrative, like in Belarus today, carries high consequences, professional but also social, especially the partisan war and resistance and...

there's important work that's been done and oral history interviews that historians have done, I also draw on in the book. But again, like doing that is, you know, it's a lot easier in democratic pluralist societies, whereas in societies, authoritarian societies that actually carries high risk to the extent that today in Belarus,

it carries the risk of criminal prosecution if since 2021 there's a new law in place that those who deny and the quote is the genocide of the belarussian nation end of quote can face criminal prosecution and so and that can be used just like calling anybody a traitor can be used in very different ways and it's mostly directed against political opposition but because it's so broad essentially i mean what i wrote my book would be you know

could fit under that. It includes questioning the narrative of the particular official narrative of the Second World War. And that's very much a problem in that it stifles public discussions and prevents them from taking place in the first place. But yeah, you talked about Holocaust survivors. So perhaps to give our listeners a sense of the destruction.

Franziska Exeler (01:14:52.625)
So of all the Soviet republics and of all European countries at large, proportionately Belarus suffered the highest human losses. So about 1.7 to 2.1 million people, which translates into 19 to 22 % of the population that by June 1941 lived in the territories that would constitute post-1945 Soviet Belarus.

So about 19 to 22 % of that population were killed or died as a result of the war. And that includes almost the entire Jewish population of the Republic. So an estimated 500,000 to 671,000 people. And then as part of these so-called anti-partisan campaigns, which we talked about earlier, the Germans raised approximately 9,200 villages to the ground, more than elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe, and killed up to

345,000 civilians, some of them Jews, but overwhelmingly non-Jewish rural residents. And then the Soviet partisans, according to official numbers, lost at least 37,000 people, but probably many more, and killed at least 17,000 people, but probably also many more in their own retributive measures. So this is really at the heart of darkness during the war. And there are other places, especially Western Ukraine,

where then the organization of Ukrainian Nationalists starts with the ethnic cleansing of Polish speaking villages during the war that are very similar in terms of the amount of destruction and violence. But proportionally, in terms of proportion to its overall population, it suffers the highest human losses and it's one of the hardest hit places by the German occupation. So what that means is when...

Holocaust survivors, you know, whether they survived, most of them survived with the partisans. So they fled from the ghettos to the forest, or they survived fighting in the Red Army, or there's also a smaller group of them who had lived in Western Belarus and were deported in 1939 and 1940 by the Soviet authorities to Siberia, Kazakhstan, which would then return after the war. So when they return after the war,

Franziska Exeler (01:17:16.429)
it's an incredibly isolating experience. I've worked a lot with memoirs and these first encounters with one's former homes are often the moment when really every hope that somebody might have had really shattered. that is the moment when many actually decide never to return. So for most Holocaust survivors who were able to leave the Soviet Union,

And this pertained to those who were from Western Belarus, formerly Eastern Poland and had been Polish citizens before 1939. They are able to leave the Soviet Union after the war under the conditions of the Soviet Polish population exchange. So most of them eventually leave the Soviet Union and whether it's via Poland to the US or to Palestine, slash then later on becomes Israel.

In Eastern Belarus, Holocaust survivors don't have the option of leaving, so they are not allowed to leave the Soviet Union. So many of them then move to a bigger town, especially people in like Babluisk or Minsk. But again, what we see is really that living next to, of living among once shattered lives is so distressing and so painful that people want to leave their former homes because nothing is left.

But it's also because they find that neighbors have moved into their houses. And there's one particular member that I worked a lot with by a Holocaust survivor named Liedmann Moore from a small former shtetl in southwestern Belarus, David Haradork. So he survives fighting with the partisans in the Lithuanian-Belarusian borderlands. He's first in the Vilnius ghetto, then joins the resistance, then the partisans. And he returns after the war and he

then encounters furniture in a neighbor's apartment. he is, so some people decide not to pursue that question of property. They decide not to pursue or question neighbors. They really just want to leave. But Litman Moore is among those who then start to walk around the town and actually question neighbors because they want to find out how their family died. He wants to find out how his parents died, how his siblings died. And

Franziska Exeler (01:19:39.857)
and then meets people, acquaintances from prior to the war, and then in his memoirs tells the story of how slowly, at first people aren't very reluctant to talk, and then slowly they start to share stories, but they never talk about what they themselves did. They always talked about what other people did and the property and the furniture that was taken by others or the others who had joined the local police forces, but not they themselves. So that's perhaps also something that we can generalize a bit that even in this very restrictive environment,

post 1944 where you had a very strong official narrative, know, the very clear cut narrative of good and evil in place. People did talk about who did what during the door. They did talk about, you know, partisans taking food from people against their will or, you know, committing violence. They did talk about who joined the local police forces. This was often done, you know, this was done in private. This was done in families. these stories were there.

But usually people never talked about their own guilt, but about the guilt of others, which is probably something very human, one could say.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:48.898)
Were survivors able to use the Soviet state to get justice in some sense? again, and I suspect that this, again, it's all complicated, there's also, at this point, you have the challenge of the particular Jewish aspect of the occupation and the Soviet state's reluctance to admit that existed. So this whole do not divide the dead.

sort of situation. And, you know, it also is challenging the whole, you know, nation of resisters argument. But, you know, are there people that sort of say, look, that's my house. And this person is a collaborator living in my house. I want my house back. And is the state able to work with that or does it have to kind of throw up its hands?

Franziska Exeler (01:21:33.957)
Mm-hmm.

Franziska Exeler (01:21:40.901)
Yeah, definitely. people, know, Jewish and non-Jewish, survived the war when turned to the Soviet state to have property conflicts resolved. So that's quite common because that also obviously doesn't just happen to Holocaust survivors, but also to others who were drafted to the Red Army. There's a lot of property, know, furniture, household items that passes through very different hands through the war.

And what complicates this again too is that this entire question of property was very personal, because these are personal belongings, you know, with that people attach meaning to. But it's also extremely political because, again, like, what did you do during the war hovered over each kind of property conflict. There was always the question of how did you, you know, in the countryside, how did you get that cow? Did the Germans give it to you? Because the Germans were also

giving out apartments or distributing livestock as a reward to people who they thought worked for them. A lot of local policemen, after the killings of Jewish communities, took the clothes or other items that the Germans didn't want for themselves. And these items then end up on the local markets where they are being sold and resold. So I think it's probably...

I mean, this is a topic that still requires further research, but I think it's very probable to say that in a place, for example, like David Haradok, so a small town, you know, your average small town in southwestern Belarus, where with a large Jewish community that was murdered with significant local participation in the Holocaust,

very likely that everybody in that town will have possessed one piece of property that belonged to a murdered Jewish family. well, some will have been families of policemen who received it that way, but others will just bought it on the market from somebody else who bought it from somebody. meaning, again, this property question is very politically charged in the post-war period.

Franziska Exeler (01:24:01.273)
And the Soviet state is the only state that people can turn to. So Holocaust survivors also turn to the Soviet state to try to have property returned. And one way of doing this was through the courts. But another way, which was quite common in the Soviet Union to try to reach somebody was to write so-called complaint letters to the authorities. And so they would turn to a political leader. In this case, for example, Panamarenko was the first secretary of the Communist Party in Belarus and sent letters to him and then ask him

to help them have property returned.

Waitman Beorn (01:24:34.702)
I mean, this is fascinating. We could go on for hours. I really recommend folks pick this up. But we should probably close. Can you tell us, what is one book on the Holocaust that you would recommend or that you found influential or important for your work?

Franziska Exeler (01:24:57.019)
Can I mention two really quickly? They're very similar, but they're also different. So they're actually memoirs. And I think they are wonderful for teaching too. So there are two memoirs by two really remarkable women. One is called Zulia Woloszynska-Rubin and the other one is Hasia Bornstein-Bielicka. And they're similar in that both of them are from, they were both of them born in Eastern Poland.

Waitman Beorn (01:24:58.082)
You may, you may, yes, you may mention too.

Franziska Exeler (01:25:23.665)
slash then what became Western Belarus after 1939. they, Julia Woloszynski-Rubin joined the Bielski Partizans. So this was a particular partisan unit because it was a Jewish partisan unit, which later on came under Soviet command, but it it differed from the Soviet partisans in that it had from the beginning family camps and it was about more about Jewish survival than about

It wasn't about communism, was about Jewish survival in the Nowokrudek region and the Naliboki forest in western Belarus. both, and Hasia Bonczan-Bialicka was born in Grodno and then was in the ghetto there later on, moves to what survivors call the so-called Aryan side. So she is able, because she speaks Polish without a Yiddish accent, she's able to

has of as a, you know, she describes as she says, a Polish village girl, a girl from the villages, and then joins the resistance there. And then later on is in Białystok again, also on the resistance side. And both of them wrote these memoirs, which are really remarkable because they're very personal. So they're very intimate. They also talk about sexual violence, for example, which is really rare because it's such a painful

and at the same time also taboo. But they have a very kind of analytical, very complex take on their personal history. So it's the combination of the personal with the really analytical, political complex analyzing that I find really remarkable in these two memoirs and that are both touching and very illuminating at the same time.

Waitman Beorn (01:27:17.484)
And what are the titles again? Do you have the titles?

Franziska Exeler (01:27:19.269)
So sorry, so, Woloszynski-Wolbin is Against the Tide, the story of an unknown partisan, and it was published in Jerusalem in 1980. And the other one, Chasia Bontzheim-Pielicka, was written together with Naomi Issa, it's called One of the Few Resistance Fighters and Educators, 1939 to 1947.

Waitman Beorn (01:27:38.392)
Great. I'll just put that in here so that we can put those in the notes for our listeners. Again, thank you so much for coming on and spending your time with us. Everybody, I highly recommend, you can, pick up the book. Her book is called Ghosts of War, Nazi Occupation, and its Aftermath in Soviet Bellers. And it's incredibly nuanced, interesting, full of really insightful examples and stories.

And as I suggested earlier, it's incredibly irritating, but in the best way, which is the way that historians do it, which is saying, well, hold on a second. It's far more complex than just a black and white answer. As always for listeners, please, if you can give us a rating, leave a comment. These things help us and help things keep going. And Francisca, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Franziska Exeler (01:28:37.691)
Thank you so much.