Q and A with Yehuda Bauer
Michael Orbach: To take the title literally, what inspired you to write a book about the demise of the shtetl?
Yehuda Bauer: The basic reason for my writing “The Death of the Shtetl” was the fact that there had been until now no attempt to deal with the small shtetlach of Eastern Europe on a historical, academic, level. I had read a great deal about them, and had in fact conducted a yearly seminar at Hebrew University, at which the students chose a different place each year to investigate its fate. Not only shtetlach were selected, also large places (Vienna, Tarnow, Minsk, etc.). In my book, I did not use even one of the places we had discussed, but I used the same methodology.
MO: How would you say the reality of the shtetl differs from its interpretation in current culture and memory?
YB: There is still a nostalgic view of the shtetl, the “heim”, from which people fled if they only could, so the nostalgia stands in clear contradiction to reality. The image of the deeply religious, tightly-knit group, exhibiting wide-reaching solidarity, still prevails — not everywhere, to be sure, but among many people. The reality was that orthodoxy was declining, as was solidarity, though elements of these things certainly continued to exist. In Poland generally, the Bund was the most important political Jewish group, not the Zionists, but in Eastern Poland, the area I researched, it was different: literally all the shtetlach were controlled by mutually antagonistic Zionist parties, for reasons I tried to explain. I found the Yizkor books published by a very large number of shtetlach both very informative and also very misleading, as they tried to preserve the kind of nostalgic memory that had less and less basis in fact.
MO: Did shtetl dwellers fare any better than their counterparts in the major European cities?
YB: The shtetl was, by definition, a small community in which people knew each other or of each other, and there had existed a sense of mutual responsibility. As my purpose was to examine the reaction of Jews to the unfolding events, it became clear that there were important differences between the shtetlach and the larger places, although there were also important similarities. Inhabitants of shtetlach certainly did not fare any better than any other Jews under Nazi control, but my purpose was not to deal with the perpetrators, so that question was irrelevant in this particular research.
MO: In the book, you use the term “amida” to signify defiance, was there defiance in the shtetl?
YB: There certainly was defiance in many shtetlach — there was also a total collapse of society and the lack of any kind of defiance in other shtetlach. I tried to find out why there should have been just widely different types of reaction in communities that were geographically and socially so near to each other.
MO: How did the partisans fare?
YB: There were many, probably thousands, of Jews that were murdered by Soviet partisans, and there were thousands who survived because they joined the partisans. It is far from being a black-and-white story, and I tried to explain why that should have been so. Most people who survived owed their lives to either the few people who hid them and fed them, or to Soviet partisans. At least one major partisan commander (Vassily Chernishev [“Platon”]) was recognized as a “Righteous.” Some of the murderers among the partisans are also known by their names.
MO: Do you believe there is an increase in Holocaust denial? If there is what would you say is a cause of it?
YB: I think that outright denial in the West is marginal, though it continues to exist. But there is “soft” denial — comparisons between Nazis and Israelis, questioning the figures, arguing for a non-difference between the genocide of the Jews and other genocides, etc. The major problem is massive Holocaust denial in the Moslem world, sometimes taking the form of saying that the Holocaust indeed happened, but the Moslems will do it much better next time (Sheikh Yussif Qaraddawi in an el-Jazeerah broadcast in early 2009). There is a large number of Moslem intellectuals — in the Moslem world itself, not only in the Moslem diaspora — who oppose Holocaust denial, so the issue is hotly debated. However, there can be no doubt that the major danger is in that world, in both its Sunni and its Shiite versions
