Patterns of Silence: French Witnesses of Nazi Crimes in Occupied Ukraine

Abstract

Literature on the Soviet treatment of the Holocaust is riddled with generalizations about a conspiracy of silence, as opposed to the sacred status the genocide came to hold in ‘the West.’ Yet what scholars have interpreted as the ‘Western’ response has been mainly limited to initiatives emerging from countries that did not experience occupation during World War II. This article examines French prisoners of war at the Rava-Russka camp in Ukraine who played vital roles in Soviet investigations of Nazi atrocities. Back home, these Frenchmen found that joining the Gaullist narrative of the war depended upon whether they could demonstrate their resistance, a revision in which recollections of crimes against Jews had no place. By analyzing how French witnesses presented their experiences differently to the Soviet and French governments and how each government manipulated these testimonies, this article argues for the need to depart from the East-West dichotomy imposed by the Cold War. Once the Soviet case is placed in a Europe-wide context, it becomes clear the USSR was not a backward outlier uniquely committed to a conspiracy of silence. On the contrary, the Holocaust had elements of a ‘usable past’ only for the Soviet Union.