Auschwitz and Buchenwald without jews? An approach to the Holocaust in European Communist narratives (1945-1970)

Abstract

The article addresses, from a comparative transnational approach, some forms of remembrance of the Holocaust in European communist policies and narratives between 1945 and the sixties. It analyses the East German and Polish remembrance of Buchenwald and Auschwitz and, in its last part, explores the keys to meaning handled by the French and Spanish communist discourses about both places of memory. The text highlights the anti-fascist paradigm as the axis that defined European communist memory. An anti-fascism where Estate Socialism and Western communisms converged. However, during that period we must also speak of a dissimilar degree of evocation of the Jew as a singular victim, symbolic adjustments, flexibilities and temporal or national modulations.