📩 Lessons (un)learned

DEAR READER,

Mass protests are sweeping across Central and Eastern Europe. Since November 2024, Georgia and Serbia have been rocked with unrest, and now Slovakia has joined the list following Robert Fico's meeting with Putin. It is worth noting that Fico recently rejected Zelenskyy's invitation to discuss Russian gas transit through Ukraine. This raises the question as to whether it was a bluff or a blunder. Either way, Fico's now facing protests and a potential no-confidence vote as MPs bail on his coalition.

There's a common thread too. Governments across the region are labeling these protests as “foreign-backed”, with Georgia going a step further, accusing the “Global War Party” and “Deep State” of interference. I think it is only a matter of time before other authoritarian leaders in CEE adopt the exact same rhetoric. Sadly, this tactic distracts us from the real foreign interference (looking at Germany) and creates further divisions. So, have we truly learned from history?

On that note, today is International Holocaust Remembrance day — the anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation. To reflect on this, we asked Colleen Willis, a graduate of Jagiellonian University focusing on Holocaust memory and national heritage, to give us a deep dive into how the Holocaust is remembered and what lessons have we (un)learned from it.

Lastly, Talk Eastern Europe is back with its first episode of 2025. Check it out below!

Enjoy reading this week’s “brief”!

— Giorgi Beroshvili, Editor

January 27th marks International Holocaust Remembrance day. While some countries observe this day on other dates that hold special national significance, most commemorate the Holocaust on January 27th, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Auschwitz, a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland, remains the site of the largest mass murder in history. It is no surprise that so many countries reflect on Nazism on this day, as Auschwitz has become a symbol of the Holocaust and Nazi totalitarianism. This is due not only to the sheer scale of human destruction but also to the diverse identities of the victims. While the overwhelming majority of those murdered at Auschwitz were Jewish, tens of thousands of other victims of Nazi ideology, including non-Jewish Poles, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, political prisoners, and Soviet prisoners-of-war were robbed of their lives in violent and dehumanising conditions.

While many are in agreement that Nazism represents the nadir of civilisation and that it should serve as a cautionary tale to all of humanity, the reality that different populations suffered Nazism in different ways means that there is discord among those who inherit this legacy about how it should be remembered and by whom. Even the European Union, which emerged out of the rubble of World War II to transform European nation-states from enemies to neighbours, has been unable to promote a unified narrative that holds equal weight to the national memories of its member states.

In recent years, Israel has become the center of international controversy regarding its culture of Holocaust remembrance. As various Israeli leaders reference the Holocaust to justify state-sponsored actions against Gaza, many observers feel uncomfortable with the comparison, especially as there is growing agreement that Israel’s actions constitute genocide. While outsiders often express their frustrations by using history and statistics to challenge the comparison or even to invert the oppressor-victim hierarchy, for many Israelis, the intense international scrutiny and the historical opposition of Hamas to the existence of a Jewish state reduces Holocaust memory to the fact that the Holocaust was an existential threat against the Jewish people.

Last November, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. It did not take long for people to question what this would mean for the annual commemoration at Auschwitz, prompting Polish officials to assure that Netanyahu would not be arrested if he attended. However, there is no indication that Netanyahu plans to go, possibly as a way of signalling that he believes Jews have been excluded from the international dialogue on Holocaust remembrance. The tension surrounding Netanyahu’s potential attendance underscores the powerful global impact of the Holocaust’s legacy and the ongoing effort to ensure that the right lessons are learned – though we have yet to reach a consensus on what those lessons should be. This International Holocaust Remembrance day, let us honour the survivors who are still with us, and reflect upon the immense pain they and millions of others suffered at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.

— Colleen Willis, Graduate in European Studies

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