13 - Patriotic memories and the genocide

Summary

The three national memories organised around the paradigm of national martyrdom, described in the previous chapter, were only a partial representation of the plural persecutions distinguished in chapter 11. The way in which wartime persecutions were represented in the post-war years indeed functioned as a metaphor, and more particularly a pars pro toto. The central image was that of the hero-victim of the repression of the Resistance combat, numerically only a modest part of all the victims of Nazi persecution. In a traditional patriotic memory, the metaphor excluded all other victims. In an ‘anti-fascist’ memory, the metaphor was inclusive by assimilation: all victims of fascism were per se anti-fascists and thus somehow, if not heroes, at the very least martyrs in a noble cause. In the Netherlands, the commemoration of persecution was essentially traditional and patriotic, and the anti-fascist discourse remained marginal and oppositional. In France and Belgium, the commemoration was largely inspired by the anti-fascist discourse, but amended by traditional patriotism. Contrary to the Netherlands, the memory of persecution was inclusive of all victims, but symbolic features distinguished the heroes from the rest: the ‘title’ and medal in Belgium, the separate law for ‘deportees of the resistance’ in France. Whether by exclusion or assimilation, these memories did not represent the distinct experience of one particular group – one group amongst many, but numerically by far the most important: the Jewish victims of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis.