7 - The Holocaust and the Cinematic Landscapes of Postmemory in Lithuania, Hungary and Ukraine

Summary

In recent years Holocaust documentaries have focused with consistency on the complex network of connections between personal and collective histories inherent to postgenerational journeys to ancestral homes or to the sites of the destruction of the Jews of Eastern Europe. This chapter follows three of these journeys and the documentary accounts of the itineraries of three travellers: a news reporter who is searching for her grandfather's house in Lithuania, an estranged Hassidic woman who is looking for an old couch in Hungary and a Roman Catholic priest who is following the footsteps of his grandfather to Ukraine. By means of familial connections with the past, these travellers explore landscapes characterised by profound absences and their journeys to Eastern Europe aim at exhuming and unlocking memories of the annihilated Jewish communities of these three countries. As Brad Prager has argued, Holocaust documentaries have used testimonies situated in present-day landscapes to ‘awaken memories of other, older landscapes and testimonial performances’ (2015: 25). Documentaries such as those investigated in this chapter have also engaged with these landscapes in order to retrieve distant histories of life and destruction, of loss, nostalgia, longing and mourning. These films have also contributed to addressing the Holocaust as a spatially complex event beyond its canonical localisation in Auschwitz. As Naomi Mandel suggests, the specific identification of the Holocaust with one location can give the false impression that ‘the Holocaust is (merely) what occurred at the camps’ whereas in fact it is the ‘dissolution of an entire network of human relations, not just the killing, that constitutes the Holocaust’ (2001: 219). With the same preoccupation for the ways in which Holocaust testimonies can maintain a limited topographical engagement with the complexity of the genocide, Hannah Pollin-Galay has argued that ‘selected sites of mourning are elevated to a mythical register, while the surrounding space, which might reveal signs of contemporary culture and events, is largely left out of the tour’ (2013: 29). As they articulate a reflection on the destruction of a network of human relations based on a focus on the places of extermination as well as the surrounding spaces, cinematic journeys to the sites of the Holocaust can contribute to tracing the topography of these landscapes by means of an investigation of individual histories and familial itineraries.