The Gaze of the Implicated Subject: Non-Jewish Testimony to Communal Violence during the German Occupation of Lithuania

Abstract

The outbreak of communal violence against Jews catalysed by the German invasion of the USSR was long neglected by scholarship due to biases against eyewitness testimony and the opacity of local events to outside observers. A growing number of studies on the topic have recently emerged, drawing from the eyewitness testimonies of Jewish survivors and previously inaccessible Soviet archives. This article analyses the lesser-known audio-visual recordings of interviews with non-Jewish witnesses to communal violence in provincial towns and villages of Lithuania. Collected decades after the events, they relate the same cruelty and destruction as recalled by Jewish survivors. As insider accounts from the local, non-Jewish community, they disclose manifold and divergent subject positions in the face of extreme violence. Marked by a forensic mode of discourse that accentuates individual agency and responsibility, they diverge from the prevailing apologetics of national narratives of the period. Instead, they reflect an immediacy of apprehension rooted in the intimate topographical setting of rural Lithuania under German occupation, a local memory not yet assimilated to national narratives of heroism and suffering. Finally, they express the memory of mutual surveillance, intimidation, and coercion that would endure for decades after the end of the war in these locales.