Postwar

When the Czechoslovak parliament voted in 1991 to restitute property seized after the war it explicitly limited the benefits to those expropriated after 1948—so as to exclude Sudeten Germans expelled in 1945-46, before the Communists seized power.

429

Under President Putin, Russia continues to insist that the Balts were liberated by the Red Army, after which they voluntarily joined the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

430

The memorial was not uncontroversial: in addition to many who disliked its abstract conception there were those, including a Christian Democrat Mayor of the city, Eberhard Diepgen, who criticized it for helping turn Berlin into ‘the capital of repentance’.

431

In March 2004 eighty-four Hungarian writers, including Peter Esterhazy and Gyorgy Konrad, left the country’s Writers’ Union in protest at its tolerance of anti-Semitism. The occasion for the walk out were comments by the poet Kornel Dobrentei following the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz. The prize, according to Dobrentei, was ‘conscience money’ for a writer who was just indulging the ‘taste for terror’ of ‘his minority’.

432

The last statue of Franco in Madrid was quietly removed at dawn, in front of an audience of one hundred onlookers, on March 17th 2005.

433

‘We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses…. We are… an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications, or their attributes or their good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it, or they returned mute.’ Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (NY, 1988), pp. 83-84.

434

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982), p. 116.