3. The Canon of Remembering Romanian Communism: From Autobiographical Recollections to Collective Representations

Remembrance, History, and Justice

“…The Austrians still chose him as their president. 33 In the Soviet Union, official anti-Semitism blocked out most of the story of the persecution and destruction of Jews. After the war, Stalin became increasingly anti-Semitic, and this remained part of a policy of discrimination until the fall of Communism in 1991.…”

“…Where local authorities did not cooperate with orders from the Germans and from the Vichy government to turn in Jews, relatively few were caught. 35 In my family's case, we were in a strongly social- 33 Richard Mitten, The Politics of Anti-Semitic Prejudice: The Waldheim Phenomenon in Austria (Boulder: Westview, 1992). Marrus and Paxton,Vichy et les Juifs,[191][192][193][194][195][196][325][326][327][328][329][330][331][332][333][334][335][336][337][338][339] ist village in Vichy France, but near the border of the part of France directly occupied by the Germans.…”

“…Between 1994 and 2009 more than 500,000 Cubans left their homeland-a statistic that did not include those who departed illegally. 36 Neither did this total include the thousands who surely perished 33 See the full text of Ernesto Guevara, "Socialism and Man in Cuba" (March 1965) while trying to cross the perilous Florida Straits on flimsy rafts. 37 In January 2013, the Cuban government loosened restrictions for those who wished to travel abroad with the result that in the first ten months of the year more than 226,000 Cubans left the island (compared with more than 176,000 during the same period a year earlier).…”

“…32 Though historians, prosecutors, and producers of television documentaries had examined the Holocaust since the 1960s, it was first in the 1980s that the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe, by then widely known as the Holocaust, became a topic of debate and discussion in a broad public extending beyond the political, judicial, and intellectual elites. 33 The radical left had marginalized it in the "red decade" of the late 1960s and 1970s, compared nuclear deterrence to a "nuclear Auschwitz" in the early 1980s and made antagonism toward Israel one of its defining features. Indeed, the leftist terrorist organizations made common cause with Palestinian terrorists who were attacking Israel as well as Jewish persons and institutions 32 Beginning in the first months after the end of World War II and continuing in the seven decades since, there were always German voices seeking "finally" to put the past behind and forget about the Holocaust.…”

“…Taking into account such context, one can identify two types of anti-communism: the one that turns the past into an instrument used to achieve political goals, and the one that wants to use political power in order to implement certain policies of memory. 33 The failure of the latter, despite the fact that it managed to have a significant impact on shaping democratic political cultures in the countries of the former socialist bloc, was important both for "freeing" anti-communist parties from their social base and for understanding the role of the state institutions that were constructed after the collapse of communist regimes.…”