SUMMARY:

Darius Staliūnas summarizes the main points of his book, Enemies for a Day: Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuanian under the Tsars (Budapest; New York, 2015) for Russian-language readers. Like Eastern Galicia, which is the focus of Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York, 2018), Lithuania became the site of the most gruesome anti-Jewish violence after 1941, perpetrated in large part by local gentile residents. Of the vast prewar Jewish populations in both regions, 90–95 percent did not survive the Holocaust. And like Eastern Galicia, Lithuania had had a centuries-long tradition of peaceful interconfessional coexistence, with no prehistory of anti-Semitic violence until World War I. In his book, Staliūnas meticulously searches for any past conflicts involving Lithuanian Jews in order to find the roots of the Holocaust in Lithuanian society and discovers no precedents that could explain the scale of intercommunal violence toward “neighbors” unleashed in the wake of the Soviet retreat in June 1941. In the essay he concludes that the preconditions for the annihilation of Jews developed in Lithuanian society only over the several years before and including the Soviet annexation of the country in 1940, and the Holocaust became possible only after Nazi occupation in 1941.