During WWII and even more so afterwards, Soviet authorities ignored and actively suppressed information about the uniquely Jewish tragedy that occurred during the Holocaust, in Eastern and Western Europe, as well as in the FSU. In the West, the postwar perception of the Holocaust focused on the ghettos and the Nazi extermination camps in Poland, especially on Auschwitz, largely because of the inaccessibility of Soviet archives, which forced scholars to write the history of the Holocaust in the East using German documents. In addition, the Cold War, as well as virulent postwar Soviet antisemitism played their part in suppressing any reliable information on the Holocaust in the territories of the USSR.
Film historian Jeremy Hicks also pointed out that in the FSU, there simply were no images to convey the story of the Holocaust that took place there, which was, for the most part, mass shootings. Since the dissolution of the FSU, scholars have begun piecing together a more complete history of the Holocaust in those territories.
In this context, the nine-part documentary series "Searching for the Unknown Holocaust" greatly expands the collective memory of the Holocaust, continuing the tradition created by Claude Lanzmann’s monumental film Shoah (1985). The series was created by Boris Maftsir, an Israeli filmmaker and former Prisoner of Zion, whose distinguished career has seen him produce over 200 documentaries and direct over 30 films.
In 2013, Maftsir completed his tenure as Head of the Names Recovery Project for the FSU. Since then, he devoted himself to "Searching for the Unknown Holocaust," which was filmed in Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Moldova and Romania.
"All of the films in the series end with a title expressing my deep gratitude to the staff of Yad Vashem, my source of knowledge and inspiration," he recently declared.
In the unique series, Maftsir and his team brought to light events which, until now, were not part of the collective memory of the Holocaust. "Archival footage from the regions I filmed is practically nonexistent, mainly because of a Nazi Propaganda Office ban on filming atrocities, according to an explicit order issued in December 1941, and because the few Soviet film archives as well as the means of film production and distribution in the FSU were tightly controlled by the government," he explains. "As a result, I decided to follow Lanzmann's cinematic practices – interviewing survivors and local non-Jews who witnessed the atrocities, as well as historians and archivists, against the backdrop of contemporary images of the cities, towns and other sites where the killings took place."
The result is an expansive and detailed cinematic representation of the unique nature of the Holocaust in the FSU, stressing its complexity as well as how it differed from the industrialized mass murder in the extermination camps, the latter having become the overriding symbol of the Holocaust in global postwar consciousness.
"My task was further complicated by the fact that I was dealing with the basics: having to explain what happened, where it happened, and who the victims and perpetrators were," adds Maftsir. "Lanzmann, on the other hand, depicted a story that led to a very well-known endpoint: the extermination camps."
The ninth film, The Mystery of the Black Book, is based on the eponymous publication compiled by prominent Soviet Jewish writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Vassily Grossman Bringing a wealth of archival documents, testimonies and other materials, this last chapter of the series sheds light on some of the reasons why the story of the murder of the Jews in the FSU was, for the most part, suppressed, until "Searching for the Unknown Holocaust" appeared on the screen.
All of the films of the series are available for direct viewing worldwide via the project's website and YouTube channel, and all of them, as well as all of the outtakes filmed by Maftsir and his cinematographer Ron Katzenelson, have been deposited at the Yad Vashem Visual Center.
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 95.
