Post-War Fates of Collaborators and Survivors

Abstract

In many respects the story of the local police has remained untold. Mostly uprooted from their homes, the few Jewish survivors engaged themselves in rebuilding their lives; many have been reluctant to burden their children with too much of their difficult past. Their memories have been preserved quietly in Memorial books, memoirs and court depositions. Former policemen have also remained silent about their wartime experiences. Even in the former Soviet Union, the trials of numerous collaborators were quickly overshadowed by a monolithic Soviet historiography, which stressed heroic resistance to the invader and played down the extent of local collaboration. Geography and post-war developments explain how many pieces of the puzzle have been kept secret for the last 30 or 50 years.