Speaker: Violeta Davoliūtė, Tarptautinių santykių ir politikos mokslų institutas (Institute of International Relations and Political Science), Vilniaus universitetas (Vilnius University) - Personal Website, Academia.edu, ORCID

Abstract: »Several days after the German invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941, the Jewish residents of the small town of Darbėnai (Dorbian) in north-west Lithuania were forced out of their homes by German security police and local collaborators. Estera Kverelytė (Ester Kverel) a gymnasium student, was sheltered by the family of her best friend. For several weeks, Estera kept a diary, until she was seized by the former mailman, now collaborating with the Germans. This young man, well known to locals, was seen taking Estera to a nearby forest, where she was found dead, her body battered and violated. In 1964, Estera’s story was featured in a Soviet documentary film entitled Unfinished Page of a Diary. Alluding to her tragic demise but providing no details concerning her fate, the film constructs a typical Cold War narrative, in which the hard facts of genocide are spun into the yarn of Soviet solidarity in the face of Western imperialism. The identity of the alleged perpetrator is positioned outside the local community through the metonymy of the empty chair of the accused ringleader tried in absentia—a Catholic priest who fled the Red Army’s advance and now resides in the USA. The agency and motivation of local perpetrators are glossed over by the label of “bourgeois nationalist” in the progressive narrative of Soviet justice. In Lithuania today, the name of Estera Kverelytė is known to few, just as few know much about the prevalence of sexual violence committed by locals against their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. Many more will have heard of Elena Spirgevičiūtė, a Lithuanian girl murdered by a pro-Soviet partisan after an attempted rape in 1944. Her case was silenced during the Soviet period, but her diary was preserved and published secretly by dissidents. Commemorations of her fate became public as Lithuania approached independence, and a process to canonize her as a saint was initiated, portraying her as a “martyr of faith and chastity.” Histories of war are notorious for glossing over gender and sexuality; the experience of sexual violence behind Germany’s Eastern Front during WWII was ‘silenced’ by taboos of Holocaust representation, the conspiracy of silence regarding local collaboration, and the opacity of the local to outsiders. The ‘return of memory’ since 1989 has involved the ‘unsilencing’ of sexual violence, and as Andrea Pető emphasizes, the process of unsilencing is subject to a politics of its own. Drawing on the feminist literature of situated knowledge, this paper analyses the politics of silencing and unsilencing the experience of sexual violence in German-occupied Lithuania in Soviet and post-Soviet Lithuania. Questioning the dichotomy of global universalism vs. local parochialism, it analyzes the instrumentalization of gender and trauma and argues for critical engagement with the local, embodied, and partial perspective of eyewitnesses against the various forms of unlocatable and irresponsible knowledge claims.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Germany / Nazi Germany | History of Europe: History of Lithuania / German occupation of Lithuania during World War II | Genocide: The Holocaust / The Holocaust in Lithuania | Military: Soviet partisans / Soviet partisans in Latvia | Sex and the law: Sexual violence / Sexual violence during the Holocaust, Elena Spirgevičiūtė