Soviet Publications of Holocaust Diaries in the 1960s: Anne Frank and Masha Rolnikaite

Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 2022. Vol. 36. No. 1. P. 60–73.

Estraikh G.

A strict ban on organized Jewish activities apart from those of a limited number of religious bodies, coupled with the state monopoly on all publishing, simplified the Soviet Union’s control over Holocaust-related publication. The appearance of any such work was an idiosyncratic event, associated with concurrent political and cultural contexts and official agendas. The relatively liberal climate of the first post-Stalinist decade raised the possibility of such events. Soviet publication of both the diary of Anne Frank and Masha Rolnikaite’s I Must Tell reflected in part foreign policy considerations, but each played a rather different role in the Soviet cultural sphere. Anne Frank’s diary—not reprinted for three decades—would be referred to as, and possibly read only as, an important anti-fascist narrative with distant relevance to wartime events in the Soviet Union. Masha Rolnikaite (Rolnik), a survivor of the Vilnius ghetto, would become a widely published belletrist “Soviet Anne Frank.”

Keywords: Jews, Holocaust, history of USSR

Publication based on the results of: Soviet Social, Political and Cultural Practices in Transnational Context (2022)