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Finland's Holocaust: Silences of History. ed. Simo Muir and Hana Worthen. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. x + 296.
Since the end of the cold War, scholars of Finland's past frequently have presented their work as a challenge to some kind of conspiracy of silence, stifling consensus, or outright censorship. this collection of articles avoids such exaggerated claims of daring and justifies its use of the word "silences" to describe Finland's various relationships to the Holocaust. this review will concentrate on two of the several silences revealed by this book: antisemitism in Finland before World War ii and the "separation narrative" (p. 1) concerning Finland's relationship to the Holocaust.
Scholarship and popular historical memory have persistently maintained that Finland's refusal to surrender its Jewish citizens to the Final Solution proves the absence of antisemitism in Finland's past. Simo Muir, in his article on the treatment of antisemitism in Finnish historiography (pp. 46-68), describes the wall of official and scholarly denial that he encountered when he raised antisemitic motivations in his study of a rejected doctoral dissertation written in 1937 by a Jewish student at Helsinki university, israel-Jakob Schur. although Muir treats his opponents in that event fairly, one wonders if another contributor could have written about this important and national debate, in which Muir himself was a major protagonist. Such a choice could have mitigated doubts about the objectivity of the volume under review.
the article by Malte Gasche and Simo Muir (pp. 128-50) addresses the discrimination experienced by Finland's Jewish athletes during the late 1930s. in particular, they focus on the case of abraham tokazier, a Finnish Jew who finished first in the 100 meters at the first track-andfield event to be held at Helsinki's new Olympic Stadium in 1938. Judges officially awarded tokazier fourth place. the authors suggest officials were motivated by a desire to please German officials at the event. Moreover,...