Gendering "history of fighting and suffering": war and deportation in the narratives of women resistance fighters in Lithuania

ENThese observations raise several important and painful questions, such as: how to remember the deportations under Stalin and the war of resistance without competition in victimhood, and without creating new lines of exclusion and marginalization? How to make sure that the experiences of minorities and other groups are not marginalized? Is it possible to develop commemorative and remembrance strategies that go beyond the nation state and become a bridge to understand the pain of others, without erasing the significant historical differences among various traumas? [...] Following this line of thinking, this chapter consists of the following sections. First, I briefly describe the current memory landscape in Lithuania, paying attention to the transformations of the “fighting and suffering” memory regime. Second, I present several alternatives to this regime that attempt to go beyond the nation-state and imagine other ways of commemorating deportations and war of resistance in Lithuania. One such way is to focus on the experiences of ethnic minorities that were part of the events associated with monumental national traumas. An other way, drawing on feminist literature, is to ask questions about gender and women when analyzing traumatic events and their commemoration. Drawing on narratives of women who were participants in the anti-Soviet war of resistance, this essay develops the second alternative in more detail. I will conclude by outlining the main contours of a gender perspective on the anti-Soviet war of resistance in Lithuania. [p. 103-104].

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