ABSTRACT
In postwar Europe, on both sides of the Iron Curtain that would divide Europe, there emerged two different, yet perversely interrelated, “resistance myths.”1 In the West, one encountered what Henry Rousso termed the “Vichy syndrome,”2 which was aimed at obliterating or marginalizing from the memory of the collective “us” the true dimensions of wartime collaborationism. Individuals might have been pronounced guilty or even lynched directly after the war, but the nation as a whole would be forged into one of supposed resisters “in its overwhelming majority.” This “claim … was perforce made and pedagogically enforced all over Europe, from Italy to Poland, from the Netherlands to Romania.”3
