ABSTRACT
A set of congruent historical myths has dominated Belgian collective memory and discourse on the subject of the Shoah in that country. According to this narrative, anti-Jewish measures were imposed on a reluctant and resisting Belgian public and officialdom by the Germans or the “Nazis”. Compliance was minimal. Measures were implemented largely at the behest of the victims. In the loop of traditional Holocaust taxonomical structures, perpetrator/victim/bystander, the first two categories are filled easily by the Germans (Nazis) and the Jews. The Belgians were, in their own collective narration of the period, either passive observers or active resisters. At worst their activities could be classified as falling into the category of “passive collaboration”.1 It is this incongruous historical category, passive collaboration, which characterizes the myths about local participation in the persecution of Jews. This passivity and its construction are the direct results of the creation of the limits of permissible, lawful, constitutional, conduct by the highest legal and governmental instances, which in turn led to the narration of the national mythology of the Jewish question in occupied Belgium.
