Abstract
This chapter explores the role of guilt, responsibility and trauma in community formation and erosion. Historians of World War II and the Holocaust often misread avoidance strategies, such as deflecting guilt onto others, minimizing harm committed, or shifting attention on heroic accounts, such as resistance and rescue, for silence, for an absence of emotions.
Examining how complicity and collaboration in the Holocaust was publicly processed, most often rejected but also acknowledged in postwar Slovakia, this chapter offers a different perspective. Reading institutionally written documentation against ego-documents, including early and late witness testimonies, Kubátová argues that avoidance strategies are a response to the voicing of experiences that conflict with the official, self-pleasing discourse.