Dan Little: Europe after World War II

Daniel Little writes about Europe after World War II.

Perhaps more than in most histories, Judt's narrative makes it clear that there are large moral realities interwoven with the facts and events he conveys. Individuals commit actions that are deplorable or admirable. But more profoundly, whole nations were confronted with choices and actions in these decades that were formative for generations to come. This is nowhere more apparent than in the ways different European countries dealt with their own responsibility for the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust. Judt deals with this issue in the epilogue to the book, and it is an important piece of historical writing all by itself. (A version was published in the New York Review of Books (link).) He demonstrates that almost none of the involved nations — especially the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, France — lived up to the duty of confronting honestly the behavior of its citizens and officials during the Shoah. France's mendacity in particular on the subject of its willing deportation of 65,000 Jews created a permanent stain on French culture — and it laid the basis for the continuation of denial of French responsibility by the FN up to the present day.

Emphasis Mine

Here we encounter the interplay between subjective and objective realities. An individual's subjective reality of denying the Holocaust is bolstered by the objective reality of no offical acknowledgement of the State's historical role in the Holocaust. And the objective reality cannot be changed without overcoming the fierce resistance of these individuals.