‘Vindictive’ Polish leaders using new war museum to rewrite history, says academic
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Version 0 of 1. A spectacular new museum of the second world war is at the centre of an extraordinary row between international academics and Poland’s political leadership, amid claims that the country’s ruling Law and Justice party is putting history at the service of politics. Due to open in December in the northern city of Gdańsk, the museum is billed as one of Europe’s prestige cultural projects for 2016. It comprises 13 storeys – six of them underground – and has been built at a cost of £72m. Dozens of countries across Europe and beyond have donated artefacts, including a Sherman tank and a Soviet T34 tank. The British historian Norman Davies, who is revered in Poland for his many books about the country, has been closely associated with the project for eight years and heads its high-ranking international advisory board. He told the Observer that attempts by the Law and Justice government to hijack the museum are “Bolshevik’’ in style and “paranoid’’. He said: “The Law and Justice government does not want a bunch of foreign historians to decide what goes on in ‘their’ museum.’’ The Oxford-based academic said one of the driving forces behind government hostility towards the project in its present form was Law and Justice strongman Jarosław Kaczyński, “who runs everything like a personal politburo.’’ There is also increasing evidence that a new “politics of memory” policy is being used to settle scores with political rivals, such as the former Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa and the European council president Donald Tusk, prime minister of Poland at the time of the Smolensk air disaster that killed Lech Kaczyński, Jarosław’s twin brother. Both men are particularly associated with the city of Gdańsk. A government move to take control of the new museum appears to have been long planned. Soon after coming to power last autumn – when the new museum was almost complete – the Law and Justice government announced the creation of another museum in Gdańsk, at Westerplatte, where the first shots of the second world war were fired. Last week culture minister and deputy prime minister Piotr Gliński said he was considering merging the flagship museum with the as-yet-unbuilt Westerplatte museum. “This way he would create a new institution, with a new director,” and ultimately take control of both museums, said a spokesperson for Gdańsk city hall. Davies said he believed the moves against the second world war museum were coming directly from Kaczyński. “He is behaving like a Bolshevik and a paranoid troublemaker. Law and Justice are the most vindictive gang in Europe. Gdańsk is a particular target because of the association with Wałęsa and Solidarity, and Tusk, who is Gdańsk-born, is a history graduate and laid the foundation stone of the museum. Kaczyński was in Solidarity and managed Wałęsa’s election campaign before he became president of Poland [in 1990]. Wałęsa sidelined him, and Kaczyński has been planning his revenge ever since.’’ The historian said that the permanent exhibition planned for the museum was a “complete narrative of 1939-1945’’, put together by an advisory board with experience of building museums. “It is strongly about Europe, with an emphasis on the war as it concerned Poland. There is a substantial section about the Holocaust.’’ Kaczyński, who engineered his party’s landslide parliamentary election victory last October, has devised a “politics of memory’’ policy that aims to highlight Polish heroism and sacrifice throughout history. Last month the opening of a museum in Markowa commemorating the bravery of the Ulma family in saving their Jewish neighbours was fast-tracked. In a measure of the importance of the event for the government, the opening ceremony at the tiny homestead museum was simultaneously translated into five languages and streamed to Polish embassies in 17 countries. In a further move under the “politics of memory’’ banner, the government has proposed legislation that would punish the use of the phrase “Polish death camps’’ where “Nazi German death camps’’ is more accurate. Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said: “It is hurtful for all Poles to hear of Polish death camps. It sounds like the Poles did it. They didn’t. The Germans did. This government wants to emphasis the positive things Poles did during the war. “The question is, will they de-emphasise the denouncements that occurred? Will they emphasise the righteous Gentiles while forgetting the informers? We do not know yet.’’ Last week the Princeton historian Jan Tomasz Gross – who wrote in September 2015 that Poles during the second world war killed more Jews than they killed Germans – was questioned by a prosecutor on the charge of “insulting the nation’’. The “politics of memory’’ policy has its own department in the ministry of culture and in part depends for its daily running upon measures, condemned by the United States and a range of European bodies and officials, to control the media, the internet and the judiciary. When state television broadcast the Oscar-winning Polish film Ida, the screening was preceded by a 12-minute warning to viewers of alleged historical inaccuracies “The ‘politics of memory’ policy appears to work largely by insinuation,” said Davies. “When I first heard about it 20 years ago, I thought it was aimed at picking up what the Soviets had left out of Polish history. Fair enough. But now that Law and Justice is in government, we are seeing it as it is: a xenophobic attempt to rewrite history. As a historian you can’t help but see the parallels: the [communist] Polish People’s Republic had a ‘history policy’, and here we go again.’’ The ministry of culture and two Law and Justice politicians did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment. |