This blog post examines the complex restructuring process of historical perception in Poland after the Cold War ended, where nationalism, anti-Semitism, and transnational historical narratives collided.
With the collapse of the Cold War system in 1989, the historical narratives of Eastern Europe, particularly Poland’s, became significantly more complex. For instance, the powerful taboo against criticizing the “socialist motherland”—so strong it prevented even mention of the Soviet-Polish War—disappeared. The joke that the past is more volatile and unpredictable than the future proved remarkably apt. Eastern Europe’s ‘Velvet Revolutions’ fundamentally shook societal understanding of the recent past. As the curtain of official memory—the “socialist brotherhood”—lifted, memories hidden in the private sphere, in the form of personal and family histories, finally came to light.
This phenomenon was already evident in the historical works published underground since 1980, when the Solidarity trade union’s democratization movement began in Poland. The historical interpretations at the time were highly diverse, with militant anti-communist historians, in particular, emphasizing nationalism and stressing that socialism was an alien ideology. They defined the Polish Communist Party, especially its internationalist faction, as traitors who sold out the nation for Soviet interests, making them the primary targets of attack. Given that a significant portion of this faction’s leadership was Jewish, the transition of militant anti-communism into anti-Semitism was a natural consequence.
Interestingly, this position shares certain commonalities with the official stance of the Polish Communist Party around 1968. This is because the patriotic faction that seized power at the time also championed nationalism and anti-Semitism. However, they differed little from the internationalist faction in their intolerance of attacks on the “socialist motherland.” They sought to dilute popular resentment toward the Soviet Union by stirring up anti-German sentiment.
If nationalism and anti-Semitism were the thread connecting the Communist Party’s official historical narrative and militant anti-communist historical narratives during this period, then the collective psyche permeating Polish history and culture from the 19th century to the early 21st century, regardless of political alignment, was a victim mentality. The image of the “nation nailed to the cross,” first presented by Polish Romanticism, was a representative historical and cultural code shared by Poles. The fact that over five million people perished during the German invasion in World War II further reinforced this consciousness. However, the fact that over three million of them were Jewish was scarcely mentioned officially.
The turning point where this historical and cultural code began to be seriously shaken was the 2000 Stockholm Declaration. European leaders participating in this declaration agreed to mandate Holocaust education, which became a core precondition for Eastern European nations joining NATO. The belated emergence of Holocaust accountability debates in Eastern Europe around the same time was not unrelated to this trend. Eastern European nations pursued Westernization by joining NATO and the European Union (EU), and political Westernization led to cultural Westernization. Cultural Westernization, in the case of historiography, meant the process of repositioning the past within a pan-European space of memory.
This approach to historical narration can be termed “transnational historical writing” as it transcends traditional nation-state-centered units of history. National and state memories that clashed with transnational history now had to be reconstructed or revised. In Poland’s case, the long-held collective consciousness of being solely victimized needed reexamination. This was because Polish collaboration, passivity, and attacks on Jews during the Nazi occupation were, to some extent, voluntary.
Indeed, the Jewish victims at Auschwitz and elsewhere were not only absent from critical self-reflection during the communist regime but were entirely “erased from memory.” This was justified by various pretexts: the claim that highlighting Jewish tragedy might neglect others’ suffering, and the argument that the support of some Western capitalists for the Nazis was a more significant issue. Moreover, the question of participation in or complicity with the Holocaust was an uncomfortable and disruptive topic when emphasizing the anti-fascist struggle of the partisans.
However, self-reflection on the past did not emerge automatically in Poland. When Neighbors, a book detailing the 1941 massacre of Jews by Polish villagers in the same village, was published in 2000, anger spread among nationalists who felt the nation’s honor had been tarnished. Nationalist counterarguments followed, claiming the perpetrators were Nazi secret police or that survivor testimonies alone lacked credibility.
Concurrently, whenever German far-right groups emphasized Allied bombings of German civilians, detached from historical context, to justify nationalism, self-reflection within Poland paradoxically weakened. This fostered a so-called “hostile coexistence of nationalism,” where conflicting national memories maintained antagonistic conflict, mutually reinforcing each other’s raison d’être.
