A History (Re)Interpretation in the Name of Truth: Memory Culture and Cultural Policy in Poland after 1989

Abstract

The focus of this contribution lies in the significance of cultural heritage for various institutional and state actors, and its connection to the well-being of democracy within the country. It is widely acknowledged that Poland, between World War II and 1989, was within the sphere of influence of the Soviet state. Consequently, the teaching and interpretation of history in schools had to adhere to guidelines established by the Ministry of Education. However, the fact that the state retains authority over curricula and syllabi, with specific state institutions responsible for designing the educational program, is generally accepted, and there is a general consensus that in liberal democracies, someone must oversee the school curriculum. At the same time, it is also widely recognized that state institutions and their work on educational policies, as well as the content of education, can be influenced by present political interests. Therefore, the more intriguing question arises: at what point does state influence over the public’s understanding of the country’s history become so significant that it can be considered as state intervention in the national cultural heritage? In other words, when does history in the public sphere become uncomfortably unfamiliar and incomprehensible to generations who have personally experienced the past?

1. Introduction

Contemporary history is often used for political purposes, and it is not particularly controversial that state institutions and their work on educational policies, as well as the content of education, can be influenced by current political interests. At the same time, the degree of state involvement in the cultural heritage issue can be an interesting starting point for developing ideas about the well-being of democracy in the country.

The extent to which the Polish state under democracy can be considered interventionist on the issue of cultural heritage can vary depending on specific policies and actions taken by the government and governmental institutions at any given time. In democratic societies, governments often play a role in the preservation and promotion of cultural heritage, but the degree of intervention can differ. Poland, like other democratic countries, intervenes in cultural heritage matters for various reasons such as the protection, restoration, and maintenance of culturally significant sites, monuments, and artifacts to ensure their long-term survival for future generations. Because cultural heritage is often seen as a part of a nation’s identity, the government takes active roles in promoting and celebrating these aspects to strengthen national cohesion and pride. Moreover, the state supports cultural heritage as a means of education, fostering a sense of history and tradition among the population.

However, the level of intervention can be a matter of debate, and there may be concerns about politicization or selective promotion of certain aspects of cultural heritage, potentially at the expense of others. In some cases, political agendas or ideologies influence how cultural heritage is handled, leading to controversy. Moreover, while the impact of interventionism on the Polish public and public sphere can be positive in terms of preserving cultural heritage, promoting national identity, and education, it also raises concerns about potential political manipulation and the need to ensure transparency, inclusivity, and respect for diverse perspectives to maintain a healthy and vibrant public sphere.

Democracy has played a pivotal role in fostering historical interpretation in Poland by providing a platform for open dialog and diverse perspectives. In the context of Poland’s tumultuous history, which includes periods of foreign occupation and the struggle for independence, democracy has allowed for a more inclusive and comprehensive exploration of the nation’s past. In a democratic environment, historians, scholars, and citizens can freely engage in discussions and research, leading to a more nuanced understanding of the nation’s history. Under democratic principles, the issue of cultural heritage in Poland should be dealt with by promoting inclusivity and pluralism. This means recognizing the diverse cultural, religious, and historical influences that have shaped Poland over the centuries. It also involves preserving and celebrating the rich tapestry of traditions, languages, and customs that make up Poland’s cultural heritage, while acknowledging the troubled chapters of its history, such as the Holocaust and communist rule. Government intervention in preserving and promoting cultural heritage needs to be balanced with respect for diverse perspectives and a commitment to transparent, inclusive processes, as its acting ensures that the heritage is preserved not just for today’s citizens but also for future generations in a manner that reflects the democratic principles of the nation.

2. Cultural heritage, history, and identity

Cultural heritage and history are intimately linked as they are both about the collective experience and development of people over time. Cultural heritage preserves, represents, and communicates history, while history provides a context and explanation for cultural heritage.

Simply put, cultural heritage can be described as what previous generations have created and how we perceive, interpret, and manage it today. At the same time, cultural heritage is not static but rather something that is constantly changing and transforming over time. Cultural heritage is created when people decide to value something as a part of cultural heritage that should be preserved. The creation and preservation of cultural heritage connect people across time and space. It creates a sense of community, but at the same time, there is a risk that it may exclude some people or groups. It can thus be concluded that not only does cultural heritage have a clear identity-related dimension but also that the creation of cultural heritage is a process that contributes to identity formation.

In practice, heritage creation can be studied by examining what cultural and heritage memory institutions claim as historically significant and how they contribute to the creation and dissolution of national community boundaries. It is about what and how they choose to remember, and what can or should be forgotten.

In 2003, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, established the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, which entered into force in 2006. Its purpose is to preserve and protect non-tangible cultural expressions. Cultural expressions are interesting from a historical perspective as part of “own” history.

According to UNESCO’s own evaluations, the Convention became an important milestone in international policies to promote cultural diversity. This was because the international community recognized for the first time the need to support those cultural manifestations and expressions that had previously not received sufficient legal and programmatic attention [1].

Through the Convention, the concept of “cultural heritage” has evolved and changed considerably, going beyond monuments and collections of objects. Intangible cultural heritage is traditional, contemporary, and living at the same time. It represents not only inherited traditions from the past but also contemporary practices involving different cultural groups. It can include oral traditions, performing arts, social customs, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices about nature and the social environment, and knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts. The importance of intangible cultural heritage lies not only in the cultural manifestations themselves but rather in the wealth of knowledge and skills transmitted through it from one generation to the next.

Intangible cultural heritage is community-based. It can only be considered cultural heritage when it is recognized as such by the communities, groups, or individuals who create, maintain, and transmit it. Without their recognition, no one else can decide for them that a specific expression or practice is their cultural heritage [2]. An understanding of the intangible cultural heritage of different communities can be a starting point for promoting intercultural dialog and encouraging mutual respect for different ways of life. The social and economic importance of this knowledge transfer is relevant both to minority groups and to the wider population within a state.

In 2023, the Convention celebrates its 20th anniversary, and also that 30 countries, including Poland, have ratified it. The legal definition of cultural heritage was anchored by the Polish jurist and specialist in the field of monuments and cultural heritage protection, Jan Pruszyński, Professor of Law at the Institute of Law of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He presented this definition in his book entitled “Polish Cultural Heritage, Its Losses and Legal Protection” in 2001, which includes all four areas identified by UNESCO: tangible cultural heritage, intangible cultural heritage, natural heritage, and protection of cultural heritage. It also emphasizes that “cultural heritage is protected as part of fundamental human rights” [3]. Since 2011, when Poland ratified the UNESCO Convention, several activities have been carried out to raise awareness of the Convention, its objectives, and the possibilities of promoting knowledge of cultural heritage. In Poland, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (Ministrestwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego) together with the National Heritage Institute (Narodowy Instytut Dziedzictwa) is responsible for the implementation of the principles of the Convention, while several non-governmental organizations are actively involved in these activities [4].

The Polish cultural heritage is thus protected under the Convention as a fundamental human right and the social value of knowledge of cultural heritage is relevant to common social groups in the country. Without society’s recognition, no one else can decide that a certain expression or practice is the cultural heritage of society, which links the issue of cultural heritage not only to history but also to the issue of identity.

3. Is it important to reflect on what historical truth is?

The answer to that question may vary between individuals. It may even go so far as to consider the question itself unjustified, as there is a common understanding among historians that it is not even possible to speak of historical truth in its narrow sense. However, rather than getting stuck on historians’ different explanations of historicism, it is fascinating to look at how much it can differ when engaging in the search for historical truth in different countries.

Working as historian in Sweden, a simple search for the term “historical truth” in Swedish on Google brings up 621,000 results. To see which results were found, I clicked on the fifth link in the list of results for each search. When searching for “historisk sanning,” I thus came to the page of the Association for Science and Education [5]. The association gives a definition of “pseudo-history,” that is, “an alleged history writing,” and the short definition is followed by a list summarizing examples of what pseudo-history is about, such as “myths, legends, heroic tales, and the like as literal truth.” For example, it is neither “critical nor skeptical in its reading of ancient historians and taking their statements as true, while ignoring empirical or logical evidence against the ancient statements” etc. Further down the page, there are also several examples of pseudo-history.

For the same search on the term “prawda historyczna,” which corresponds to “historical truth,” Google gets almost 14 million hits. This is 28 times more hits than in Swedish. While the difference is astounding, one could try to explain it by pointing out that there are about 38 million Poles and only 10.5 million Swedes.

So, it was worth doing a search on the German term “historische Wahrheit.” Interestingly, Google delivers close to 6 million results, which is still less than half of the Polish hits, even though Germany has 82 million people.

Without being an expert in Polish history or relying too much on the interpretation of a simple Google search, the example shows that “historical truth” is something of great importance to Poles, something that many reflect on and discuss in different contexts, and thus also in the public sphere.

Also in the Polish search results, I clicked on the fifth link. This takes you directly to a website of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and an expert debate on historical truth and how to avoid forgeries [6]. Prof. Dariusz Stola, writer Anna Bikont, Prof. Andrzej Paczkowski, and Prof. Antoni Sułek took part in the debate and can all be seen on a video recording placed on the website. Two of the professors are historians, while the last one is a sociologist. The event at the Museum took place on September 26, 2017, and the recorded (and still available) discussion revolved around Anna Bikont’s book “We of Jedwabne,” which is a significant journalistic achievement [7].

The book describes the events of the summer of 1941 when Polish Jews were attacked in their home villages in southern Poland. The most affected population was in Jedwabne, where at least 340 Jews, representing a quarter of the village’s population, were either murdered or burned to death by their own neighbors. For several decades, the official version of the event was that the German occupying forces were responsible for the massacre of the Jews. The book thus touches on one of the most sensitive and controversial topics that historians have addressed since the country’s liberalization and establishment of scientific freedom in 1989. Right after the publication of the first historical studies related to the topic, it immediately sparked debate in the public sphere where issues of historical research and social responsibility were discussed.

This controversial debate, which mainly focused on the country’s past being attacked and occupied by Nazi Germany in 1939, was linked to crimes against the Polish nation. This, in turn, led to the establishment of the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN) in early 1999 as a state agency responsible for research, education, archiving, surveys, “lustration,” information gathering, and commemorative activities. The Institute of National Remembrance is the largest scientific research and archival institution in Poland dedicated to researching the history of Poland in the years 1917–1990.

4. Doing history in a liberal context

Since the regime shift in 1989, many archives in Poland have finally opened their collections to historical research, allowing for a range of interesting studies based on primary sources. At the same time, a public debate on the country’s Cold War history has taken off. A kind of broad reckoning with history has begun, and from politically conservative circles an increasing political activity has started, often referred to in the media as a “witch hunt.”

The “witch hunt” began on June 4, 1992 when the then Minister of the Interior, Antoni Macierewicz, submitted a list of 64 names of members of the government to the Polish Parliament (Konwent Seniorów). According to preserved archive documents from the time of the Polish People’s Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, PRL, before 1989), these people were registered by the country’s security services as their secret collaborators. An additional list contained information on two people who were particularly important for state security–the then President of the Republic of Poland (RP), Lech Wałęsa, and the then Marshal of the Sejm, Wiesław Chrzanowski.

Until the 2015 parliamentary elections, one could speak of numerous controversial debates in the public sphere involving both critical arguments and heated emotions, but where academic freedom of research was safeguarded. Since the establishment of the nationally conservative Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PIS) as a government-forming party with a majority in parliament, the situation has changed with the gradual introduction of laws regulating the management of the country’s history. The drafts of these laws are currently being prepared by the Institute of National Remembrance before being put to a political vote.

In April 2016, Parliament passed a law prohibiting the promotion of communism or other totalitarian systems through the names of organizational units, municipal auxiliary units, buildings, facilities and utilities, and monuments. The law is commonly known as the “Decommunization” of public space. Under its provisions, the Institute of National Remembrance was to propose names for streets and buildings to be removed from the public space. The proposal for the amendment was prepared by the Institute of National Remembrance and submitted to the Ministry of Justice in 2016. The aim was to combat expressions such as “Polish death camps,” which are misleading as a designation of Nazi camps in the German-occupied territories that are currently within Poland’s borders. The first reading of the proposal took place on October 16 of the same year. Thereafter, the project was stuck in committee for over a year. At the request of MPs from one of the conservative political parties (Kukiz’15), provisions were added to punish the denial of “crimes of Ukrainian nationalists.”

The decommunization law required local authorities to implement these guidelines and follow the institute’s recommendations for the specified changes by September 2, 2017. If these guidelines were ignored, the responsibility for changing the specified names was transferred by law to the county governor. This also happened in Gdańsk, and journalist Rafał Borowski asked a question in the local press whether the Spanish Volunteers would disappear from the city map [8]. He wrote that this is requested by the Federation of Fighting Youth (Federacja Młodzieży Walczącej), whose members believe that soldiers who fought on the side of the Republican troops in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 should not be glorified. The youth organization has conducted a survey on the question: Is it worth renaming the street Dąbrowszczaków? and the answers received were:

“24% – yes, because they represent a group that fought for communist Spain.

7% – no, because collective responsibility should not be applied.

34% – no, because their fight against fascism was justified.

35% – the current name should be kept because of the significant costs that a name change would entail.

Total number of votes: 1272.”

During a meeting dealing with the issue of street name changes, the majority of city councilors opposed compliance with the decommunization law for the specified streets and several others. The main argument was the criticism and objections expressed by the majority of the city’s inhabitants to the implementation of the law. Moreover, it was stressed that according to the principle of decentralization of public authority introduced after 1989, the issue of street names should be under the competence of local authorities. The conflict escalated and the Supreme Administrative Court made a decision on the application of the law. The decision cannot be appealed. At a convened press conference, the mayor of the city, Paweł Adamowicz, commented on the decision of the Administrative Court by recalling that the naming of streets and squares is an “eternal and natural” right of local authorities:

“This very old, original right has been violated in recent years by the central government, which imposes street names on local communities through orders of the governor. The NSA today did not stand up for the natural rights of local government. This is my first surprise. The second surprise is that the NSA judges took it upon themselves to evaluate history, a very difficult and demanding job. And so today’s verdict of the NSA declared Dąbrowszczak, Kruczkowski and Buczek to be communists, while Sołdek, Pstrowski, Zubrzycki and Wassowski did not become communists. The decision is final and, of course, I will implement it. I respect the decision, although I fundamentally disagree with it” [9].

Parenthetically, Adamowicz openly opposed the implementation of decommunization law in the public sphere regarding street names, and exactly 2 months after the press conference he was murdered at a public sports event in January 2019. The perpetrator’s motive and the circumstances of the murder were highly controversial as he shouted political slogans immediately after the attack. The street’s name today is President Lech Kaczyński’s Street, named after the first President of Law and Justice elected in 2005, who died in an air disaster near Smolensk in Russia, close to the border with Belarus, in 2010.

5. Politicization and backlash against research and freedom of expression

The decommunization law was the subject of a series of controversies and a new draft was adopted by Parliament in 2018, the day before the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the International Day of Remembrance for Holocaust Victims. Among other things, it introduced prison sentences for attributing responsibility or co-responsibility to the Polish nation or state for crimes committed by the German Reich. It also provided for criminal liability for foreigners outside Poland. On February 6, 2018, despite the controversy, President Andrzej Duda signed the law and at the same time decided to send a subsequent application to the Constitutional Court to review some of its provisions in relation to the Constitution.

The disappointment with President Duda’s decision was also expressed by then US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who wrote on his Twitter account: “The United States is disappointed that the Polish President has signed into law a bill that would impose criminal sanctions for attributing Nazi crimes to the Polish state. We understand that this law will be referred to the Polish Constitutional Court. The passage of this law adversely affects freedom of speech and academic research” [10].

The first female president of the Supreme Court, Professor Małgorzata Gersdorf, warned that the proposed rules could freeze the public debate on the course of World War II in Poland. The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs had also previously warned of the negative effects of the legislation.

It is difficult to go into all the details of the far-reaching consequences of the law, but it will suffice to mention that since the arrival of the new director of the Institute of National Remembrance, Jarosław Szarek, in July 2016, accusations of falsifying history has been increasingly risen in different public debates and pursuing a historical policy that favors the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party has become a thriving power. Contrary to historical research and the findings of the Institute of National Remembrance itself, Szarek blamed the Germans for the pogrom against Jews in Jedwabne.

Here, I can return to one of the historians in the panel discussion on how to avoid falsification of history, and the recorded video on the fifth link in Google search results on “prawda historyczna” (historical truth). Dariusz Stola is an internationally recognized scholar specializing in the history of antisemitism. After the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, POLIN, opened to visitors in 2005, Stola was appointed as the museum’s director. In addition to its exhibition activities, the Museum is also actively engaged in research in the fields of Jewish history, the history of anti-Semitism, and Polish-Jewish relations. For its successful activities, the museum was awarded the European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA) in 2016. Nevertheless, by a political decision, he was replaced by the museum’s deputy director, Zygmunt Stępiński, who was previously responsible for overseeing the work of education, communication, sales, and marketing.

6. The “cursed soldiers” as opponents to the formation of the communist state

In terms of the ongoing change in the interpretation of history, the decommunization law and its consequences are just one example. At the same time, the focus of the new chapter in the national history narrative is on new national heroes. These new heroes are called the “cursed soldiers” (Żołnierze wyklęci) or “indomitable soldiers” (Żołnierze niezłomni) and their entry into history textbooks comes from the resistance to communism just after the Second World War. Officially, the “cursed soldiers” are regarded as forgotten heroes who “stood on the side of free Poland and never gave up.” This is what Polish President Andrzej Duda and the Institute of National Remembrance claim [11]. However, reading the first studies on these people by the Institute of National Remembrance, serious flaws in the image of the anti-communist resistance emerge.

In May 1946, the number of members of the armed resistance was estimated at around 13,900 people. During that year almost 4200 political attacks were recorded in which 2346 people were killed. After the amnesty was announced on February 22, 1947, some 50,000–60,000 people were revealed to be members of various armed resistance groups. Months passed, and partisan units were dramatically reduced. By mid-1949, the number of people actively acting within these groups was estimated at only 52, with about 250 people fighting in their ranks.

A subject that a decade ago was on the fringes of so-called identity politics is now setting its own framework. The Institute of National Remembrance plays a central role in spreading the myth of the “banished soldiers,” and they form part of the ideological basis of the Fourth Polish Republic, that is, Poland after 1989 [12].

The myth of armed resistance to the post-war establishment of communism is based, for example, on the figures of Zygmunt Szendzielarz “Łupaszka,” Józef Kuraś “Ogień” and Romuald Rajs “Bury.” Their portraits can be seen on t-shirts in schools, sports arenas, and universities, and even in Parliament during the last election period. “Łupaszka,” “Ogień,” and “Bury” grace album covers, and bookstore shelves are filled with their biographies. The Institute of National Remembrance disseminates a series of biographical short films through its website [13]. In 2020, a coin series was minted that has since been expanded with new faces [14]. There are no limits to the creative ways of popularization.

The problem with this powerful narrative is that not every “cursed soldier” deserves to be glorified or even publicly remembered [15]. Many of them have left behind civilian victims and committed simple robberies, rapes, manslaughter and murders [16]. Publications revealing the crimes committed by the “cursed” are attacked by “historians” eager to justify abuses. In their opinion, killing communists and their accomplices is justified and even advisable.

In the available archival documents, there are not only cases of mass killings that incriminate, for example, “Bury” and his unit. Rajs himself, in an interview with the Security Service (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa), tried to absolve himself of responsibility for the crimes, blaming everything on his subordinates. In the summary of the Institute of National Remembrance’s own investigation, the prosecutor stated that “based on all the evidence, there can be no doubt that the main perpetrator—the person who gave the orders—was R. Raj’s “Bury,” and that those who carried out the orders were some of his soldiers.” One can also read that: “Without questioning the struggle for Poland’s independence carried out by organizations opposed to the imposed authorities, which include the National Military Union, it must be firmly stated that the murder of peasants and the pacification of villages in January and February 1946 cannot be equated with the struggle for the independent existence of the state, as it bears the hallmarks of genocide. Also, in no way can what happened be justified by the struggle for the independent existence of the Polish State” [17].

The name “Łupaszka” was also spread in primary schools and for various reasons “Łupaszka” became the face of the new anti-communist heroes. But here too, the Institute of National Remembrance could be recommended to anticipate its own research findings. In 2015, Paweł Rokicki published the book entitled “Glinciszki in Dubinki. War Crimes in the Vilnius Region in Mid-1944 and their Consequences in Contemporary Polish-Lithuanian Relations,” published by the Institute of National Remembrance. In Rokicki’s book, there is a testimony of the activities of the “Łupaszka” unit, where Stasys Lisausaks tells of killings in the city of Dubinki when Polish soldiers from the Home Army (AK) surrounded the house and broke in through the door: “Having found the sleeping family of the guard Rinkevičius and his wife’s brother Kerulis, who was hosting them, they as first shot the men, then let loose a series to the wife lying on another bed with a child of some 2 years of age: the bullets carried off half of the woman’s head, then stabbed her and the child with bayonets in anger (seven stab wounds were found on the woman’s body). Having seen a three-month-old baby in the cradle, one of the soldiers pierced it with a bayonet and ostentatiously having lifted it up, carried it around the room until the baby stopped waving its arms and legs … ” [18].

For many eyewitnesses, who survived the war as children, lived and worked in the so-called “New Poland” during the Cold War, and then experienced the liberalizing change in 1989, the state’s political decisions regarding the production of new history textbooks and their content provoke strong reactions. For them, the question of true history becomes difficult to reconcile with the new representations of national heroes.

7. Some concluding thoughts

From all the examples and the described line of development, the concept of historical truth has a special meaning for Poles. During the Cold War, historical truth was discussed in the context of the ongoing political situation, but in private social settings behind closed doors and in hushed voices. Criticizing the dependence of Polish politics on the Soviet Union was illegal. Moreover, Poland’s post-war history was not part of the school curriculum. History courses in schools ended with the liberation of the Soviet army from the German occupation of Polish soil. The pre-war and post-war location of the land in other borders was not possible to discuss in public, as openly criticizing Poland’s political dependence on the Soviet Union or pointing out the lack of sovereignty could lead to imprisonment, police interrogation or even detention by the security services without the family ever knowing where the person went. It can be said that historical truth has been a hidden hot potato during the Cold War.

After 1989, democratization and liberalization contributed to the fact that the hot potato could finally be discussed in the public sphere. There was and still is a need to write the country’s post-war history, i.e. the history from 1918 to 1990, in a way that can be anchored in history books and taught in schools. Historians have been given the opportunity to write about the country’s contemporary history under the new democratic conditions. But despite historians’ interest in portraying the complexity of the past, political interests in managing the country’s cultural heritage have not disappeared over the past 30 years. In different ways, these interests have influenced the process of shaping historiography and steering the direction of how different perspectives are illuminated and contemporary history is told.

After the right-wing conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party gained the majority in the 2015 parliamentary elections, the issue of the direction of historicization has been repeatedly politicized. There have been media-driven political debates about what is considered particularly important in the country’s history, and what should be highlighted, managed, and taught in schools. At the same time, there are debates about what does not deserve to be considered interesting and whether certain subjects should be avoided altogether. In the case of the involvement of Poles in the murder of their Jewish neighbors during World War II, there are also disturbing examples of topics that become illegal to discuss in public debate, even though they are otherwise well-researched and historically documented.

Law and Justice’s ambition is to promote nationally conservative values in which history plays a clear and central role. But in a democracy, not everyone follows a party line and does not share the ambition to focus only on those parts of history that highlight the country’s pride in the historical narrative. Moreover, it can be argued, that there are more advantages and educational benefits to critical thinking about history, as Maria Sjöberg, for example, has formulated in her book [19]. On the other hand, finding new national heroes based on war crimes is often considered offensive, and it is not a coincidence that many contemporary witnesses believe that these new heroic narratives distort the image of what really constitutes true history. Nevertheless, I can rest assured that the question of how to formulate Poland’s contemporary history is undoubtedly interesting.

The current debate on Polish history shows how important it is to link it to the issue of cultural heritage and reflect on the dangers of one voice claiming a monopoly on the interpretation of history in the public sphere. Indeed, it is not only in times of war that information flows and efforts to tell history in a certain way are topical and driven by political interests, as we are now clearly witnessing, for example, in the case of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

The creation and responsible management of cultural heritage is an important task that, in a democratic society, is carried out by different institutional actors with different interests, not least political ones. This diversity allows for different perspectives and even critical insights into the historical narrative, which will always be evolving. Unfortunately, it is not always the case that historians dig up long-awaited neat stuff when they dive into the archives. Sometimes even unpleasant stories emerge that do not always fit the polished image of national pride. But even these “ugly” stories are part of the country’s history and provide witnesses with an important connection to the perceived time, as they have experienced different events.

In this sense, the Polish case offers valuable insights that can inform cultural heritage policies elsewhere in several ways. First and foremost, Poland’s experience highlights the importance of striking a balance between preserving historical and cultural heritage while embracing the diversity that shapes the historical narrative of the past. By acknowledging the coexistence of various cultural influences, including the minorities, Poland exemplifies a pluralistic approach that respects different heritages within its borders. Additionally, Poland’s efforts to address troubled chapters of its history, such as the Holocaust and the communist past, demonstrate the significance of confronting painful truths and using cultural heritage as a tool for reconciliation and education. Furthermore, the Polish model underscores the importance of democratic principles, transparency, and inclusive decision-making processes when it comes to interventions in cultural heritage. By fostering dialog among historians, cultural experts, and local communities, Poland showcases a need for a democratic approach to heritage management to navigate their complex historical narratives while promoting the necessity of a broad societal discourse on troubled pasts.

In history, all stories have their place, even if, or perhaps especially because, history is a central issue of identity formation. In the ongoing debate about what constitutes historical truth, the past will be interpreted and reassessed several times before the older generation feels comfortable with their narratives of the past in the public sphere, and with the texts of newly written schoolbooks.