Polish leaders take aim at war museum
Print Edition
THE Polish government is coming under growing pressure to permit the opening next year of a major new museum on World War II — an ambitious project with an international approach that the country’s nationalistic new leaders dislike.
Work on the Museum of the Second World War has been under way for eight years and it was due to open early next year in Gdansk, the northern Polish port city where some of the opening shots of the war were fired. It aims to be the first museum in the world that tells the story of the war in its entirety, focusing on the suffering of civilian populations across Europe and Asia.
But the country’s ruling party, Law and Justice, has put the fate of the museum in question. Party leaders have made clear they prefer to create a museum that focuses exclusively on the Polish experience and are threatening to cancel the current project.
An organization representing Polish wartime resistance fighters wrote to Culture Minister Piotr Glinski this week expressing “deep concern” about the fate of the museum. The World Union of the Home Army Veterans said it had put “great hope in a dignified commemoration” that the museum promised of the wartime experience of Poles and others who came under Nazi and Soviet occupations.
Meanwhile, some 200 historians from the United States and Europe sent a separate appeal to Glinski on Wednesday asking him to allow the museum to open, saying “any interruption in its work will count as tragedy in the eyes of all who study the past and all who care about Poland’s future”.
The Culture Ministry’s press office said yesterday that no final decision on the museum’s future has been taken yet.
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