Memory, identity, and patriotism

As a beneficiary of IPN’s archives, a longtime friend of Poland, and a grateful recipient of that country’s highest award for contributions to Polish culture, I am deeply concerned by the new “IPN Act” signed into law this past February.

People walk in dense fog in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp during ceremonies in late January 2018 marking the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of the camp and International Holocaust Victims Remembrance Day in in Oswiecim, Poland. (CNS photo/Kacper Pempel, Reuters)

The second volume of my biography of St. John Paul II, The End and the Beginning, benefited immensely from the resources of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance [IPN, from its Polish initials], which was established after the Revolution of 1989 to preserve records related to the Polish experience under the Nazis and the communists. Documents obtained from IPN by Polish historians helped me paint a detailed picture of the forty-year war the communists conducted against Karol Wojtyla, from the days when he was a young priest, through his Cracovian episcopate, and on to his first decade as Pope John Paul II.

Thus, as a beneficiary of IPN’s archives, a longtime friend of Poland, and a grateful recipient of that country’s highest award for contributions to Polish culture, I am deeply concerned by the new “IPN Act” signed into law this past February. For the law dictates that IPN – presumably an archive for research – will now become an agency monitoring thought, speech, and writing. According to a law so vaguely drawn as to invite abuse, it seems that IPN is to flag instances of someone speaking publicly or writing about Polish involvement in the Holocaust of European Jewry, speech and writing that has been declared illegal under the IPN Act. The penalty for such transgressions is three years in prison (ironically, the sentence passed by a Viennese court against the odious Holocaust-denier, David Irving).

Sympathetic as I am to some of the current Polish government’s criticisms of the European Union, and much as I welcome its efforts to strengthen family life, I cannot extend my sympathy to this gravely misconceived law: misconceived because it makes IPN into something ominously resembling Orwell’s “Big Brother;” misconceived because it could promote falsifications of history while criminalizing truth-telling; misconceived because it deflects attention from the 6,000 Polish rescuers honored at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem; misconceived because it re-awakens stereotypes many of us have worked for decades to erase; misconceived because it exacerbates tensions in a country where (like America, alas), the survival of the shrillest seems to be the order of the day.

No one should doubt that all Poland suffered terribly during World War II. Twenty percent of the population in 1939 was dead in 1945, including thee million Jews. Another 1.2 million people had been “transferred” to Siberia and its gulag camps. The race-mad Nazis seized two hundred thousand Polish children and took them to Germany. At the end of the war, there was not a single structure more than two feet high in Poland’s capital, which Hitler had ordered razed in retaliation for the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Polish heroes of unimpeachable integrity were judicially murdered by the country’s new Stalinist occupiers, because their democratic convictions might pose a threat to consolidating communist rule.

In recent years, real progress has been made in eradicating offensive terms like “Polish Death Camps” from the world’s vocabulary, as Poles, Germans, and others have worked together to make clear that those were Nazi extermination camps. Moreover, Poland’s Jewish heritage is now celebrated: in massive cultural festivals such as the one held in Cracow every summer, and above all in a magnificent new museum of the history of Polish Jewry in Warsaw – one of the finest historical museums in the world. Further, the late Archbishop Jozef Zycinski of Lublin, following the example of John Paul II, slowly but carefully created a Jewish-Christian dialogue in Poland, so that memories could be cleansed and purified, and a new relationship between Catholics and Jews forged.

In light of all this, and more, the IPN Act seems a grave mistake. Poland in the 1980s offered the world an inspiring model of morally-driven nonviolent revolution. Since 1989, Poland has been the model for post-communist transitions, politically and economically. Poland and its friends were successfully making the case to the world about the full truth of the unspeakable atrocities that took place there during World War II. Now this.

And in the name of what? National identity is a precious thing, but it can only lead to a true civic patriotism if it deals with history honestly. Russia is a prime example of a country beset by a national story riddled with historical falsehoods.  Poles, of all people, should not want to follow that example.


If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!

Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.


About George Weigel 483 Articles
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. He is the author of over twenty books, including Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (1999), The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010), and The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform. His most recent books are The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission (2020), Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable (Ignatius, 2021), and To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books, 2022).

5 Comments

  1. As a sympathetic Poland observer, I appreciate this article. They seem to be in a somewhat demographic jam at this time. Polish youth do emigrate to places like USA and though high Christian, Poles do somehow like in most of Europe limit birthing. This combined with not welcoming any sort of immigration could sadly put them in the position of being a country without people. Regarding history, as much as I love it, the words famous of Henry Ford gnaw, “history is bunk”.

  2. First of all, I do not intend to defend the IPN law, but … Is it so difficult to write down the proper full UNESCO name of the camp: Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945) – http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/31? Is it so difficult to write who were Nazis? It comes quite easy to write “… about Polish involvement in the Holocaust of European Jewry…”, but is it difficult to write down there was no collaboration goverment in Poland – the country was completely under German occupation, it was the only country where Germans established the death penalty for helping Jews, the Polish underground state issued death sentences on Poles who reported Jews in hiding to the German authorities in occupied Poland? Sorry to say, but the article is quite disappointing – it duplicates misleading term “Nazis”. This way it makes the sentence “In recent years, real progress has been made in eradicating offensive terms like “Polish Death Camps” from the world’s vocabulary, as Poles, Germans, and others have worked together to make clear that those were Nazi extermination camps” sounds like a joke.

  3. Perhaps George Weigel should advocate a military intervention by the US in Poland in order to safeguard “liberal democratic values.”

    I am sure the Polish people really care about the opinion of a TheoCon concern pundit. Maybe Mr. Weigel should have attempted some private fraternal “correction” with Poles in positions of influence, rather than using the mass media to do so.

  4. In this case I think Mr. Weigel is sorely mistaken, and misses the larger problem which was revealed by this law, not caused by it, that is anti-Polish hatred. The roll-out of the law was clumsy and revealed the total inadequacy of the Polish government in strategic communication in English to the West. Nonetheless it was a move made out of a perceived necessity to combat the incessant lies being deliberately spread about Poland. The idea that “real progress has been made” in eradicating the “Polish Death Camps” libel is simply false. I am on the mailing list of a Polish organization that tracks these things and even before this whole blow-up, incidences of this and related terms in international newspapers (especially in Germany) was a weekly if not daily occurence.

    Which “stereotypes” are you referring to? That Poles are born-and-bred anti-Semites? Did you ever stop to think who propagated those stereotypes? Anti-Polish, Jewish animosity is the elephant in the room that polite conservatives dare not mention or even notice. It started at least as far back as the end of World War I (1918-1919), when places like the New York Times were promoting the fantastical idea of mass genocide against the Jews, which was totally debunked, namely in the Morgenthau Report. As usual the heart of the matter ties into money; billions of dollars in property in Poland that Jews (including those unrelated to any Holocaust victims) are trying to get their hands on through pending U.S. House Resolution no. 1226. They should take it up with Germany! Poland is under attack, don’t add fuel to the fire in a situation you obviously don’t understand.

1 Trackback / Pingback

  1. Memory, identity, and patriotism -

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

All comments posted at Catholic World Report are moderated. While vigorous debate is welcome and encouraged, please note that in the interest of maintaining a civilized and helpful level of discussion, comments containing obscene language or personal attacks—or those that are deemed by the editors to be needlessly combative or inflammatory—will not be published. Thank you.


*