![]() Censorship prevented a discussion about the trauma, so that the population would forget about the tragedy and move on,” says Irina Scherbakova, a Russian historian and founding member of the human-rights organization Memorial. “Propaganda in films and literature glorified the war role. Russian officials have since said the Soviet incursion into Poland wasn’t an “invasion” but an act of “self-defense” because Poland had blocked the formation of a coalition against Hitler’s Germany before the war. There, authorities denied the existence of a secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact protocol that made plans to divide territory in areas like Poland between Germany and the USSR. The American narrative often simply left out the role of the nation’s Cold War enemies in the USSR, and the Soviet Union was involved in its own myth-making project. And the mythos of the war had already begun to take shape. Empires vanished, as European colonies in Asia, Africa and the Middle East fought for and won their independence. The United States had emerged as the foremost economic superpower, and the United Nations was founded. “Whenever I write about something that speaks to the fact that segments of Polish society during the war were complicit with the Holocaust, I become an enemy of the people.”īy that point, the war had ushered in a new world order. It’s a question of time,” he tells TIME by phone while in lockdown in Warsaw. “I have no doubts of course my detractors will strike sometime soon because that’s what they do. That hearing has been postponed indefinitely because of the pandemic, but the issues it raises are not going away anytime soon. A week later, a hearing was set to take place in Warsaw in a lawsuit he filed against a nationalist organization aligned with Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party, over its claim that he “falsifies the history of Poland” by doing that work. First came the release of what he describes as “the most important” of his 17 books, which features his research into the Polish policemen responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews during the Holocaust. At the end of March, the historian Jan Grabowski was set to have a busy few weeks. ![]()
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