Post by Bonobo on Aug 24, 2009 13:54:02 GMT 1
Where Past Is Always Present
by Martin Ehl
5 August 2009
Poles are obsessed with their history, largely because it keeps coming back.
WROCLAW | Hitler once made speeches in this hall, later the communists held congresses here, and today people box or play basketball, and companies throw their annual parties. Centennial Hall, as this architecturally unique building in Wroclaw is known – or the People’s Hall, as the communists called it – could tell the history of Central Europe over the past century and no one would get bored.
These months the concrete hall and adjacent spaces are undergoing reconstruction so that they may serve as a modern congress center. Nevertheless, the enterprising director, a Czech named Hana Cervinkova, has brought here an exhibition from Brussels that deepens still the historical dimensions of the hall: an exhibition about the 50-year-old European Union and the 5-year-old membership of the Central European states. It’s noteworthy that the exhibits have descriptions in Czech, which in Poland definitely isn’t the norm during similar events, even in the borderlands.
We already consider membership in the union a given, the same as the influx of funds that help, for example, even during the present times of crisis to finance repairs and construction (the inhabitants of dug-up Wroclaw could say a thing or two about that). Still, some of the exhibits and interactive screens give one chills: time was not that long ago when Winston Churchill spoke about the menace of communism; when to buy a car abroad was an excessively complicated bureaucratic nightmare; when they shot at people along the borders, places where now you speed through at 80 kilometers per hour.
Poles are proud of their history and aggrieved when someone attempts to provide them with another version than the one that they know or believe. The originally European exhibition is supplemented with a substantial Polish section on the role of Solidarity in the fall of Socialism. And their definite obsession with history can be seen in that day’s headlines of the most-read Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, on the newsstand at the snack bar at the end of the exhibition in Centennial Hall: “NKVD Victims: Poland calls for an investigation.”
UNEARTHED
History has returned like a boomerang. During repairs to the underground part of a Belarusian church in the village of Hlybokaye in northern Belarus, a mass grave of more than 20 bodies was uncovered last month. According to the remnants of cigarette packs and clothes, the priest judged that the victims were Poles. At the end of the 1930s, the church had been abandoned, and most likely the Soviet secret police then used the premises. Local and Polish historians believe that those found could be Polish citizens seized during the occupation of the eastern part of Poland by the Soviet army in the fall of 1939 after World War II erupted (Polish territory between the world wars, Hlybokaye became part of Soviet Belarus after Stalin and Hitler divvied up the region in 1939).
The Belarusian authorities, however, ordered that the grave be again filled in. “It smelled horribly” was the explanation. Polish historians are naturally calling for an investigation and a confirmation of the assumption that these were Poles killed, like those in the Katyn forest, by NKVD officers. Of the estimated 25,000 captured and “disappeared” Poles from that time, the remains of at least 8,000 are still missing.
The Russian (Soviet) archives keep silent, just like various offices. The second remain impenetrable, the first have a political order against calling into doubt the official version of history, which didn’t have room for the Soviets’ massacre of the Polish intelligentsia until, essentially, the fall of socialism, when in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that the NKVD had carried out the executions..
When reading about these crimes, which are on the front pages even though they are 70 years old, a person only then begins to understand why history and especially its interpretation is such an obsession for Poles. Even more when it’s in a city like Wroclaw, which until 1945 had German inhabitants who built gems such as this very Centennial Hall, which Poles now take pride in (and repair) and a young Czech woman directs.
by Martin Ehl
5 August 2009
Poles are obsessed with their history, largely because it keeps coming back.
WROCLAW | Hitler once made speeches in this hall, later the communists held congresses here, and today people box or play basketball, and companies throw their annual parties. Centennial Hall, as this architecturally unique building in Wroclaw is known – or the People’s Hall, as the communists called it – could tell the history of Central Europe over the past century and no one would get bored.
These months the concrete hall and adjacent spaces are undergoing reconstruction so that they may serve as a modern congress center. Nevertheless, the enterprising director, a Czech named Hana Cervinkova, has brought here an exhibition from Brussels that deepens still the historical dimensions of the hall: an exhibition about the 50-year-old European Union and the 5-year-old membership of the Central European states. It’s noteworthy that the exhibits have descriptions in Czech, which in Poland definitely isn’t the norm during similar events, even in the borderlands.
We already consider membership in the union a given, the same as the influx of funds that help, for example, even during the present times of crisis to finance repairs and construction (the inhabitants of dug-up Wroclaw could say a thing or two about that). Still, some of the exhibits and interactive screens give one chills: time was not that long ago when Winston Churchill spoke about the menace of communism; when to buy a car abroad was an excessively complicated bureaucratic nightmare; when they shot at people along the borders, places where now you speed through at 80 kilometers per hour.
Poles are proud of their history and aggrieved when someone attempts to provide them with another version than the one that they know or believe. The originally European exhibition is supplemented with a substantial Polish section on the role of Solidarity in the fall of Socialism. And their definite obsession with history can be seen in that day’s headlines of the most-read Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, on the newsstand at the snack bar at the end of the exhibition in Centennial Hall: “NKVD Victims: Poland calls for an investigation.”
UNEARTHED
History has returned like a boomerang. During repairs to the underground part of a Belarusian church in the village of Hlybokaye in northern Belarus, a mass grave of more than 20 bodies was uncovered last month. According to the remnants of cigarette packs and clothes, the priest judged that the victims were Poles. At the end of the 1930s, the church had been abandoned, and most likely the Soviet secret police then used the premises. Local and Polish historians believe that those found could be Polish citizens seized during the occupation of the eastern part of Poland by the Soviet army in the fall of 1939 after World War II erupted (Polish territory between the world wars, Hlybokaye became part of Soviet Belarus after Stalin and Hitler divvied up the region in 1939).
The Belarusian authorities, however, ordered that the grave be again filled in. “It smelled horribly” was the explanation. Polish historians are naturally calling for an investigation and a confirmation of the assumption that these were Poles killed, like those in the Katyn forest, by NKVD officers. Of the estimated 25,000 captured and “disappeared” Poles from that time, the remains of at least 8,000 are still missing.
The Russian (Soviet) archives keep silent, just like various offices. The second remain impenetrable, the first have a political order against calling into doubt the official version of history, which didn’t have room for the Soviets’ massacre of the Polish intelligentsia until, essentially, the fall of socialism, when in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that the NKVD had carried out the executions..
When reading about these crimes, which are on the front pages even though they are 70 years old, a person only then begins to understand why history and especially its interpretation is such an obsession for Poles. Even more when it’s in a city like Wroclaw, which until 1945 had German inhabitants who built gems such as this very Centennial Hall, which Poles now take pride in (and repair) and a young Czech woman directs.