Beyond the city wall, monumental Teutonic schools hunkered across from crumbling modernist blocks and a decayed concrete flak tower, now the Klubogaleria nightclub. Between them broken pavements eddied and rolled like the Baltic itself, and pigeons washed themselves in the bath-sized potholes. One step further and I was at the Martwa Wisła or ‘dead Vistula’, the branch of the river that had opened Poland to the world. Here the Prussians had built a shipyard for their navy and German industrialists launched dredgers, trawlers and battleships. Dozens of U-boats had taken to the sea from its slipways and, in the communist years, the yard had grown to become the fifth-largest ship producer in the world. Here too the end of the twentieth century had begun.
In 1980 Gdańsk shipyard workers – including electrician Lech Wałęsa – laid down tools in protest against the firing of a crane operator, as well as plunging living standards and rising food prices. At Gate No. 2 of the then Lenin Shipyards, Wałęsa – fiery and affable with distinctive walrus moustache – inspired the strikers to go further. His demand for free trade unions (and press freedom) swept along the coast, closing ports and factories, then down the Silesian mines, paralysing the economy. After three emotional weeks, the government gave in to the protesters. Within a year some ten million Poles had joined Solidarność. Within a decade – in spite of an interval of brutal martial law and the arrest of 10,000 union members – Poles had dismantled the old order. They forged a model for compromise between ruler and ruled, and Wałęsa became the country’s first freely elected post-war president.
To many, Wałęsa’s negotiation for the withdrawal of Soviet troops marked the real end of the Second World War. So it was appropriate that now, in the shadow of the shipyard’s chimneys and cranes, an extraordinary new museum to that war should thrust upwards out of the earth.
I stepped into its skewed glass and terracotta-panelled cube, and dropped into the four-storey-deep concrete bunker that lay beneath it. Around me sombre underground exhibition halls fanned out at unsettling angles: the Russian Revolution, Hitler’s ‘racial community’, Japanese imperialism, air raids, death camps and the Battle of Britain. A wall-size map signed by Stalin and Ribbentrop sliced Poland in half. In a black room entitled ‘People Like Us’ hung the framed portraits of hundreds of Holocaust victims.
In this haunting space, physical depth echoed emotional depth. Far below the sunbeams that glanced off its sheer walls, I paused to consider Łódź ghetto banknotes, minute figurines carved from toothbrushes at Ravensbrück concentration camp and doughy shards of china melted by the atomic blast at Hiroshima. The Gdańsk museum did not celebrate military heroism. It didn’t propagate a patriotic, official chronology. Instead it focused on civilians – European, Asian and Middle Eastern – who’d endured terror, humiliation, hunger, bombardment, slave labour and forced mass migration. It recalled forgotten or marginalised victims from around the globe: 3 million Soviet POWs murdered – most of them starved to death – in German captivity; 2.7 million Chinese civilians lost during Imperial Japan’s ‘kill all, loot all, burn all’ sanko sakusen operation; hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma exterminated by Croatia’s Ustaša. The astonishing subterranean building was a Gesamtkunstwerk, a complete work of art, unlike any I had seen before, but the man who had overseen its creation was not there. He’d been fired.
‘We inherited the museum six months ago,’ said Aleks Maslowski, the museum’s new press officer, an intense, distrustful, squirrel-faced man with an edge of anger in his voice. ‘Its displays were international,’ he went on, all but spitting the word. ‘It taught that war is a bad thing,’ he huffed, looking at his watch, ticking with impatience, making me aware that he had more important things to do. ‘Now the message will be changed. We need to teach the Polish people that they must be prepared to defend our home.’ He paused to emphasise: ‘This is a Polish museum, financed by Polish taxpayers, so it must reflect the Polish perspective.’
In the exhibition I had noticed the new regime’s first dozen changes, tacked on like emoji smileys on Goya’s Disasters of War. Polish heroes were feted. New exhibits on resistance to Nazi Germany and the Western Allies’ ‘betrayal’ of the country had replaced displays on the war in Asia. Victories were emphasised over pain.
But the most shocking ‘correction’ was saved for the final room. Originally a series of documentary clips had been projected above a stretch of the Berlin Wall, linking the war to the present day, from the arms race and Kennedy’s assassination to Donbas and Syria. Mao Zedong had been juxtaposed with the Beatles, Vietnam with the Warsaw Pact, Polish strikers with moon shots. US helicopter gunships had come face to face with Tiananmen Square tanks. Taliban fighters had swept across Afghanistan as African refugees drifted in the Mediterranean. A weeping Aleppo father clutched his bloodied, dying son as the folk ballad ‘House of the Rising Sun’ warned, ‘Oh mother, tell your children, not to do what I have done…’
Now, instead of a salutary anti-war message, a slick and derivative Call of Duty animation flashed across the screens. Above the real barbed wire, a cartoonish Polish martyr fought to hold back invaders. He flew a Hurricane against the Luftwaffe, survived (or at least respawned in) a Siberian gulag and led the Warsaw Uprising from a hi-tech Matrix-like base.
‘We break the German enigma code, saving the lives of millions and in exchange for all that we do, we are betrayed, abandoned by the West behind the Iron Curtain,’ trumpeted a brassy narrator, championing both victimhood and martyrdom. ‘But we don’t give up, despite being left on our own.’ Then in a stagey visual finale, Polish shipyard workers in yellow hard hats knock down the Wall and Poland prevails ‘because we do not beg for freedom, we fight for it’.
In front of my eyes, history was being rewritten.
‘This process will never be finished,’ press officer Aleks insisted when I asked him about the tacky, animated Unconquered video. ‘We will find new facts. The displays must be changed whenever is needed,’ he added without a hint of contrition.
‘The story of the museum is the story of modern Poland,’ said ousted director Paweł Machcewicz when we met weeks later, far away from Gdańsk. After his dismissal he’d taken refuge in Berlin and we met there in his temporary, sparse, stark white office. On the desk in front of him lay a copy of Galasso Scotini’s Politics of Memory as well as his own book Museum. ‘Our history is again exploited as a political weapon.’
Since 1945, the monolithic mythology of the Red Army’s glory – and heroic communist resistance to Nazism – had been extolled across Eastern Europe. That political tale crumbled along with the Berlin Wall, in the same year that Machcewicz graduated into ‘a miracle’.
‘After university I realised that I could do anything, become anything: journalist, academic, historian,’ he told me. His face was long and lean, his lips pronounced, his shirt checked and his blazer blue. ‘I chose to be an historian so as to play a part in writing true Polish history.’