His career ran in parallel with the new national narrative: working as a research analyst at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, writing books on the Cold War, serving at the new Institute of National Remembrance. As the director of its Bureau of Public Education, he encouraged the acknowledgement of wrongdoing, as in the opening of Służba Bezpieczeństwa secret police files. Alongside others of his generation, he was determined to shape ‘the new, democratic, independent Poland’.
‘It was a heady time, a high point of Polish self-consciousness,’ he said, offering coffee, setting aside the morning to talk to me. ‘We were electrified by the excitement of truth-telling and reconciliation.’
But then the Law and Justice party came to power, and recast the Institute of National Remembrance as a tool for an authoritarian assault on culture.
‘When I saw their intention, I immediately resigned from my post at the Institute.’
Machcewicz believed that Poles had something important to say, both to themselves and to Europe. In the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, he wrote that ‘the most tragic conflict in the history of humanity’ had shaped Polish identity, as it had shaped the identities of many other nations. He said that Poles needed to learn more about it ‘to understand the way we are today’.
Poland’s then prime minister, Donald Tusk, read the article and asked Machcewicz to create a special war museum in Gdańsk.
‘Such an opportunity comes only once in the lifetime of an historian, and not to every historian,’ he said with a laugh.
From the start the museum set out to transcend national boundaries as well as to show how the war had impacted individuals. Its collection would include thousands of items donated by both the public and by institutions: buttons and belt buckles retrieved from Katyn graves, the keys to Jewish homes (in the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom, some Poles had tormented and murdered Jews with the complicity of the German Ordnungspolizei), a cattle wagon used by the Soviets to transport Poles to Siberian gulags and by the Nazis to send them to Auschwitz. Through its exhibits visitors would come to understand that war does not lie in a remote past. The undertaking absorbed eight years of Machcewicz’s life and some $130 million of taxpayers’ money, until Tusk’s party fell from power. Immediately PiS sought to ‘liquidate’ it.
‘It was – and is – the largest historical museum in Poland but the government claimed that it wasn’t patriotic enough,’ Machcewicz emphasised with both defiance and an air of the hunted. ‘PiS wanted to use it for propaganda purposes, to promote the idea of Polish heroism, martyrdom and uniqueness.’
The new government demanded extensive changes, including the repackaging of facts. For example, although the Soviet Union and Germany had suffered the greatest loss of life in the war, in order to portray Poles as the greater victim, they wanted deaths to be listed as a percentage of population.
‘If I’d agreed, Poland would have come top of such a list, having lost 20 per cent of its people. But the figure is contentious as it includes Polish Jews, some of whom were murdered by their fellow countrymen. I refused to change a single detail of the exhibition under their pressure.’
As a result, the regime cut the museum’s funding. They accused Machcewicz of overspending on building works, of sabotage and of working as an agent of Brussels and Berlin. They even conjured up a controversial law ‘to defend Poland’s reputation from historical inaccuracies’ and thereby punish anyone who mentioned Polish complicity in Nazi crimes (such as the Jedwabne pogrom). Finally, as the museum became an ideological and political flash point, the regime fired him.
‘They behaved like occupation forces, seizing and taking control of territory,’ he said, containing his emotions while recalling their barbaric methods. ‘Five years ago no Pole could have imagined that something like this could happen.’
But that wasn’t the end of it. In an effort to defame and demoralise Machcewicz, the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau – a kind of political police invented by the first Kaczyński government – began to call at his home and intimidate his family. Then a criminal investigation was initiated against him and he was menaced by a charge of corruption with the possibility of up to eight years in prison, despite there being no evidence against him.
To tell the true story, Machcewicz fought back with appeals and his new book, Museum.
‘I don’t feel defeated by the government. These attacks are their revenge for failing to defeat me,’ he said. ‘In fact, I feel it is a victory. Half a million visitors saw the exhibition before the regime took it over and started to change it.’
He went on, ‘Young people today are the first generation who may not have any family recollection of the war. So the museum’s first task was to convey some basic knowledge as schools are not fulfilling this task in a sufficient way. On a deeper level we wanted young and old alike to become emotionally involved, to understand what war is, what violence is, what suffering is. We wanted to affect their values. I believe that has been achieved, half a million times.’
We spoke through the morning about responsibility, moral courage and politicians who retell stories of the past to justify their power. We looked back at moments in the twentieth century when one party eliminated its opposition and took control of the police and courts. I said it was no wonder that the PiS regime especially disliked his exhibit on the rise of 1930s nationalism.
‘It has always been possible to destroy democracy from within,’ replied Paweł Machcewicz. ‘The difference today – in Europe at least – is that there is no direct physical violence.’
‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘That is why it’s so important to defend the museum,’ he emphasised. ‘To show that the war isn’t a closed chapter, that it isn’t the past. The propensity to violence is inside us; it is part of the human condition. Our task – as responsible and cognisant individuals – is somehow to avoid the repetition of such a nightmare.’
That night it poured in Gdańsk. Crocodiles of umbrellas skirted puddles in the half-light. Older locals stayed indoors, behind curtains drawn against the damp dark, while younger Danzigers stepped out, shaking off the wet like dogs inside candle-lit cafes. I lingered among them, over ginger tea, waiting for the torrent to subside.
It takes time to build an authoritarian regime, I thought, but in Poland democracy has been undermined at breakneck speed. As in Russia and Hungary, from which the Kaczyński twins took their lead, the country has come to be ruled by one man who claims that he alone speaks for ‘the people’. He has eliminated his foes and gutted the democratic institutions that constrain him. He works to polarise the country, turning Pole against Pole to prevent them from uniting against him and defending their democracy. He exploits the myth of Smolensk for – whatever the truth – the tragedy serves him.
Of course a majority of Poles voted Law and Justice into power. The electorate chose to belong to the nation – a more primitive form of collective identity – rather than Europe’s postmodern vision of community. But how could they – a free people – then allow their nation to be dismantled? How did they stomach the party’s comic-book world view?
At times Poland struck me as an unknowable place, secrecy ingrained in it by centuries of occupation. Yet at the same time the regime’s intentions are plain to see. Journalists and judges who want to keep their jobs now understand not to violate ‘the interests of the nation’. The Smolensk crash investigation continues to be debased (the greatest cover-up ‘in the history of the world’ according to the PiS defence minister). New schoolbooks no longer name Lech Wałęsa as an important twentieth-century democrat, claiming instead that the true heirs of Solidarność are the Kaczyńskis.