Detail from a promotional poster of Wojciech Smarzowski’s 2016 film Wołyń. Image courtesy of repetuary.pl. Some rights reserved.Across Europe and North America, open versus closed is the new political divide, declared The Economist in July. And in eastern Europe, debates are raging about figurative walls as well as physical ones. Can the region’s history be parcelled up and divided between nation states? Is memory a fortress, or a forum for dialogue?
At the official level, authoritative truths are in the ascendant. In July, the Polish parliament approved a government-sponsored bill to recognise the wartime mass murders of Polish civilians by Ukrainian nationalists in 1943 as “genocide”, a move condemned by Ukraine’s parliament as well as opposition figures in Poland. Meanwhile, September saw the release of Smoleńsk, a film which has been widely criticised for its crude popularising of a Russophobic conspiracy theory about the 2010 Smoleńsk airplane tragedy, in which 96 people, including then-president Lech Kaczyński, were killed.
Indeed, there is a perceptible move in Poland towards official adoption of an essentially martyrological narrative which foregrounds and valorises loss in national terms. The Law and Justice party have overseen the revival of the martyrdom myth of the so-called “condemned soldiers”, anti-communist insurgents in the 1940s and early 1950s, while downplaying the role of ethnic Poles in wartime and postwar pogroms against Jewish citizens.
