Culture

Poland’s Ruling Party Puts an Extraordinary Museum of Polish-Jewish History Into Limbo


Dariusz Stola met me at a coffee shop in Warsaw. He was wearing a flannel shirt and he was unshaven. It was Sunday, but this was more than a couple of days’ worth of stubble. Stola may or may not be the director of Warsaw’s Polin, the museum of the history of Polish Jews, which opened in 2014 and is probably the most ambitious and successful new museum in Eastern or Central Europe in a decade. Stola hasn’t been at work since the end of February. He told me that he still hopes to return, but he added that, as someone who was formed by Poland’s unique and ultimately successful anti-totalitarian resistance movement of the nineteen-eighties, he has the habit of hoping against hope. The question of his reappointment as the director of Polin has been the subject of a protracted, highly politicized battle.

The story of Polin is, as Stola sees it, “a series of miracles.” In 1993, a group of Polish historians travelled to Washington, D.C., for the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and returned inspired. “It was a new kind of museum, unknown in Poland,” Stola, who was not part of the original group, said. Poland, where the largest number of European Jews lived before the war, was where the largest number of Jews died: roughly three million, or some ninety per cent of the pre-war Jewish population, were killed. But the founders did not envision a museum of murder—it would be a museum of the life and culture of the Jews of Poland, going back to the Middle Ages. (“Polin” is a transliteration of the Hebrew words for “Poland” and “rest here”; according to legend, the first Jews to come to Poland, a thousand years ago, announced their decision to settle with this phrase.)

It took more than twenty years for the idea to become reality. Polin as an institution was formally founded in 2005 by three entities: the Polish national government, then run by a leftist coalition; the city of Warsaw; and a nongovernmental organization called the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland. The city donated a plot of land (although, as Stola pointed out, this plot, in what had once been a Jewish neighborhood, had surely belonged to Jewish businesses before the Holocaust). A striking building with double-curving interior walls, designed by the Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamäki, went up. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a North American historian and museum specialist, was drafted to lead the creation of the permanent exhibition. Donors were enthusiastic; coöperation among the founders yielded inspired aesthetic choices. It was a show of political will that, Stola said, would be unimaginable in Poland today. Everything seemed to come together, with the right people in all the right places at the right time. “Coincidence is the domain of divine intervention,” Stola said.

I visited Polin at various stages in its development, and found that its extraordinary accomplishment was that it avoided giving the visitor a narrative. Its exhibits are, like history itself, genuinely polyphonous and contradictory. The museum was an astounding critical and commercial success, drawing about half a million visitors a year from the beginning. It also faced criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. What Stola characterized as the “marginal left” said that Polin did not sufficiently highlight the history of anti-Semitism in Poland; the “marginal right,” on the other hand, wanted more information on Poles who helped Jews escape or hide from the Nazis during the Second World War. “They both wanted more non-Jews,” Stola joked.

Stola was a somewhat unexpected choice as director of Polin. He is not Jewish, nor did his previous work focus primarily on Jewish history; just before coming to the museum, he was writing on late-stage socialism in Poland. “Stola has done a surprisingly good job,” Konstanty Gebert, a prominent Jewish journalist and activist in Warsaw, told me. “That guy has been the most brilliant museum director,” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said. “He is a terrific scholar. He is a great guy. He is a mensch of the first order.”

Miracles have a way of ending. In 2015, Poland elected a nationalist-conservative government, which, like many other Eastern and Central European governments, promised to make the country’s past great again; “Down with the pedagogy of shame” was one of its buzz phrases. It meant that Poles should stop apologizing for their sins, foremost among them their coöperation with the Nazis in exterminating European Jewry. A signal event in what the new leadership saw as the nation’s humiliation was the previous Polish leader Aleksander Kwaśniewski’s 2001 apology for the murder of sixteen hundred Jews in the village of Jedwabne, where the killers were their victims’ ethnic-Polish neighbors. The government targeted the Princeton University professor Jan T. Gross, a Polish-American historian whose book “Neighbors” documented the Jedwabne massacre. Gross was threatened with the loss of his Polish state honors and prosecution for ostensibly libelling the nation. Last year, Poland passed a law making it a criminal offense to ascribe blame for Nazi atrocities to Poles or Poland. (As originally adopted, the law made the crime punishable by jail time, but this provision was later removed, making it a civil offense.)

The legislation of memory is not in itself unfamiliar. All European countries do it. Germany criminalizes Holocaust denial. Ukraine has outlawed denial of the “criminal nature” of Communist and Nazi regimes. In 2010, Lithuania, where the local population was instrumental in the murder of Jews, outlawed references to Lithuanian collaborators. Now Poland wanted to do the same. Polin objected. In a statement signed by Stola and Piotr Wiślicki, the chairman of the board of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute, the institution said that the law would inhibit historical research. The government was not happy.

But Gebert, the journalist and activist, believes that what made the government really mad at Stola was an exhibition called “Estranged,” held in March of last year. It documented the events of March, 1968, possibly the most shameful episode of Poland’s post-war history. A government-sponsored anti-Semitic campaign purged Jews from workplaces, the Party, and, ultimately, the country. Thirteen thousand people—a majority of Jews remaining in Poland at the time—are believed to have emigrated. Many people were “outed” as Jews; some of them, like my own relatives in Warsaw, had been living with non-Jewish papers since the Second World War, which they had survived because of those papers. “Estranged” was phenomenally successful, selling a hundred and sixteen thousand tickets, according to Stola. The exhibition closed with a wall of quotes: xenophobic and anti-Semitic statements from 1968 and 2018, mixed together. The quotes were unattributed, but at least two recognizably belonged to current members of the country’s ruling party.

The government pressured Stola to resign. Stola refused, but his contract was running out at the end of February, 2019, and the government did not want him reappointed. But, because the museum is a public-private partnership, run by consensus by the three founding parties, the national government couldn’t dictate its future. By way of a compromise, all three agreed to form a fifteen-person committee to conduct an open search for a director; Stola submitted to the humiliation of applying for his own job. His only competitor was a Jewish community leader—a lawyer with no museum experience. The committee chose Stola. But the country’s minister of culture, Piotr Gliński, had to formally reappoint Stola. He has not.

This is not the first time that the Polish government has seized control of museums, using blunt pressure or clever legal ploys, depending on the situation. In 2017, the government took over the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, another contemporary museum that offered no simple answers—and certainly didn’t offer the now-official narrative that Poland was, on the one hand, a helpless victim of Nazi and Soviet aggression, and, on the other, a hero of resistance to both. (This narrative is not untrue, but it is glaringly incomplete, because it elides Polish collaboration with the Nazis.) Ironically, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said, in this battle for government dominance, “Every last bit is about the importance of history.” So important is history that the government wants complete control of it. Stola is guilty simply of being a scholar and a thinker, rather than a functionary.

For the past four months, Stola told me, he has maintained a daily routine: “Every morning, I wake up, have a cup of coffee, and wait for the phone to ring and the minister to tell me he is appointing me because I won the competition.” Stola has the option of returning to his research position at the Academy of Sciences, but he has not returned, because “I expect the minister to do what he is supposed to do. I won the competition. And the museum should have a director.” While he is in limbo, one of his former deputies keeps the museum running. Stola told me that he has also clocked two thousand kilometers on his bicycles during his forced vacation, but that, as is his way, he remains full of hope.



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