From 1949 to 1989, Poland’s Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy (ZBoWiD) sought to sustain a monopoly on memory-making for war veterans and victims of Nazi occupation. Given the magnitude of World War II’s influence on Poland’s politics of memory, it is remarkable that previous scholarship has insufficiently featured this central organization. This translation of Joanna Wawrzyniak’s 2007 dissertation (published 2009) applies extensive archival analysis, rare veteran journals and bulletins, secret police files, and interviews to exhibit the ZBoWiD’s inner workings and influence. Like Jonathan Huener’s Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration (2003), Wawrzyniak deftly applies a pivotal example to illustrate the broader evolution of Poland’s memory culture in the tense Cold War political climate.
Deploying a tight chronological analysis, Wawrzyniak reveals that shifting memory narratives formed due to “negotiation between the state and memory groups” (13). This interplay evolved over four principal periods that paralleled trends in Polish politics and culture. After an initial contextual chapter, Chapter 2 traces memory narratives through the tumultuous immediate postwar years before the founding of the ZBoWiD. Deploying Robert Traba’s term “live memory,” it illuminates an era in which the recentness of trauma vested commemoration with particular emotional involvement, and ongoing chaos allowed for diverse narratives that included commemoration of both the Communist People’s Army and their former Home Army foes. As socialists and communists were forcibly merged into one party, however, commemorative groups were also forcibly centralized into the ZBoWiD. Hence, the early postwar suppression of “substantial and pluralistic” commemorative practices paralleled the suppression of open political society more broadly (82).
In contrast to diffuse and competing memories before 1949, the Stalinist era (Chapter 3) saw the ZBoWiD consolidate a myth of brotherly Soviet and Polish military glory that excluded the Home Army. In this narrative, liberation had only been possible through Soviet sacrifices to defeat fascism, and the USA and West Germany represented the next fascist danger. Effacing Jewish memory, former concentration camps became spaces where “heroes of the communist cause suffered.” Like most regime narratives at the time, this “propagandistic illusion” failed to connect with society (133–34).
As in Poland more generally, the years 1956–57 functioned as a hinge on which the whole country turned from Stalinism to communist nationalism (Chapter 4). At the cost of historical accuracy, the ZBoWiD won new members by claiming that communists and Home Army fighters had united together to overthrow fascism, presenting a common body of national heroes more conversant with public memory wishes. Although communist suffering and heraldry still dominated, this “collision of interests” between state and society meant that “diverse groups of memory gained a voice” (158). So diverse was this sudden commemorative explosion that, in contrast to 1960s strident nationalism, some groups actually distanced themselves from nationalism and pursued commemoration for personal, rather than ideological motives.
Finally, through the 1960s (Chapter 5) the ZBoWiD “normalized” into a social welfare structure for aging soldiers and victims (much as Poland was a striving social welfare state), and momentary coexistence between diverse commemorative narratives gave way to a strident nationalist, even antisemitic approach spearheaded by the ZBoWiD but paralleled by broader social trends. Mieczysław Moczar’s rise as ZBoWiD head (1964–72) transformed it into a nationalist, antisemitic movement to gain mass appeal and legitimize the regime. Previous reluctance to feature Jewish suffering under Nazi occupation gave way to making Poles the “greatest victims,” whose heroic rescue of Jews was now betrayed by Israel’s alliance with Polish archenemy West Germany (200).
Wawrzyniak’s analysis ends with repercussions of the ZBoWiD’s dissolution in 1990. As in the immediate postwar period and 1956, rival interpretations became possible. After the IPN Institute of National Memory formed in 1998 to guard national memory of Polish victims and heroic struggle against Nazi and communist occupiers, critical works by scholars such as Jan Gross and the Polish Center for Holocaust Research stimulated open competition over memory.
It is unclear why Wawrzyniak skips the vast epoch from 1969–89. What was the interplay between Solidarity and war commemoration, not least as so many victims and veterans were dependent on the state due to welfare payments? Did it matter that commemoration increasingly stemmed from those without wartime memories? Also, as Wawrzyniak periodically observes, in each era the USSR was upheld as Poland’s protector against West German revanchism on the tenuous Oder-Neisse border; as in most Polish organizations, this rhetoric recurred in every ZBoWiD speech. Did West German recognition of Poland’s western border in 1970 diminish the ZBoWiD’s public resonance? The provocation of such queries only underlines the success of Wawrzyniak’s analysis of how the ZBoWiD mirrored and shaped Polish political and cultural memory. An incisive and well-organized case study, it is highly recommended to specialists on Poland’s politics of memory and postwar central and east central Europe more generally.
