New York Times o Wroclawiu

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October 15, 2003


Honor the Uprooted Germans? Poles Are Uneasy

*By RICHARD BERNSTEIN*

WROCLAW, Poland ? Even as the idea of Europe is inexorably pushing
Germany and Poland, those ancient neighbors and enemies, into the same
club, the European Union, a different way of looking at history has been
pushing them apart.

Certainly this has been so in recent weeks, since a group of Germans led
by a conservative member of Parliament proposed that a center be built
in Berlin to study and remember the mass expulsions of 12 million to 13
million ethnic Germans from several countries of Eastern Europe after
World War II.

To its advocates the center would be a natural development, an effort to
remember and understand a lamentable, often forgotten fact: that in the
two years after Germany's defeat in 1945, ethnic Germans were forced to
leave countries where they and their ancestors had lived, in some
instances for centuries, and resettle in Germany itself.

But in Polish places like this medieval, painstakingly restored city and
in other countries, most notably the Czech Republic, the proposal has
provoked an emotional and almost entirely negative reaction.

That was summed up when a leading Warsaw newsmagazine put a cartoon on
its cover showing the most prominent advocate of the proposed center,
Erika Steinbach, as an officer in the Nazi SS, sitting astride a
submissive Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor.

"There is an emotional overreaction, and that's not needed," allowed
Wojciech Wrzesinski, director of the Institute of History here in
Wroclaw, a city whose entire German population was forced to leave after
the war and where the German idea for a memorial resonates about as
badly as anywhere in Poland.

Even if Professor Wrzesinski believes that the magazine went a bit far,
he quickly points out why the German initiative is wrongheaded and harmful.

Especially if located in Berlin, he and others argue, the center would
make Germans seem equal in their victimization to the peoples, including
the Poles, whom they harmed.

"Consciousness is created by certain symbols," said Wlodzimierz Suleja,
the director of the Wroclaw branch of the Polish Institute for National
Memory, and a historian of modern Poland. "And this center would be
their symbol, the Germany symbol, that they were victims, too, and that
would be a symbol detached from the truth about the past."

German officials say the issue has become a matter of negotiation
between the government of Germany and those of some of its former Soviet
bloc neighbors. This may further complicate the delicacy of bringing
peoples who have feared or experienced German domination into the
European Union in May ? a step that is already unleashing fears in
Poland of a swarm of wealthy Germans buying up the country.

In fact, the proposal for a center on the deportees may turn out to be a
minor irritant. The idea has been publicly opposed by Mr. Schröder and
his government.

Still, a difference over memory and how it is safeguarded has taken its
place among the differences that have been more commonly discussed in
the growing union.

The dispute over the past, moreover, is a reminder that the passage of
time may heal some wounds; eventually it may even lead to a benign sort
of forgetfulness.

But once history has happened, it has happened forever, and as long as
people wish to forge their identity on the basis of collective memory
there can be no annulment of its consequences.

Wroclaw, a formerly German city of restored Baroque houses and churches
on the Oder River, was almost entirely destroyed during World War II,
when it was bombarded and eventually overrun by the Soviet Army after a
desperate 14-week German defense that lasted until four days after the
fall of Berlin.

When Wroclaw, known for hundreds of years by its German name, Breslau,
did fall, only about a fourth or a fifth of its wartime population ?
swollen by German refugees from bombed-out industrial cities farther
west ? remained. Then, as the Soviet authorities took control, they
carried out a decision pressed by Stalin and reluctantly accepted by his
wartime partners, Truman and Churchill.

It was that Poland's borders would be shifted west, so formerly Polish
cities like Vilnius and Lvov could be incorporated into the Soviet Union
while formerly German cities like Wroclaw would be given to Poland.

So the German population of Wroclaw was forcibly removed, as were German
populations in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and parts of Romania.

At the same time, Poles were uprooted from what were now to be parts of
Lithuania and Ukraine and were transported to Wroclaw and other newly
Polish locations. "We are the only city whose population was 100 percent
changed after the war," Rafat Dutkiewicz, the mayor of Wroclaw, said in
an interview.

German tourists are a common sight here, as they hunt down the places
where they or their parents or grandparents once lived.

During the Soviet decades, the Poles of Wroclaw were not allowed to take
corresponding journeys to Ukraine, Belarus or Lithuania, but since 1996
increasing numbers of them have gone to see where their families came
from, too.

This quest for roots has not provoked political disagreement in the
past. But there is a new urgency in Germany these days about the need to
remember and to commemorate. With the debate provoked by the proposed
center and the publication of a new book about deportations, the subject
of German exile has been getting unparalleled attention.

"Why now?" asked Peter Glotz, a former member of the German Parliament
and co-chairman, with Ms. Steinbach, of the Committee Against
Deportations, who was deported with his family from Czechoslovakia when
he was 6.

"Now I'm 65," said Mr. Glotz, the author of a book on the deportations
from the Sudetenland. "People are dying out, and at the end of life
people are asking, `What happened?' " The territory, once largely
inhabited by ethnic Germans, was annexed by Germany in 1938 and returned
to Czechoslovakia in 1945.

"The second reason is Yugoslavia," Mr. Glotz continued. When mass
expulsion became a feature of the Balkan wars in the 1990s, he said,
"suddenly the Germans realized that this was our problem."

In Wroclaw, arguments like those of Mr. Glotz do not persuade.

Some 20,000 of its mostly Germanophile, assimilated Jews were wiped out
by the Nazis. In the entire 1,000 years of the city's history, the worst
that ever happened here was the wholesale destruction that took place in
1945, the end of a chain of events initiated by Hitler and the Nazis. It
is these things that most need remembering, people here say.

"Hitler sacrificed the 1,000-year history of this town to hold up the
Third Reich," said Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, a historian of German-Polish
relations. In a center against deportation, facts might go missing,
among them: Wroclaw voted about 40 percent for the Nazis in the election
of 1933 that brought Hitler to power ? more than they won nationally.

October 15, 2003


Honor the Uprooted Germans? Poles Are Uneasy

*By RICHARD BERNSTEIN*

ROCLAW, Poland ? Even as the idea of Europe is inexorably pushing
Germany and Poland, those ancient neighbors and enemies, into the same
club, the European Union, a different way of looking at history has been
pushing them apart.

Certainly this has been so in recent weeks, since a group of Germans led
by a conservative member of Parliament proposed that a center be built
in Berlin to study and remember the mass expulsions of 12 million to 13
million ethnic Germans from several countries of Eastern Europe after
World War II.

To its advocates the center would be a natural development, an effort to
remember and understand a lamentable, often forgotten fact: that in the
two years after Germany's