Behind it all is the self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” economist, television pundit and lambchop sideburn-laden populist President Javier Milei, who took office at the end of 2023. Milei’s rapid rise was fueled in part by his relative outsider status in a moment of economic crisis caused by what Milei calls the failed political “caste.” Argentina is grappling with inflation rates of more than 200%, a 40% poverty rate, plummeting foreign currency reserves and massive sovereign debt.

Milei, who defeated his institutional political opponents in a run-off, cited the Hanukkah story of the Maccabees in his inauguration speech in December, describing the Jewish warriors’ successful revolt against the ruling class in the 2nd century B.C. as a “symbol of the victory of the weak over the powerful.” This was no coincidence. Alongside his transgressive public presence and radical policy decrees, Milei emphatically embraces Judaism.

Born and raised Catholic, like the majority of Argentines, Milei has in recent years studied the Torah with great intrigue. He claims that he is seriously considering converting to Orthodox Judaism, but says he would do this only after his term in office, given the strict lifestyle requirements of orthodoxy. And he has voiced full-throated support for Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza.

At his inauguration, Milei hosted conservative populist Viktor Orbán. The Hungarian prime minister, who is a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has drawn harsh critiques for his attempts to downplay the Hungarian role in the persecution of Jewish people during World War II and for his demonization of American-Hungarian philanthropist George Soros, who is Jewish. Also at the inauguration and invited to light the Hanukkah menorah was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose dependence on Western powers to defend Ukraine against Russia’s invasion has made him a symbol of liberal internationalism — one that the isolationist populist right has grown to loathe. After the ceremony, Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, was seen confronting Orbán over the Hungarian prime minister’s obstruction of efforts to get European Union aid to Ukraine.

Shortly before his inauguration, Milei received blessings from the famed Kabbalistic rabbi David Hanania Pinto. After his inauguration, Milei flew to New York to visit the tomb of “the Rebbe,” as the influential Hasidic spiritual leader Menachem Mendel Schneerson who died in 1994, is known; his burial place was also famously visited before Election Day 2016 by Ivanka Trump, herself a convert. After the gravesite visit, Milei dined with former U.S. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and Gerardo Werthein, a close personal friend of Clinton’s, who will soon become Argentina’s ambassador to the U.S. Werthein too is Jewish.

On the outside at least, Milei holds many contradictions. His embrace of a nationalist populist like Orbán suggests one set of priorities, while his kinship with Zelenskyy, a Jewish leader raising money globally for the war with Russia, suggests another. The same could be said of his visit to a religiously conservative spiritual site followed by lunch with a neoliberal Democrat who famously scandalized the White House by having an affair with an intern. Politically, religiously and stylistically, Milei is difficult to categorize.

Like other populists, his perceived authenticity is his biggest political asset. But who is the authentic Milei? Venezuelan journalist Moises Naim wrote in El País that there are two Mileis: One is the bespectacled libertarian economist who may actually break an economic gridlock for Argentina. The other is the tantric sex expert with an Austin Powers hairdo who famously hired a medium to speak with his deceased dog and dead people who told him he would win the presidency.

In a similar vein, there seem to be two Mileis with Judaism: One who has a sincere calling to the faith and all its intricate pluralisms, and one who dialogues with a global right that has used Israel as a symbol of conservative ethnonationalism while also engaging in antisemitic rhetorical tropes that have galvanized and won the support of disaffected, largely white Christian voters in both the U.S. and Europe.

Argentina itself is a place of contradictions in recent Jewish history. It has given safety to Jews fleeing persecution throughout the 20th century — they now compose about 0.5% of the population and represent Latin America’s largest Jewish community. But it also gave refuge to Nazis escaping war crimes tribunals after the Holocaust. A Spanish judiciary commission found that during Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, Jews were disproportionately targeted for torture and disappearance. 

Milei has downplayed the “dirty war” carried out by that anti-communist military regime, which investigators later estimated to have ordered the extrajudicial killings of more than 20,000 people. His vice president, Victoria Villarruel, has pushed what the Buenos Aires Times called a “denialist discourse” about the history of the dictatorship. Families of victims have expressed fear that whitewashing Argentina’s darkest chapter of the 20th century could pave the way for history to repeat itself. 

In more recent decades, Argentina has become the site of proxy attacks on Israeli and Jewish institutions carried out by Iranian-aligned extremist groups. A 1992 suicide bombing on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires killed 29 people and a similar attack on a Jewish community center two years later killed 85. Decades later, investigations into the bombings were marred by allegations that sitting government officials, including the left-wing president at the time, Cristina de Kirchner, had orchestrated a cover-up and committed. Alberto Nisman, the federal prosecutor investigating these allegations, was found dead in his apartment in 2015, shortly before he was scheduled to present his findings.

And despite Milei’s embrace of Judaism, his own administration is not immune to antisemitic allegiances. His attorney general, Rodolfo Barra, was once forced to resign from a government job when it was discovered he had been part of neo-Nazi group Tacuara.

The Israel-Hamas war has of course ratcheted up tensions around these cases, and in Jewish and Arab communities across the country.

“For most people, his Judaism is another eccentricity,” says writer Tamara Tenenbaum, whose father was killed in the 1994 Jewish community center bombing. Tenenbaum was part of a diverse group of Argentine Jewish intellectuals and leaders who signed a letter, “Milei does not represent us,” noting how Milei had been embraced by right-wing political projects around the world that champion Israel while simultaneously leaning into antisemitic tropes — through the vilification of concepts like “globalism” or “cultural marxism”— and supporting other forms of racism and discrimination. All this comes against a backdrop of a rising evangelical population in Argentina that supports both Milei and Israel, but may resist more progressive visions held by some segments of the Jewish community. 

“I got a lot of antisemitic hate online from supporters of Milei,” Tenenbaum told me. “Your surname speaks for you,” one person wrote her. Another message read: “Of course you are a leftist whore with that name.”

Since taking office, Milei has announced pro-Israel policies, like declaring Hamas a terrorist organization, installing his personal rabbi, Axel Wahnish, as ambassador to Israel, and declaring intentions to move Argentina’s Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The moves have inspired what Buenos Aires-based rabbi Fabián Skolnik calls “two opposing sentiments” among Argentine Jews who support Milei. On the one hand, “the community feels pride and happiness to have a pro-Jewish, pro-Israel president. He participates in community activities, in Hanukkah, in Jewish life.” Yet on the other hand, having a president visibly associated with Judaism inspires worry. “If things don’t go well and issues start to emerge, a lot of folks in the Jewish community are afraid that will awaken antisemitism.”

Not simply in style or words, Milei has networked himself with a posse of populist right-wing politicians worldwide, many members of which have embraced Israel, sometimes in spite of their own antisemitic leanings, in a fight against Islamic extremism or the fabled brand of communism they say is threatening to traditional family values. Right-wing populist leaders who celebrated Milei’s victory have in recent years also specifically embraced Netanyahu, Israel and “Judeo-Christian” conservative values — be they former U.S. President Donald Trump or former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who also proposed moving the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem after the U.S. did as much in 2018.

Milei appears to be interested in aligning himself with other figures who may support his vision for austerity. “He happens to be in the same box as nationalist populist figures,” said Juan Soto, who has organized right-wing leaders including Milei in his work with the Disenso Foundation, a think-tank arm of Spain’s far right Vox Party. To wit, Milei signed onto the 2020 Carta de Madrid, a brief manifesto penned by the Disenso Foundation that denounced the supposedly encroaching specter of communism in Spain, Latin America and the United States.

But, Soto told me, “economic protectionism is where the New Right can be divided.” He described Milei as an outlier, in that he is “a free marketeer, a classical liberal, who needs international help.” In this sense too, Milei embodies contradictions. He is a libertarian who wants to dollarize the Argentine economy, who will also deeply rely on the International Monetary Fund — which Argentina owes $32 billion — to course correct his country’s economy. This is a far cry from other populist parties who embrace economic nationalism or alternative transnational cooperation with some of the U.S.’s rivals, such as BRICS — which Milei has refused to join — whose founding members are Brazil, Russia, India and China. 

Milei may align with Vox’s Carta de Madrid, but he doesn’t align with Old World conservatism that sometimes veers into Putin fetishism, as in the case of Hungary’s Orbán. In this sense, we have to understand Milei’s as a distinctly New World brand. He welcomes Yankee internationalism and displays a unique mash-up of embracing libertine social preferences mixed with conservative religious guidance. He has supporters with antisemitic leanings, but he himself loves Judaism. Milei may be more like Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador with Palestinian ancestry, who staunchly supports Israel, decries Hamas and has taken extreme measures to enact change in El Salvador — much akin to Milei’s campaign spirit of waving a chainsaw as a symbol of drastic change coming. In a battle to eradicate the country’s drug cartels, Bukele has taken a “state of exception” to extremes, overseeing the arrests of nearly 60,000 people alongside enforced disappearances, torture of detainees and an overall dissolution of due process. These measures have drastically reduced El Salvador’s once record-high homicide rate, but at a tremendous cost to its democracy and to the tens of thousands affected by Bukele’s scorched-earth approach.

Perhaps part of Milei’s interest in aligning with traditionalist or religious factions of the global right on issues like abortion, which he firmly opposes, is to distinguish himself from “social-marxist” opponents and civil rights detractors. “If you have an important figure in the global right like Milei who is so strongly interested in Judaism, it is an important building block in the ‘Judeo-Christian’ coalition,” says Rabbi Slomo Koves, a leader of the Hungarian Chabad, a highly networked sect of Judaism known for encouraging more religious observance among Jews. The global right’s embrace of the “Judeo” within the “Judeo-Christian” coalition could mitigate antisemitism within some rank-and-file. Or it could just help to cover it up. 

While holding all of these contradictions on the global stage and at home, Milei is already bringing shock therapy to Argentina’s bedraggled economy. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year – the nationalist’s symbol of greedy globalists –  Milei addressed business leaders saying they were “social benefactors” and that free markets, not socialism, would save Argentina. He is a populist stradling the “globalist” and the “nationalist” divide. He is a potential Jewish convert navigating support for two different Jewish leaders, supporting two very different wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. At home, he is alternately donning his economist glasses and his chainsaw. How will all this impact Argentina’s economy, Jewish population and national fabric? We’ll soon find out.

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Three of the books, including the critically acclaimed graphic novel “Maus,” were flagged for review by the Nixa school board for potentially violating a new Missouri law that makes it illegal for school officials to provide minors with sexually explicit material. Librarians and educators who run afoul of the rule, which applies primarily to materials with strong visual components, like graphic novels and illustrated books, can face up to a year in prison and up to $2,000 in fines. The law did not apply to the other four books under consideration, which were flagged by community members for review by the board.

As I reported in April, Missouri’s law is part of a growing national movement, led by conservative parents’ rights groups, aimed at restricting access to books about gender, sexuality and race in public schools. In the first six months of the 2022-23 school year, state and local policymakers banned 874 books from classrooms and school libraries across the U.S., according to the nonprofit PEN America, which ranks Missouri as one of the nation’s top book-banning states. Since Missouri’s sexually explicit material law was enacted in August 2022, librarians fearful of criminal prosecution have removed nearly 300 titles from school library shelves.

In Nixa, a conservative town in southwest Missouri, a group of high schoolers decided to fight back against local efforts to ban books. Over the last 18 months, this student movement has led a campaign to defend books under siege by reading challenged titles, surveying students about their support for book bans and speaking up in support of contested books at school board meetings. Two of these students — Meghana Nakkanti and Glennis Woosley — attended the Nixa board’s June 20 meeting, where school officials voted on whether the Missouri law applied to three graphic novels: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir “Maus,” an illustrated adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets,” a coming-of-age autobiography by Craig Thompson. The board ultimately voted to retain “Maus” but decided to ban the other two books as well as four text-only novels that parents and community members challenged. 

What is it like to be at the frontlines of one of the nation’s most divisive culture war battles? I spoke to Nakkanti and Woosley to find out and to ask what they have learned from the rage of the book banners. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Both of you attended the June 20 meeting. The board decided not to ban “Maus,” but they did choose to ban “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets.” The board also banned the young adult novel “Unpregnant,” which is about pregnancy and abortion, and the children’s book “Something Happened in Our Town,” which is about police brutality. Which of these books generated the most conversation? 

Woosley: The conversation on “Unpregnant” was long. It’s the story of a girl, coming from a Christian conservative family, finding out that she is pregnant, and she’s a teenager. And so she and her friend try to get an abortion for her, and it takes place in Missouri in a very similar town as Nixa. So that’s why this book is so big and important around here. And she has to go to New Mexico to get an abortion. It’s a comedic book. And a lot of school board members were saying that they were taking the subject of abortion and making it light-hearted and normalized in ways they didn’t agree with. That was the main thing they talked about. Some of them also said that it was encouraging abortion, and they didn’t want students to be encouraged to have abortions. 

Did any students speak up? Was there space for that? 

Nakkanti: During their deliberation process, we were just flies on the wall. We weren’t allowed to say anything. But it was a very random conversation. One of the school board members took issue with the fact that Planned Parenthood is mentioned throughout the book and proceeded to describe how Planned Parenthood was created by a eugenicist. This was a fictional book, and it was like, that point has little to no pertinence to the subject matter at hand. And the same school board member took issue with the fact that there were no books about teenage girls who were pregnant and went to pregnancy centers. It was very bizarre. 

Woosley: She specifically had this mindset of, ‘there are books that are anti-police.’ So she was saying, ‘Why don’t we have books that are pro-police in our library if we have a book like that?’ 

Proponents say that the whole point of this law is to protect students from explicit sexual material. You are students. What’s your take? 

Woosley: I don’t like the law because it’s extremely vague. And because of that, what I don’t like is that some of these books that I am actually interested in reading I’m being restricted from reading. Thankfully, I come from a family that can provide me with those books. But I know a lot of my friends can’t do that. That’s why I don’t like the law, and I don’t think it’s benefiting us. It’s restricting people who want to read books from reading them. 

Nakkanti: I think the student body acknowledges that most of us don’t read. As high schoolers, we’re so busy with life and homework that we often don’t find the time to read. We say this all the time: Why do these people care so much? There are all these adults who probably have never even set foot in the high school or who have kids that are eight, who won’t be in the high school for six years, worried about this book that they think these kids are reading. It’s really not that serious.

Glennis, you will be a sophomore next year. You’re on break, you didn’t have to go to a long school board meeting over the summer. What’s motivating you to become involved in this? 

Woosley: My dad is a member of U-Turn in Education, which is one of the parent groups around here that is pro-books. And when I got into my freshman year in high school, I knew all about what was already happening. I heard about how all these students were going to meetings and speaking and keeping up with what has been happening. So I thought, I want to go and I want to try to help. Even if more books get banned, at least students are speaking out against what is happening. I think there’s real value in student voices being heard. 

Meghana, you’re going to go to college next year in another state. If you want to leave all of this behind, you probably could. I’m curious what you’re taking from this situation with you. 

I think the biggest thing that I’ve walked away with is the fact that speaking out isn’t always easy. And I know that a lot of people who live in environments where student advocacy is very welcome can’t necessarily relate to that reality. But here, some of us have to see if we’re being followed on the way home from board meetings. That’s not a reality for so many of the other school districts that we’ve been hearing about. Because they are in these urban centers that are primarily filled with groups that agree with them. 

I don’t think we’ve had a single win. We go to these meetings and we speak, and we lose every single time. But we show up anyway because we show up on principle. The school knows that there’s attention on them. Not only do we pay attention, but the country is paying attention as well.

You say you haven’t had any wins, but the board could have banned all the books.

Nakkanti: I guess they could have, but I think they’re trying to make everybody happy. Now it’s become very much like a two-party system in the worst way, where the individuals that need to be heard in my opinion — the students — are being completely disregarded because the board wants to appease these two pro- and anti-book-banning adult groups. Two groups that can vote and use their dollars to support their reelection campaigns. So it just becomes this game of politics with our library. It’s frustrating, but I guess it’s a microcosm of Washington.

At the same time, this spotlight on students can be sort of a double-edged sword. Meghana, you said some students have to worry about being followed home from school board meetings. Can you talk more about the pressures students have faced from adults because of their advocacy?

During the board’s May 2022 meeting, an adult came up to a person who was 16 at the time and told her that he could easily find her address and that she should ‘watch out.’ At this meeting, there was booing, jeering and clapping. Some of my friends weren’t sitting with students, and that’s where we heard all of this horrible commentary that these adults were making about kids who were minors at the time. I don’t think we took it too personally because they’re like 50 years old, and they’re making fun of children. So ultimately, we’re still winning. These adults can’t figure out how to process their frustration in a manner that doesn’t degrade the existence of other people.   

I think that meeting really damaged the credibility of the pro-book-banning folks because they were yelling at and threatening children. While there are some voices on the book-banning side that are loud, angry and even violent, I think there are a lot of good people who are pro-book ban but might be misguided. I think it’s made me more empathetic in many ways. I believe that the vast majority of these people are just fighting for something they believe but don’t acknowledge the harm of their actions. 

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Joined by the presidents of Poland and Israel, it was the first time a German head of state took part in a commemoration of the uprising. Tensions between Poland and Germany, however, fermented on the sidelines. 

Before the ceremony, the Polish culture minister, Piotr Glinski, who is also the deputy prime minister, circulated a report tabulating Polish wartime losses to President Steinmeier. Poland has demanded $1.3 trillion in World War II reparations from Germany. For Glinski’s Law and Justice party, it was an opportune moment to press its claims that Germany is disrespecting Poland by refusing to engage with its call for reparations and to appeal to an electorate struggling with inflation and fearful of the war in Ukraine next door. For the government’s detractors, it was a schoolboy gesture staged to draw votes ahead of Poland’s parliamentary election this fall.

 The Polish government’s willingness to stress test the country’s public relationship with Germany may be part of an election strategy, but, behind the scenes, the real relationship between Poland and Germany continues to grow stronger. This throws into question the effectiveness of Poland’s efforts to muddy Germany’s reputation as a model for successfully reckoning with its past.

The two countries are becoming more economically intertwined. Poland is Germany's fifth-largest trading partner, and bilateral trade is reported to have grown by 14% in the last 12 months. Germany makes up around 20% of foreign direct investment in Poland.

It’s an economic closeness that is light-years away from the stark rebuke of German-Polish business dealings often seen in Poland’s state-controlled media. “On the governmental level, we see a real cold era, but, at the same time, German investors are coming to Poland, and more Polish companies are based in Germany,” said Agnieszka Lada-Konefal, an expert in Polish-German relations. In December 2022, Mercedes-Benz announced plans to invest over $1 billion in an electric van factory in Poland. But while the economic relationship is good, it could be better: Lada-Konefal added that Poland’s ongoing battle with the European Union over the country’s democratic backsliding has spooked some German investors.

While Poland’s government has said it is willing to wait out Germany’s current position on the reparations issue, the majority of Poles want to push the relationship into the future. According to the German-Polish Barometer, an annual polling project that has examined the relationship between the two countries since 2000, 64% of Poles in 2021 wanted to disconnect from the past.

Poland’s government is often accused of distorting the past. It has tried to center Polish heroism and sideline Jewish victims by arguing that the majority of Poles tried to protect Jews from Nazi forces.

Germany has taken the position that all financial claims from World War II were resolved in 1953, when Communist Poland said it would not pursue reparations at the behest of Moscow. This position was settled again, the German government says, in the Two-plus-Four Treaty of 1990, which led to the reunification of Germany. Poland counters that earlier calls for reparations were ignored. 

Calling for reparations may play out as a key tactic for the Law and Justice party in the Polish parliamentary election expected later this year, allowing it to take votes from the far-right Confederation party. “Only the very hard part of the Law and Justice electorate really want to hear anti-German slogans, and the party needs to give something to this group,” said Lada-Konefal. In Polish elections, addressing the concerns of small groups of the electorate can have a disproportionate effect on the outcome. 

Germany’s hesitation to send lethal military aid to Ukraine has reinforced Polish perceptions of Germany as being too soft on Russia. When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, Poland said it was disappointed by the immediate German response. And despite Germany signing off on historic military aid packages for the Ukrainian armed forces, Poland’s government continues to argue Berlin is not doing enough to protect Europe from a Russian threat. “The ambiguity around the German position on initial support for Ukraine and perceived sympathy towards Russia has affected the relationship,” said Maria Skora, a research associate at the Institute for European Politics, a policy research center.

Among the German public, Poland can be an afterthought in German politics, said Monika Sus, a visiting professor at the Hertie School in Berlin. “In general, there is a total lack of knowledge in Germany on Poland,” she said. “There is an education problem on modern Poland, especially when you compare this to the general understanding of France in Germany.” 

In late May, Poland’s embassy in Berlin criticized the German government for issuing teacher training material that portrayed a fictional Polish mother as a “devout Catholic” and a person who “hates gays.” Speaking to Polish media, Poland’s ambassador to Germany, Dariusz Pawlos, said the material “reproduces anti-Polish stereotypes and harmful generalizations.” Despite Law and Justice presenting LGTBQ rights as an attack on so-called traditional family values since coming to power in 2015, a growing number of Poles in all categories, from young to old, are in favor of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage, according to a June 2022 poll.

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In the English-speaking world, Dresden has become a symbol of moral ambivalence and the cost of war in general, most famously captured in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Arguments still continue, mainly among historians, about whether it was a necessary military action or a war crime motivated mainly by vengeance. 

For Germans today, talking about Dresden has far more immediate political stakes. One of Germany’s proudest cultural achievements has been its very public process of “coming to terms with the past,” establishing a mainstream political and cultural consensus around collective responsibility for the legacy of Nazi crimes. Where does the bombing of Dresden — a moment of suffering that totally reshaped the city, both culturally and architecturally, and that lives on in many local families’ memories — fit into all that? 

The far right has eagerly adopted the portrayal of Dresden as a senseless war crime, holding an annual “march of mourning.” They use the bombings to draw false equivalencies about the damage of World War II and to suggest that Germany’s apologetic and largely anti-nationalist memory culture has gone too far. More mainstream elements have tended to advocate either for the avoidance of the topic altogether or — as a compromise position — for a policy of dignified “silent commemoration,” hoping to reject any kind of politicization of the date. Left-wing and community organizations, meanwhile, have made a priority of interrupting far-right actions while arguing that any commemoration on February 13 should foreground Dresden’s own Nazi past and the dangers of fascist politics in general. Under public pressure, the city’s major religious institutions and municipal government have begun to move away from silent commemoration, opening up the city to a range of other memorial activities around the date.

Over the past 25 years, the anniversary of the bombings has become a passionately contested date, one that sees clashes in the media and in the streets as the whole city is turned into a chaotic public laboratory for memory culture. The question of how to talk about Dresden becomes a conversation about victimhood and complicity, apology and pride, pacifism and justice — and ultimately, too, about the identity of the city.

Dresden is a gorgeous, captivating, contradictory place. The capital of Saxony, Germany’s easternmost state, it was built up in elegant style from the 15th century onwards. Its reputation as a city of culture and beauty — praised by Goethe, painted by Canaletto, epitomized by the name “Elbflorenz” (Florence on the River Elbe) — was secured during the Baroque-era rule of Augustus the Strong. And, despite the many developments that have shaped the city since — the industrial revolution, Nazi rule, the Allied bombing and its aftermath, 40 odd years of the Communist German Democratic Republic — it is this period of Saxon prestige that Dresden turned to in the 1990s as it sought to rebuild its urban center. Now, thanks to phenomenally expensive renovations, visitors to Dresden can experience the architectural beauty of the original Elbflorenz, provided they do not venture too far from the city center.

For a long while, the bombings hardly featured in any national conversation. The GDR accused the Western Allies, their Cold War enemies at the time, of terror bombing innocents, cynically redeploying a narrative coined by the Nazis, although this remained a relatively minor element of East German national public history. West Germans, meanwhile, were more focused on either reviving their economy or, especially from the 1960s onwards, on acknowledging their own national guilt. How, if you are committed to accepting the collective responsibility of “coming to terms with the past,” can you account for your own suffering? 

The answer has tended to be to not talk about it, a tactic that W.G. Sebald criticized as an “inability to mourn,” citing the lack of literature on Germany’s bombed-out cities like Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne. Yet this national silence, as Gunter Grass and others have warned, risks ceding the terrain of remembering German wartime suffering — not just the bombings but the atrocities committed by Allied and Red Army soldiers, among other things — to extremist right-wing elements.

“For the far right, Dresden is a symbol that can be used to support a different approach to memory about the Nazi past,” said Stephan Petzold, a lecturer in German history at Leeds University. “It’s part of an attempt to create an idea of Germans being not perpetrators but victims.” According to Petzold, far-right activists and politicians have been drawn to Dresden since the 1990s on account of its symbolic status as a German “victim city.” In doing so, they have capitalized on older mythologies of German victimhood, which flourished in postwar West Germany, in the GDR generally and among German families in private.

The annual far-right “march of mourning” has drawn openly militaristic groups like the neo-Nazi Kameradschaften networks as well as politicians from the extremist NPD party, which peaked in the 2000s before falling away. More recently, the Alternative for Germany, the far more professional far-right party that currently receives 28% of the vote in the Saxon parliament, also participated in the march. The anti-Islam Pegida movement and the Covid-skeptic Querdenker (“lateral thinker”) networks have also been present. These commemorations are openly provocative in a nation whose constitution forbids the relativization of Nazi crimes (one sign seen at the march last year read: “Bombenholocaust,” or bombing Holocaust). But they have never been banned by city or federal governments.

Commemorations grew in size over the 1990s and early 2000s but it was not until 2005, when the bombings’ 60th anniversary was marked by what was then the largest far-right rally in postwar Europe, that Dresdeners began to publicly rally in opposition.

At that time, the municipal government policy had been the avowedly “apolitical” silent mourning, and anything else in the inner city was banned. Dresden’s conservative administration, Petzold said, attempted to position themselves between the far right and antifascists, suggesting that each side was politicizing the date for extremist purposes. Gradually, however, the city’s wreath-laying ceremony began attracting more far-right elements, so much so that the Jewish Community of Dresden decided to boycott the event. Leftist groups began trying to blockade far-right marches. Community organization campaigns pressured the city government to unambiguously resist far-right appropriation of the date and encourage an approach to memory culture that included perspectives from the victims of Nazi persecution and other marginalized groups.

What has resulted since is a wide array of often competing activities around February 13. One of the numerous city-sponsored events is a “human chain” of remembrance, which symbolically encircles the historic downtown as a statement against xenophobia and a gesture of protection against far-right incursion. Many left-wing and civil society groups have gone further, organizing further blockades and counter-protests against the far right in addition to commemorative events around local Jewish sites and attempts to publicly draw attention to the city’s Nazi past.

Petzold explained that Dresden’s historic downtown has become an important element of local memory politics. “The competition over space, over who gets to be visible in public space, is really key,” he said. Far-right groups “were being allowed to use iconic sites like the opera house to create good images of themselves, which also makes them appealing to the media. There’s an appropriation, perhaps, not only of that space but also of those iconic buildings, which have become enshrined in local Dresden identity.”

I walk among these iconic buildings when I arrive in Dresden on February 11, the first day of commemorations. There are helicopters in the air and hullabaloo on the streets. Slipping around a group of police, I join what appeared to be an antifascist block party. A brass band is playing, while rainbow flags and antifa banners billow in the wind. People young and old stay warm by drinking coffee, tea and punch from the nearby kiosk. Right at the front, beside the cordoned-off street, stands a group of old women with a sign reading, “Omas Gegen Rechts,” — Grannies versus the (far) Right. I observe a few gruff middle-aged people, all alone, many small groups of fashionable 20-somethings and five or six clusters of rather hard-looking antifa, all dressed in black and with face masks, including one bloke with a hoodie that boasts of “German Punk Terror Since 1990.” A few people arrive dressed as sparkly unicorns. It is, to put things mildly, a difficult crowd to get a read on. Sensing my confusion, somebody turns to me and says: “We’re waiting for the Nazis.”

After an hour they arrive, on the other side of a police cordon. Most are dressed in black. They carry banners that read “Dresden 1945: Unforgotten” and “350,000 Europeans murdered.” A float goes past playing Vivaldi, with a sign in a Gothic-style font that reads: “That they do not lie in their graves in vain // is solely up to our will // our actions.” There seems to be about a thousand of them. Some wave black flags. I think I can make out a snatch of the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the anthem of the Nazi party. A rumor spreads that the police have been confiscating sap gloves.

Here, on the counter-protest side, somebody is handing out whistles. Doja Cat’s “Boss Bitch” comes on over a loudspeaker, effectively drowning out Vivaldi. A number of chants go up: “There is no right to Nazi propaganda,” “Nazis piss off, nobody will miss you,” “German policemen are protecting the fascists.” Suddenly a 20-something with short pink hair and overalls surges to the front and shouts, in a strong Saxon accent: “Your kids are gonna be like us! Your kids are gonna be like us!” The rest of the crowd nearby joins in.

Afterwards, I meet up with Claudia Jerzak. A 43-year-old sociologist born and raised in Dresden, Jerzak has been documenting the far-right protests and counter-protests for over a decade — first for her Master’s degree on the topic and now for a doctorate she is completing part-time alongside her work as a researcher for an initiative on social work with refugees. She also co-wrote a 2012 film, “Come Together,” about Dresden’s contested memory culture. In her writing, Jerzak is critical of the city’s “silent commemoration” policy, which she believes has too easily tolerated the presence of far-right groups and obstructed any discussion of Dresden’s own perpetrator past. 

Jerzak wants to explain everything — she has the enthusiasm and eye for detail of a city tour guide — but on this day she has to rush off to see where the far-right demonstration ends up. We agree to meet again later. Before I let her go, I want to ask her a personal question. How does it feel, as a Dresdener, to see your hometown transformed at least once every year into a political battleground of international interest, a place where various factions squabble over the legacy of a long-past local wound? She gives an ironic laugh. “It’s exhausting,” she says, and then she’s gone.

“We’re worried about what’s going to happen,” said Michael Hurshell, the vice president of the Jewish Community of Dresden. February 13 is a difficult day for the community every year, he explained. “We tell our community members that maybe this isn’t the best day to be out and about in the inner city.’”

Hurshell, an American conductor and orchestra leader born in Vienna but educated in the U.S, moved to Dresden in 2002. Since 2020, he has led this Jewish community of some 700, a majority of whom are Russian speakers from Ukraine. When we met, he invited me to the ostentatious Cafe im Coselpalais, which is housed in a complex that Augustus the Strong built for his mistress. When I arrived, he asked if I had come to report on neo-Nazi protests. That, I said, but also the whole range of rituals and memorials around February 13, the diversity and enthusiasm of which surprised me. “Well,” he said, with a wry smile. “That’s Dresden.”

The city’s Jewish community is based in the New Synagogue, a blocky Modernist building erected on the site of the old synagogue, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938. It is currently locked behind a fence, undergoing safety upgrades, recommended by the German authorities after a synagogue shooting elsewhere, that may last for up to two years.

Hurshell described the bombings as a “terrible, terrible act of suffering,” but took issue with the myth of victimhood some Dresdeners have adopted on the topic — which the far right has instrumentalized. Only recently did Hurshell learn that Dresden enthusiastically supported the Nazi regime, being among the first cities to engage in public book burnings. “And when it comes to the question of whether bombing Dresden was merely an act of reprisal, with no military significance,” he added, “the Jewish community likes to remind people that a number of our members are only alive because of the bombings.” Hurshell’s late friend Hans-Joachim Aris was one of these people: He and his sister were scheduled to be on a transport headed east days later when the Allied attack saved both of their lives.

A far-right party in 2004 won almost 10% of the vote in a Saxon state parliament election. Hurshell and his Jewish friends got together to discuss what to do: “Does this mean it’s time to get out of here?” Hurshell remembers how, in one of those early years, the far-right demonstrations around February 13 brought people from all across Germany for a march that was scheduled to go over the Carola Bridge and right past the synagogue on its way into town. Dresden's city government insisted that it could not prevent a legally registered demonstration. Jewish community members had decided to stand in front of the synagogue arm in arm, following the progress of the oncoming far-right march by observing the police helicopters overhead. But the march never made it to the synagogue because a huge crowd of Dresdeners had come to the bridge and simply sat down, even though it was illegal to block a registered demonstration. "And that impressed me. It was an act of solidarity with us, which I hadn't expected, and it was one of the reasons those demonstrations eventually petered out” Hurshell said. He, of course, decided to stay.

On February 13, 2023, I find myself losing my bearings. What I had expected, in Dresden, was a memory war with two sides: the far right against civil society and the leftists. Instead, as I enter town in the early afternoon, a vast spectrum of arguments and performances are taking place across the city.

At one square, there is a huge “peace” demonstration where several Russian flags are flown. One sign at this protest compares the vice-chancellor Robert Habeck’s call for an “economic war” against Russia to the “total war” of Josef Goebbels. Down by the Kreuzkirche, one of Dresden’s two main churches, there is a memorial plaque for the victims of the Holocaust. By the time I arrive there, seven women are holding a vigil. They are part of the Dresden chapter of the Omas Gegen Rechts (Grannies against the Right), which has been holding vigil at the site since 10 a.m.

This year, the Omas Gegen Rechts demonstrators are carrying a banner that reads: “For peace, against violence and war everywhere.” “We are against war,” explains Helga, a long-time Dresdener. I ask if they are saying they oppose Germany delivering tanks to Ukraine. “Well,” Helga hesitates, “we don’t all agree about that.” At the mention of Ukraine, one or two other Omas look over. Helga explains that they often argue about the situation — but always in a respectful manner. A fellow Oma, Christine Weimann, admits that, while her pacifist beliefs are unwavering, she has found herself uncertain in this instance. “I think it’s good that we’re always in conversation,” she adds. “And I wish our group did even more of it, because people need to stay in conversation and not divide people up into pigeon holes. It’s our only chance.”

I meet again with Claudia Jerzak, who has agreed to show me some memorial activities around the city. She describes Dresden on February 13 as a turbulent public stage for memory culture — a big meet-and-greet, almost, for the city and its histories. Dresden, in Jerzak’s view, generally lacks an earnest and thorough engagement with its past. The anniversary offers an opportunity to change that, and the “friction,” she says, is part of the process.

Up at the Neumarkt, the human chain is about to form. Dresden’s mayor and the rector of its main university give speeches about the importance of friendship, peace and solidarity, rejecting outright any switching of the victim and perpetrator roles. When the bells ring out at 6 p.m., people get into position and begin linking arms.

I ask Jerzak if she ever joins in. She says no. “If the idea is to protect the city, then why are we just protecting the historical buildings downtown — wouldn’t it be more valuable to protect the values of the city everywhere, to protect its vulnerable citizens and people of color, on this day and throughout the year?”

Jerzak leads me to a different square, a few blocks south and east, to show me some more explicitly political public memory activities. Here, a far-right rally is expected to arrive in the next hour or so. Since this year’s anniversary falls on a Monday, the “mourning march” has combined with the regular weekly Querdenker protests that lean more Covid-skeptic, libertarian and respectably suburban than the hardcore-looking cadres from Saturday. What is happening now is a counter-demonstration, a Gegendemo, designed to block far-right actors from marching into downtown Dresden. Once again, we are listening to a brass band.

Jerzak gets cold and heads home, while I follow the action to the decidedly un-baroque Pirnaischer Platz. Here a number of anti-right Gegendemos have combined to blockade the rally. The police presence is heavy, with some officers moving through the Gegendemo trying to find someone with whom they can negotiate a withdrawal. 

The withdrawal doesn’t happen, and suddenly the far-right demonstration arrives, separated by a long line of police vans. Unlike Saturday’s solemn procession, this group seems upfront about its desire to provoke. Because the police are now rerouting them, they each have a turn to face the Gegendemo crowd before turning down Saint Petersburg Street. Many of them point and laugh, while others mock-conduct antifa chants. Almost everyone takes a selfie. Some hold up peace flags and commemorative candles — a surreal act of coded provocation.

Later I learned that the blockade went down as a success. The far-right march was rerouted, and its estimated 500 to 1,000 attendees were outnumbered more than two to one by the counter-protesters. The arithmetic stays with me for a long time. If you include the reported 10,000 people in the human chain — plus all the other various community events — then February 13 has, per capita, been a day overwhelmingly defined by resistance to the pull of German victimhood and xenophobia. What the far right has triggered is a very public process of self-clarification for the city: Every year, every February, where do we stand? It must be utterly exhausting, and not just for Claudia Jerzak, but at least it gets everything out into the open.

Back at the Neumarkt, the human chain has ended and people are milling about. The last official event for the day is Nacht der Stille, “the Night of Silence,” to be held in the basement of the Frauenkirche from 10 p.m. onwards. I join the crowds filing in.

“Wars,” says the Frauenkirche’s pastor, Angelika Behnke, “do not begin or end with bombs.” Instead, she intones, they find their roots in envy, resentment and arrogance. Behnke somberly describes how the Frauenkirche collapsed in 1945 from the damage it sustained during the bombing. Yet with the memory of destruction comes hope, she continues: “We cannot do anything about what happened back then, but we can look around at what is happening today.”

For the rest of the evening, interspersed with music, a series of Dresdeners give short speeches about what they are lighting a candle for. We hear from the Jewish Community of Dresden’s Michael Hurshell and then from a Ukrainian-born Dresdener, a young woman from Iran and a Russian university student who opposes the war. The shift in context is surprising, but I begin to see its logic. If Dresden is now an open, multicultural city — if Dresdeners, now, bring with them a whole diverse array of remembered wartime suffering — then surely it’s not just the Dresden of 1945 that belongs to the city’s memorial duties but also 1938’s Kristallnacht, and 2022’s Ukraine.

The same goes for Syria in 2015, when its civil war changed the population of Germany, much to the ire of the far right. In 2017, Damascus-born Dresden artist Manaf Halbouni installed three upturned buses in front of the Frauenkirche, a visual homage to Aleppo civilians’ use of city buses as protective barricades during the Syrian civil war. Right-wing activists responded with outrage, but Halbouni, when we spoke on the phone, said that he was simply building a bridge between two destroyed cities, only one of which had yet had the chance to build back up. As to whether he might be accused of taking the date out of context, of instrumentalizing it to his ends, he replied sharply: “You could accuse anyone of that. Everyone is always instrumentalizing this day.”

When I depart Dresden the following day, I find myself thinking about what purpose memory culture serves. Even the best public monuments run the risk of growing stale, assuming as they do that everyone is on the same page. This anniversary, by contrast, sets the whole thing in motion. It demands a constant trying-out of new contexts and connotations. When the far right wanted to turn the city into a one-dimensional symbol of suffering, Dresdeners have responded with an ongoing public renegotiation of their history — a rowdy play of the past and the present against their ornate, Baroque stage.

At the very least, they’re having arguments. As my train pulls away, one particular image from the anniversaries stands out. It is 9:45 p.m. on a Monday night, the town square is filled with people and two old men are simply standing there and arguing — arguing about Russia, arguing about the bombings, arguing about their city and about what should be done.

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“No one was allowed in because they were afraid that people would take pictures, protest, and block the work,” said Marek Zaniewski, the vice president of the Union of Poles in Belarus, relaying accounts from people who witnessed the operation in the predominantly ethnic-Polish district. 

A Catholic priest was able to get inside the perimeter but was soon ejected, and authorities threatened people who tried to take pictures with prosecution. Later that day however, photos emerged online showing that the cemetery site had been leveled to the ground.

Zaniewski said when he heard the news, his initial shock soon gave way to despair. 

“Surkonty is a very important place for Poles living in Belarus,” he said. “Its destruction was a very painful blow.”

The history of the Home Army is problematic for Belarusian strongman Aleksander Lukashenko and his pro-Russian regime. While the Home Army’s primary enemy during the war had been Nazi Germany, the fighters at Surkonty had been killed by Soviet soldiers in battle in 1944. 

The destruction of the cemetery at Surkonty came one day after Poland demolished a Soviet-era monument. Western media framed the events as tit-for-tat retaliation, but the cemetery destruction wasn’t the first — at least five other Polish military cemeteries had been desecrated this summer.

The destruction of these Polish grave sites is the latest salvo in a broader, accelerating campaign to rewrite the history of World War II and the Holocaust in Belarus which Lukashenko has been waging since his 2020 crackdown on anti-government protestors, leaving him vulnerable domestically and isolated internationally. Lukashenko’s government has been building a new nationalist narrative that marginalizes minorities in Belarus in favor of a homogenous, Soviet-style national identity, and ties the regime’s challengers at home and abroad to the familiar Nazi enemies of the past.

The Lukashenko government’s relationship with Belarus’s Polish, Jewish, and Lithuanian heritage had fluctuated before 2020 — but now, amid the state’s mounting project of historical revisionism, not only have authorities increasingly been working to erase reminders of these peoples’ history in Belarus, but they have also hijacked the history of the Holocaust in Belarus to frame it as part of a genocide not of Jews, but rather ethnic Belarusians.

In this version of history, Belarusian victimhood is central, and Russia’s victory over Nazism during World War II defines the modern Belarusian state and its relationships to its hostile neighbors. On the ground, Lukashenko’s historical policy has translated into persecution of minority communities, the Russification of Belarusian national symbols, and fears of a dangerous new phase in Lukashenko’s ongoing effort to eliminate threats to his rule.

“They’re trying to create this atmosphere of us against the whole world,” said Hanna Liubakova, a Belarusian journalist, describing the government’s motivations. The goal is to arouse an us-versus-them mentality relying on memories of World War II. “There are enemies around us, and they are all trying to exterminate us, and this has happened before. That’s why we have to keep together and support this great leader.”

In January, Lukashenko’s government passed the Law on the Genocide of the Belarusian People, which proclaims that Nazi Germany carried out a genocide against ethnic Belarusians during WWII, defining Belarusian people as “all Soviet citizens who lived on the territory” of Belarus at the time. Anyone who denies any part of this narrative can face jail time. Israeli scholars warn that describing all victims of Nazi war crimes in Belarus, including hundreds of thousands of Jews, as ethnic Belarusians amounts to Holocaust denial.

“There’s no obvious corroboration for the idea that when the Germans came in they were out to get Belarusians,” said David Marples, a historian at the University of Alberta, who specializes in Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian history and has written several books on modern Belarus.

Yet this has not stopped authorities from trying to establish facts on the ground that support their narrative — Belarusian state media has reported that renewed excavations of WWII-era mass graves sites in the country have already begun, with the aim of uncovering “the whole truth” of the purported genocide against Belarusians. 

According to Veranika Laputska, a Holocaust researcher and the co-founder of the EAST Center, a think-tank focused on the post-Soviet space, the Belarusian state has threatened to begin excavating Jewish grave sites as well, including at the Nazi death camp at Maly Trostenets, in order to inflate the number of victims who were killed there for political purposes.

“If they’re going to start re-digging these mass graves, it means that they will not only be distorting the memory of Belarusian Jews but also European Jews who were unfortunately killed on Belarusian territory,” said Laputska.

Lukashenko has set the stage to use the genocide law’s claims to go after his enemies.  In February, Lukashenko formally tasked General Prosecutor Andrei Shved, who had previously called the Polish Home Army “fascist criminals,” with hunting down alleged perpetrators of this genocide who had escaped punishment, calling it “a matter of historical justice.”

Shved’s office published in April a lengthy manuscript to support the genocide law’s conclusions and presents the purported evidence for Hitler’s campaign against Belarusians. It is a skewed, dubiously-sourced, and “amateurish” perspective on Nazi atrocities in Belarus, according to Marples, the historian, that undermines the realities of the Holocaust, and also implicates the Polish Home Army, Lithuanian forces, Latvian paramilitaries, and others as active parties to genocide alongside the Germans. The document also takes aim at the 2020 anti-government protestors, falsely claiming they wore Nazi insignia.  

This might point to the government’s intentions to launch a future “denazification’ campaign,” said Laputska of the EAST Center, labeling neighboring states as Nazis and fomenting national opinion against countries like Poland and Lithuania. “And then, we don’t know what is going to happen.”

The recent grave destructions may indicate this leap has already taken place, said Denis Kazakiewicz, a journalist and analyst based in Brussels who is from the Polish-Belarusian community.

Vladimir Putin has frequently described Ukraine’s government and people as fascists or Nazis to justify his invasion of the country. “If you think that those people” — the Home Army —  “are Nazis, and the people who come to their graves are Nazis, that means that the state that supports those people are also Nazis,” said Kazakiewicz. “That means that the Russian and Belarusian state has the moral grounds to attack those Nazis as they do now in Ukraine.”

Lukashenko’s most recent hostility toward Poland and Lithuania stems from their support of the 2020 protests against his rule. After the presidential election, that year was deemed fraudulent by the international community, Lukashenko declared himself the victor and violently ended the protests. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the candidate who ran against Lukashenko in the presidential election, fled to Lithuania later that year. Poland, especially, has been demonized by Lukashenko as a bellicose, anti-Belarusian aggressor acting at the behest of the United States.

At least 288,000 ethnic Poles, around 19,000 Lithuanians, and nearly 13,000 Jews continue to live in Belarus, and Poles especially have increasingly become regarded by the state as a fifth column loyal to the West. In 2021, several prominent leaders of the Union of Poles in Belarus were put behind bars, including journalist Andrzej Poczobut and activist Andżelika Borys, on charges of “inciting national and religious hatred” and “rehabilitation of Nazism,” according to the Prosecutor General’s Office. They joined tens of thousands of Belarusian protestors who were arrested during and after the 2020 demonstrations.

While using history to vilify his enemies, Lukashenko is building an ideological bridge connecting Belarusian and Russian heritage. Lukashenko anointed the day the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939 a national holiday this year. 

As Belarus has moved closer to Russia, Moscow has helped Lukashenko use history to pursue his political goals. In April, Shved and his Russian counterpart created a joint working group to “establish the circumstances” of the genocide of “the Soviet people.” Earlier this year, Lukashenko not only agreed to let Russia launch attacks on Ukraine from Belarusian territory, but also to host Russian troops and nuclear warheads indefinitely. 

Uladzimir Vialichkin, the head of the local branch of the human rights organization Viasna in the western Belarusian city of Brest who fled the country in 2021, said Belarusian authorities have been chipping away at vestiges of Brest’s Jewish and Polish heritage for years, and although efforts have been made by foreign organizations to preserve evidence of Jewish cemeteries and document desecrated Jewish gravestones in the city, amateur guides who’ve drawn attention to this history have been harassed by authorities.

“The goal of this is singular,” Vialichkin said. “That this is Russian territory, a Russian city, Russian everything.”

In Surkonty, ethnic Poles have erected wooden crosses on the site of the military cemetery several days after it was desecrated. According to Zaniewski of the Union of Poles in Belarus, even these were removed by authorities, and in September another Polish grave was reportedly found destroyed. 

“Destroying a cemetery doesn’t destroy the memory of people,” Zaniewski said. “Those crosses will rise again.”

But as Vialichkin witnesses more graves getting desecrated, memorial inscriptions being altered, and more of the country’s history shifting before his eyes with each passing year, he has doubts.

“The witnesses of these crimes naturally die off, and now there’s no one left to challenge this,” Vialichkin said.

“History is being rewritten. Everything is being rewritten.”

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Alderney itself was such a prized strategic possession, it was nicknamed “Adolf Island.” 

On this deserted island, the Germans left a fingerprint of the Holocaust: SS concentration camps run on U.K. soil.

Today, residents are finally asking: Why has the British government done nothing, when it has evidence of German war crimes on its soil?

Battling History

The Nazi concentration camps on British soil the UK government tried to forget

Most years, when the Channel Islanders of Alderney come together on May 22 to memorialize the victims of the Nazi occupation, it rains. A chilly wind whips up from the sea as a congregation gathers to pay tribute to the thousands of people who toiled and died in forced labor camps on this tiny island.

But today, it’s bright and clear.

Fluttering above us, with the sea and the sky beyond, is a blue-and-white striped flag. It represents the uniforms of the prisoners. There are plaques in Russian, Hebrew, French, Polish and Spanish to commemorate the victims of the German occupation of this island in the English Channel between 1940 and 1945. The Channel Islands, an archipelago belonging to the British Crown, were the only piece of British territory Adolf Hitler managed to conquer during the Second World War. And on Alderney, the Nazis built a series of labor camps — including two concentration camps run by the SS.

In the U.K., this story is far from common knowledge, confined to the obscure recesses of the British collective memory. Even when I ask other Channel Islanders from the nearby island of Jersey if they knew Nazi camps existed on British soil, they’re hazy on the details.

In recent months, the British Home Secretary Priti Patel declared the government’s plan to transfer asylum seekers arriving in the U.K. on small boats to detention centers in Rwanda. But before this policy was introduced, Alderney was floated by a right-wing think tank as a possible destination for detainees. “Its location and topography make it suitable in many respects,” the report read, before noting that the island was “gravely misused during World War II by the Nazis.” The think tank’s authors added that while the difficulty of the island’s tiny airfield might be overcome, “the problem of bad associations may be less tractable.”

The suggestion was quickly squashed — perhaps, some islanders thought, because international attention on Alderney would open an enormous Pandora’s box.

Now, as a £100million ($120 million) Holocaust Memorial is planned to be built next to the Parliament building in London, there’s a fight underway over precisely what happened in Alderney, and how Britain should face up to the Nazi atrocities that occured on its territory.

When the British began their investigations on the island after the war it gradually dawned on them that the scale of atrocities could warrant full-scale war crimes trials. As this realization took hold, there was a shift in the tone of the investigations, says Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist at Staffordshire University who has studied the island for more than a decade. The official narrative changed, skating over the fact that 27 different nationalities were thought to have been brought to the island, among them hundreds of French Jews. Instead, the Foreign Office simply said that “for practical purposes Russians may be considered to be the only occupants of these camps.”

“That enabled the British authorities to hand over the investigation to the Soviets. And that meant they could wash their hands of the whole cost and everything else of war crimes trials,” said Sturdy Colls. It was cleaner and easier to say the prisoners were Russian, and the Soviet Union’s responsibility. The enduring legacy of that decision was that the stories of other prisoners — Jews, other Europeans, North Africans — were largely erased from the official history of Alderney. 

At the service, the self-governed island’s President, William Tate, hit back at those who said the island of Alderney was not facing up to its past. “There are those who say that we don’t do enough. I take issue with that. I think we all live with the responsibility of ensuring that the lives of those people that were lost during that period do not go unremarked.”

Alderney is a three-mile-long slither of land that is home to some 2,000 people. Wildly beautiful, surrounded by the seething, white-crested Atlantic, the island is fringed with sandy crescent-shaped beaches. Alderney’s capital, St. Anne, a postcard-perfect, cobbled town, is covered in banners to mark Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee when I visit. Though it’s just ten miles off the coast of France, this is unmistakably British soil.

Unlike the other islands of Jersey, Guernsey and Sark, where British residents lived under German occupation, the people of Alderney collectively decided to evacuate their homes in June 1940, when the fall of France was imminent. They did not return until December 1945. On this virtually deserted island –– a mere handful of islanders remained –– the German occupiers acted with impunity, building labor camps and SS-run concentration camps.

The camps operated under the system of “Vernichtung durch Arbeit” — extermination through hard labor — and hundreds, if not thousands of prisoners died here. They were worked to death, forced to build a vast network of fortifications as part Adolf Hiter’s “Atlantic Wall,” a system of defenses along the coast of continental Europe designed to deter allied invasion. The Channel Islands were a key part of this defense structure and Alderney was such a prized strategic possession, it was nicknamed “Adolf Island.”

Eighty years later, and the island is still disfigured by concrete bunkers, firing ranges, batteries, and cement fortifications — relics of the darkest chapter of Alderney’s history. Threading through the rock deep below the island, a vast network of tunnels have been gouged out by forced laborers.

What precisely happened here, how many died here, and how they should be remembered are subjects of fierce contention. The British government has been accused of covering up Nazi atrocities on its own soil, of refusing to face up to or reconcile with the horrors of Alderney’s past and keeping it a secret for decades.

“How can Britain, in good conscience, build a £100 million memorial and education center, and become head of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2024, if we can’t come clean about one little fingertip of the Holocaust on British soil?” said Michael James, a local resident who was in attendance at the remembrance service. “It’s just wrong. It reeks.”

James believes the number of people who died in Alderney during the war is well into the thousands. “It’s staggering that we’re having to fight to get the truth. If you had died here wouldn’t you want your children to know you had died here? How many hundreds of relatives are out there that don’t know their family members died on this island?”

The islanders were told that there were four camps on Alderney. That slave laborers had worked here and built the island’s fortifications. That these laborers were Russian. That 337 of them had died. But recent studies have identified as many as nine camps and that alongside the Russian prisoners, there were also Europeans, North Africans and Jews.

In contrast to the official number of 337, the highest estimates for the number of deaths on Alderney run to 70,000. Many islanders believe the real number is somewhere in the thousands rather than the hundreds.

When the people of Alderney returned to their island after the war, they said the birds didn’t sing. The island was covered with barbed wire and concrete, and the silence suggested that something terrible had happened. The islanders were told little and asked few questions. Children knew that the gravesites were where “slave laborers were buried.” But, said Sally Bohan, who returned to Alderney after the war as an infant, she didn’t truly absorb what that meant until her late teens. “We didn’t realize the severity and — just the awfulness of it. And there was nothing here to say what had happened.” 

People relied on hearsay. Witness testimonies were routinely recounted of bodies being tipped off the breakwater, of people dying while building a vast anti-tank wall running along one of the island’s pristine beaches, their bodies simply folded into the cement. Islanders talked about finding bones on the beaches. About seeing ghosts: juddering forms dressed in the forced laborers’ distinctive striped uniform, up by Lager Sylt, the S.S. concentration camp near where the airport is now located. 

John Dalmau, a Spanish forced laborer who was taken to Alderney by the Nazis after fleeing Franco's regime, recounted being sent down as a diver in Alderney's Braye Bay to disentangle an anti-submarine net.

"Among the rocks and seaweed there were skeletons all over the place. Crabs and lobsters were having a feast on the bodies which remained intact," he wrote in the years after his release. "I watched the blown-up bodies moving with the tide."

Talk of a cover up by the British government has been rife on the island for many decades. A question has always hung in the air. Why did the British government let evidence of German war crimes on its soil — the concentration camps and those who suffered in them — remain in obscurity? Why was no one prosecuted?

Different islanders have different answers. Because Britain had other things to be getting on with — a country to rebuild. Because the atrocities weren’t significant enough to require Nuremberg-style trials. Because no one wanted to reflect on how much cooperation there was by Channel Islanders in German crimes. Because there was a collective sense of shame about letting the Channel Islands fall into enemy hands. Because no government wanted talk of Jewish murders on its soil.

In 2016, when the then-Prime Minister David Cameron announced that a Holocaust Memorial would be built in London’s iconic Victoria Tower Gardens on the banks of the Thames, right next to the Houses of Parliament, he described it “as a permanent statement of our values as a nation.”

At the outset of the Ukraine crisis, U.K. politicians praised the country’s “long, proud history of welcoming refugees.” A government cabinet minister, Tom Pursglove, cited the British 1930s “Kindertransport” policy as an example, when almost 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children were brought to Britain in the lead-up to World War II. At London’s Liverpool Street Station, a bronze statue of Jewish children arriving with their luggage silently watches over commuters.

The story of the Kindertransport is widely taught as part of the British school history curriculum. But few ask why only children — “kinder” — were given sanctuary, why their parents were left to be murdered by the Nazis.

“The thing is, if we reveal that the Holocaust happened on Alderney, and that quite a number of Jews died there, and that the government covered it up and prevented French Jews in particular getting justice, then where does it leave our program of teaching British values through the Holocaust?” said Marcus Roberts, founder of an Anglo-Jewish heritage organization called Jtrails, who has been studying the German occupation of Alderney for over a decade.

In a fiery meeting in Alderney last July, Lord Eric Pickles, Head of the UK Delegation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said the time had come for Britain to face up to its history during the Holocaust, “warts and all.” Following a presentation by the Alliance, laying out proposals for how Alderney could better safeguard the memory of the camps and grave sites dotted around the island, Lord Pickles told Alderney residents that they needed to face up to what had happened on their land.

“We can’t pretend everything was just rosy,” he said. “This is about telling the truth, the unvarnished truth, not for the titillation of others, but because you own it. It’s yours. You didn’t ask to be the custodians of the most important Holocaust site in the British Isles. It’s not what you asked. But you are the custodians and we want to support you.” The Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s eight recommendations included tasks like improving the mapping, signage and listing of the camp sites and grave areas.

The first person to stand up was Susan Allen, 77, a retired Alderney resident who had worked for the British Foreign Office for several decades. “I’m appalled by all this,” she said. “You are talking about taking over the whole island and turning it into a Holocaust — almost a Disneyland. And I’m sorry, I don’t go along with that.”

Another resident, a former Alderney politician named James Dent, said the memorialization should not be principally focused on Jewish memory. “In Alderney the prisoners were of all faith and no faith,” he said, echoing Allen’s concern that the island shouldn’t become “some macabre theme park for Holocaust tourists.”

Pickles seemed struck by the virulence of the opposition he faced at the town hall. “We’re merely suggesting there should be some small stones, just to be able to give an approximate idea of where things are,” he said a half hour into the impassioned meeting. When I spoke to him on a call last month, he said that he understood why people didn’t want their paradise tainted even by “merely improving the signage.”

“If you move to paradise, you want to see it in those terms. And I don’t think we should look down our noses at people who move to this lovely place that they’ve chosen to live in, and they don’t want to engage in its darker secrets,” he said. “Maybe I’m a little bit too tolerant by nature,” he added, after a pause.

During the town hall meeting, Dr. Gilly Carr, a Cambridge archeologist with a specialism in Holocaust heritage, suggested that the stones could simply have QR codes on them, rather than any text, so that people could find out more information about the gravesites and concentration camp remains only if they wanted to. “The beauty of an online site,” she told the Alderney residents, “is that it’s invisible.”

A spokesperson for the States of Alderney, Alistair Forrest, said the Alliance's suggestions were currently being worked through. “We pay our respect to those who suffered and died in the slave camps on our beautiful Island,” he said.

A debate over the number of people who died in Alderney has soured. “We seem to have become engaged in what I think is possibly a slightly bizarre competition,” Dent, the former politician, said during the meeting, describing how people were constantly trying to “top” each other by quoting ever-larger death tolls. “It doesn’t matter if it was 400, or 4,000, or 40,000 people who died here,” he said, adding that the victims should be memorialized “quietly, and with dignity.”

Knowing just how many died on their island, believe others on Alderney, is essential. The official number of 337 was arrived at back in the 1940s, when Britain commissioned an investigation into atrocities on the island in the aftermath of the war.

In May 1945, after Britain had taken back the island from the German occupiers, Captain Theodore “Bunny” Pantcheff was dispatched to Alderney to conduct an investigation on behalf of British intelligence. The young captain was just 24 at the time, but not inexperienced. He had been a star investigator at the London Cage, British intelligence’s secret interrogation facility during the war years. He was fluent in both German and French and — a bonus — had vacationed on Alderney as a child.

Pantcheff canvassed the experiences of some 3,000 witnesses. He produced a harrowing report, detailing what had happened at Alderney’s various concentration camps.“Crimes of a systematically callous and brutal nature were carried out — on British soil — in the past three years,” he wrote at the outset of the report, before detailing how forced laborers were tortured, starved, and worked to death.

"Workers were beaten for the most trivial offences against the harsh regulations, such as failure to execute a drill movement properly or endeavouring to acquire food from the garbage pail. On occasions workers were beaten for no reason at all."

Theodore Pantcheff, 1945

By counting the number of graves on the island, Pantcheff stated that he knew for certain that 337 people had died there, admitting that “it is impossible to say with any exactitude that the general figure of 337 could represent the full number of deaths on the island.” Pantcheff, his sons explained, was looking for bodies so that prosecutions could be made.

But no prosecutions were ever made –– an outcome that still haunts this island. Instead, the British government packaged up Pantcheff’s report, and sent it over to the Soviet Union, to, as Sturdy Colls put it, “wash their hands of it.” But as British-Soviet relations broke down in the postwar years, the chances of the two governments cooperating and sharing war crimes witnesses began to dwindle, and trials became an impossibility.

In 1947, the French War Crimes authorities requested a copy of the investigation. The British said it “was found that the majority of internees were Russians” and that the reports had been handed over to the Soviet Union. “I regret that the only information we can give you on this matter is the general statement that the Russians were treated with great cruelty,” the British letter to the French authorities read. The letter neglected to mention that held alongside Russian, Polish and Ukrainian prisoners, as well as German, Spanish, and North African inmates, were hundreds of French Jews.

Bunny Pantcheff’s report remained a secret for decades.

His son, Andrew Pantcheff, 67, said his father had dearly wanted to see those guilty of crimes against humanity on Alderney brought to justice. “Even if it’s only one,” Pantcheff pleaded to his higher-ups, according to his son. “Even if it’s only one, so that somebody who tries to do this again won’t be entirely sure that they can just walk away.” 

Perhaps the most important prosecution that never happened was that of Major Carl Hoffman, the brutal, relentless commandant in charge of coralling forced laborers into building the island’s massive fortifications.

After the war, the story ran that Hoffman had been hanged in Kyiv in 1945. But in reality, he walked free. He was held in British custody until 1948 before he was allowed to return to Germany, where he lived out the rest of his life, dying peacefully in Hamburg in 1974. It was not until the 1980s that the British Foreign Office admitted this.

In the early 1980s, Solomon H. Steckoll, a South African journalist, attempted his own investigation. “A mass of obstacles had been placed in the path of the truth,” he wrote in his book, “The Alderney Death Camp,” published in 1982. “For over three decades now,” Steckoll wrote, “the silence has rested like a heavy blanket of impenetrable fog over what took place on Alderney.”

Pantcheff wrote his own account of what happened, titled “Alderney, Fortress Island,” published ahead of Steckoll’s book, setting out “to put flesh on the concrete skeleton and try to breathe life into it.”

The blurb reads: “There was no extermination camp, no Auschwitz, nor any ‘cover up.’” In the book, Pantcheff describes how he wants to dispel speculation: “If it does nothing else, at least it may help some of the more fantastic ghosts so far raised — for example the stories of gas-ovens in the concentration camp or bodies thrown in the cement mixer.”

But the book also criticizes those who “shirk the concept of blame or feel that it all happened a long time ago and is no business of theirs. If this book has a purpose, it is to make it as hard as possible to follow any of those easy options.”

According to his sons, Pantcheff hoped to lay bare the catastrophe that had happened on Alderney, and tell the stories of those who toiled and lost their lives there. “It might have been a very small tragedy compared to Auschwitz,” his younger son Richard Pantcheff, 63, said. “But it was a tragedy nonetheless. It was appalling. He didn't want it to be sensationalized. And he didn't want it to be minimized.”

“Alderney, Fortress Island” was the first time Pantcheff’s own account of what had happened on the island was put before the public. 

For many years, the official British government line ran that the U.K. copy of the original Pantcheff report had been destroyed to create “shelf space.” Many of Pantcheff’s papers were kept in the Alderney Museum files until the early 2000s, when MI6, the British intelligence agency, requested the files back, according to the museum director Trevor Davenport. “I personally bagged them up and sent them off,” Davenport said, adding that MI6 promised to send back copies. “When we sent them, I said to the council — ‘we’ll never see them again.’ And of course we haven’t.” Davenport said MI6 simply sent back a summary.

In the late 2000s, many of the materials from Pantcheff’s report became accessible at the British Archives. There are, however, files that are not included in the papers –– particularly the full statement by George Pope, one of the only islanders who remained in Alderney during the occupation. Pope said he had seen almost 1,800 Ukrainians die, and witnessed as many as 400 Jews thrown into mass graves. His account was regarded as unreliable by Pantcheff, who suspected Pope of collaborating with the Germans. “The Pope testimony could be the key document,” said Alderney resident Michael James. 

The sheer number and size of the fortifications built in Alderney between 1940 and 1945, some argue, make the official death tally dubious.

Soviet citizens who worked on Alderney were rarely prisoners of war. Marcus Roberts, the Anglo-Jewish heritage historian, described how they were mostly press-ganged or kidnapped civilians and were described by the Germans as “volunteers.”

“You have to ask yourself realistically, what size of labor force would you have needed to complete such constructions?” said Roberts. “I can say with a high degree of certitude that at least 15,000 died there,” he said, describing how it was important to factor in the prisoners’ living conditions, and their ultra-low-calorie diet of thin cabbage soup and bread. “I wouldn't be surprised if that number could be as high as 30,000.”

Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls said her investigations gave her an estimate of between 701 and 986 deaths, but that the true number is undoubtedly higher, due to the Nazis attempts to cover up their crimes.

Two military authors, Colonel Richard Kemp and John Weigold, wrote in the Daily Mail newspaper in 2017 that they believed a minimum of 40,000 slave workers died on Alderney — and “perhaps as many as 70,000.” They said Alderney had been turned into “a secret base to launch V1 missiles with chemical warheads on the South Coast.” 

These staggering numbers dwarf even the largest estimates made by other historians, causing considerable consternation in Alderney. Trevor Davenport, the director of the Alderney museum, is incensed by the number. “Rubbish! I mean rubbish. I don't even give it any credence at all,” he said.

Davenport does not believe the word “holocaust” pertains to Alderney, and prefers to discuss the island’s wartime past without the mention of forced laborers. He spoke to me on the condition that there would be absolutely no discussion of slave labor. Davenport said the islanders were fed up of listening to “utter tripe” produced by academics parachuting into the island.

The Alderney museum has a single cabinet devoted to the laborers, featuring a sandal worn by the workers along with archival photos. Among the IHRA recommendations described to residents by Lord Pickles, was the suggestion that more be added to the museum’s on-view collection about the island’s prisoners and that a new exhibition should be put together.

In early 2016, two drill rigs arrived on Alderney. One was stationed just off shore. The other was on the fields where forced laborers’ graves are known to be.

The Alderney government had been consulting with a multi-million pound scheme to build an underground electricity link between France, Alderney and Britain, known as the “FAB project.” The cable would span the island of Alderney — and potentially carve right through Longis common, where hundreds of forced labor victims are buried. 

Alderney Renewable Energy, the energy developer behind the project, told reporters that the drilling was part of a non-intrusive geophysical survey, intended to “detect any areas of unknown archeology” in the area. Residents said that the Alderney government did not engage with them about the plans, so that when the drills arrived, many didn’t know what they were doing there.

One resident contacted the police on the neighboring island of Guernsey to report that a site of mass murder was being plundered. Britain’s Chief Rabbi, alongside academics and local historians, all aired concerns that mass graves, including those of Holocaust victims, would be disturbed by the project. After being lobbied by one onlooker, the Russian Embassy got involved, issuing a statement saying that any remains of Soviet Citizens found during construction should be identified and given a proper burial. “The Embassy has also offered help with the identification of the said remains,” the statement read.

A group of 32 islanders took legal action, requesting that the British Ministry of Justice conduct a public inquiry. They alleged that the island's government had acted corruptly in its dealings with FAB, and that people within it had a significant conflict of interest in ushering forth the project while standing to financially gain from it. The Guernsey police dismissed the matter, on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to prove the group’s allegations.

FAB Director James Dickson said FAB had “adhered to the strictest standards of professional conduct” and kept residents extensively informed about the project prior to the rigs arriving, through door-to-door flyers and public meetings. 

The States of Alderney chose not to respond to questions about FAB. 

Last week, FAB announced that the interconnector was no longer slated to run through Alderney, and would instead bypass the island. “This gives us more certainty, as we need to work with fewer permissions, approvals and licenses,” Dickson said in a statement. 

He told me FAB hoped to start construction in 2025.

The drilling was the match that lit the fire. “That’s what brought it all back up for me,” said Michael James, who grew up on the island and has spent the past four years intensively researching Alderney’s past. He described how the FAB project woke many islanders — including him — up to the pressing question of what had really during the war years and how many really lay buried on the island.

Among those to critique the project at its outset was Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls, who submitted a report about the location of the graves and which areas needed to be avoided. “I voiced my deep, deep concerns that it was going through the site of a former cemetery,” she told me.

The forensic archaeologist’s distinctive, six-syllabled name trips lightly off the tongue of almost every islander I talk to within a matter of minutes. Her work is divisive.

In 2019, Sturdy Colls released a documentary called “Adolf Island.” The film followed her efforts to try to find out precisely how many people were buried in Alderney’s mass graves, using different state-of-the-art, non-invasive techniques, including ground-penetrating radar, laser technology and drones.

But before the film was made, a leaked pitch for the documentary appeared to show another motive: to dig up Holocaust graves. “Caroline negotiates with the States Council to excavate the site. The evidence is too strong to ignore. It will be an emotional axis for everyone involved in the story,” the pitch read. Marcus Roberts of JTrails wrote to her university that her film constituted the “exploitation of Jewish human remains for commercial gain and public entertainment.” The university chose not to uphold the complaint, according to Roberts.

Sturdy Colls said the pitch had been leaked when the TV production company’s website was hacked and should never have been in the public domain. She called Roberts’s allegations unfair and unfounded. “There was no suggestion that I was ever going to go and dig without any of the permissions being in place,” she said. “My understanding of Jewish law is very thorough.”

When it was released, Sturdy Colls’s documentary dwelt on local opposition to her research. “Shrouded in decades of silence amid attempts by local authorities to prevent examination and the search for missing victims of Nazi atrocities, the team must turn to state-of-the-art technology to get the answers they seek,” read the press release for the film, released on the Smithsonian Channel.

Sturdy Colls encountered vehement opposition from some islanders, even to her non-invasive techniques. “They want to encourage all ghouls, weirdos and anybody with twisted minds to come to Alderney,” wrote one angry resident to the local paper, “to see and worship the wonderful Nazi achievements, so that they can probe with modern gear, excavate slave labor camps, and fly their little spy planes. Well, not if I can help it.”

Sturdy Colls said she has never in her career experienced the hostility she faced in Alderney. “All because they want to forget the memory of people who were brutalized and murdered on this island,” she said in her documentary. At one point, she told me, residents threatened to shoot down her drone equipment.

Nigel Dupont, 63, a lifelong Alderney resident whose family have lived on the island for six generations, does not want to forget. He believes wartime events were “all hushed up” once Britain took back the Channel Islands. We drink tea in his light-filled kitchen, which looks out across Longis Bay. An anti-tank wall the Germans built, known as the “wall of certain death” — where witnesses said they saw bodies thrown into the cement — can be seen in the distance. 

“Lots of dark things happened here,” Dupont said, remembering how he grew up in a culture of collective silence. “Local families wouldn’t sit around the table and talk about what happened.” 

In the 2000s, that attitude began to change. “As people started to die, there became more pressure to talk,” he said, referring to the passing of the last generation with a living memory of the war.

Dupont said he paid scant attention to the significance of the architecture dotting the island as a young man. He used to throw epic parties in the German bunkers — “the acoustics were fantastic.” But as he got older and became a building contractor, he began to see the architecture of the island differently. “Over the years, the more I’ve read and the older I’ve gotten, I’ve begun to look around and do the math myself,” he said. He described how real Alderney natives — who have lived there a long time — were all keen to understand what really happened during the years they were forced to leave their island home.

 “My generation is ready to know the truth.”

In 1947, two years after he visited Alderney to conduct his investigation into German atrocities, a 26-year-old Captain Theodore “Bunny” Pantcheff wrote a memorandum to himself. It was a list of sentences, written in black fountain pen, each starting with the same four, underlined words: “I must not forget.”

“I must not forget the dead who were murdered,” he wrote. “Nor the face of a corpse that has been maimed and buried alive.”

“Humanity has been and is being outraged; only the few who are whole-heartedly persuaded of that, who know, will be prepared to do anything about it.”

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The post The Nazi concentration camps on British soil the UK government tried to forget appeared first on Coda Story.

Many Poles wrestle with 80 years of myths about the legacy of Nazi occupation, believing the country’s “good name” has been betrayed by hostile historians

While the conservative government promotes Polish virtue during World War II and sidelines Jewish victims, some Poles want to see Poland finally reckon with the realities of its 20th century history

Poland’s ministry of memory spins the Holocaust

For years Olympic slalom canoeist Dariusz Popiela, 36, trained on the Dunajec river in southern Poland. During his twenties, he paddled every day on a churning stretch between two bridges in his hometown of Nowy Sacz. He never thought that this place so familiar to him would become the source of what can be called his memory rebellion. Popiela has always been fascinated by history. He grew up quizzing his grandfather about his childhood memories of life in Nazi-occupied Poland.

But there was an enormous chapter that his grandfather had ripped out of his mental storybook of recollections: the nearly 12,000 Jews who lived in Nowy Sacz before 1939 — about a third of the town’s pre-war population. They had disappeared from the town’s memory. Absent from lessons at school, it wasn’t until Popiela began his own research that he learned about the scale of Jewish life in Nowy Sacz and in Poland. With a thousand years of Jewish history, the country was home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of the United States at the start of World War II.

Popiela was floored when he read the details of how Jewish residents from his town were transported to the neighboring Belzec death camp. Many spent their final night in Nowy Sacz huddled on the riverbank exactly between the two bridges where he had paddled in his canoe so often.

“They saw this same view. They heard the same river voices and sounds,” Popiela said when we stood by the riverbank this past May. Running through some of the most picturesque scenery in southern Poland, the Dunajec river flows through steep gorges, pine forests and fields of tall grass growing right up to its fast-moving waterline. Popiela pointed to families cycling by and couples walking along the river path. “Half of the city disappeared and you have no memory,” Popiela said, shrugging his shoulders. “How is that possible?”

Since his discovery, Popiela has led dozens of commemorations to Jewish life across Poland through his foundation “People, Not Numbers.” Popiela is part of a new generation of Polish citizens, historians, writers and educators pushing for a more honest confrontation with Poland’s 20th century history.

For decades, Polish-Jewish history was kept in what scholars call “the communist freezer.” Around three million Polish Jews were murdered by the Nazis. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Polish communist authorities tolerated much discussion of the genocide. When they did — such as during an anti-semitic purge of the party in 1968 — it was to blame Jews for not showing enough gratitude towards ethnic Poles who tried to save them.

After the fall of communism, some of that silence was broken. More recently, the country’s ruling right-wing government has been consolidating a nationalistic narrative about the past that emphasizes pride over what they say are a politics of shame. It has been effective. Recent surveys show Polish people believe that more than half of Poles directly helped or hid Jews in their homes during Nazi occupation, an absurd overestimate. Those like Popiela who work to commemorate Jewish victims are accused of promoting what’s been coined by the government as a “pedagogy of shame.” The term is used as a political slur by Jaroslaw Kaczynski and members of the party he leads, the ruling Law and Justice party. It has come to mean a liberal historical agenda that exaggerates dark facets of Polish history.

At the center of these competing historical narratives is Poland’s ministry of memory — called the National Institute of Remembrance, IPN in Polish, which was created in the early 2000s to deal with the country’s communist legacy, manage the historic archives of the secret police and prosecute crimes committed under communism. Today the Institute also largely deals with the legacy of Nazi occupation and is charged with defending the country’s “good name.” The IPN was at the center of international fury in 2018 when the government passed a “Holocaust law,” known as the "IPN law" within Poland, making it a criminal offense to “defame” the Polish nation by claiming Polish people had responsibility for Nazi crimes.

The IPN is one of Poland’s most powerful institutions, with its budget making it the largest institute of historical research in the country, eclipsing university history departments and independent research institutes. A one-of-a-kind bureaucratic creation, it is the country’s most prolific publisher of historical texts, a prosecutor’s office, a production house of historical films and games, and a major authority shaping what students across the country are taught about history in school. The Institute of Remembrance’s budget has nearly doubled under the Law and Justice Party, which has been in power since 2015. Today it has an annual budget of 430 million PLN ($105 million), a staff of about 2,000 and 11 regional branch offices.

With its leadership appointed by parliament, the Institute is controversial in an already highly polarized political environment. There is demand from a number of leading historians for the Institute to be dismantled or reformed. Far more widespread opposition comes in the form of local level initiatives like Popiela’s that are trying to change memory culture in Poland.

A memory rebellion

When Popiela learned about the deportation site on the banks of the Dunajec, just steps away from the beautifully preserved town square in Nowy Sacz, his first feeling was in fact shame.

Each new detail that emerged felt personal: the dam further up the Dunajec river was built by forced Jewish labor, he discovered; and he later found slabs of 17th century matzevot, or Jewish gravestones, used in the construction of town infrastructure, their Hebrew script just barely still legible off the curb of a busy roadside.

“But the shame was something that gave me power,” said Popiela. “It gave me rebellion and the power to do something.”

For the past ten years, Popiela has devoted the time he has outside of his sport to commemoration work. With just a handful of members, his foundation, People, Not Numbers, has researched archives and interviewed older residents to identify the name, surname and age of Jewish victims across rural Poland. They’ve installed 10 monuments and discovered 10 mass Jewish grave sites. Volunteers maintain a number of Jewish cemeteries that were abandoned. Popiela self-publishes what he calls — with a wink — his “underground” monthly newspaper about Jewish history in Nowy Sacz. He leaves out stacks at local coffee shops and in the town hall.

When we meet in May, Popiela is about to break ground on his most recent project: a memorial park in Nowy Sacz located within what had been the town’s Jewish ghetto along with the installation of a plaque along the Dunajec river bank at the site of the former camp. All of the efforts are crowdfunded by Popiela. I asked him, why is he — an Olympic canoeist about to compete in the European Championships — doing this in a country that’s created an entire state bureaucracy to deal with historical remembrance.

“They are caring about other stories,” he said. I push him to elaborate and he gives an example. A few years ago the foundation tried to team up on the commemoration of a Jewish family of eight, murdered in 1944 after being turned over to the Gestapo by their neighbor. The Institute’s local branch said the memorial plaque must say that this family was killed by the Nazis. Popiela refused.

“Do you put the name of the murderer of your family on their grave?” asked Popiela. It’s the same demand he’s just recently received in an open letter from several local, patriotic organizations in opposition to his plan for building a monument to Jews killed in Nowy Sacz. “They don’t have the point of view of the victims. The most important part for them is the sign that the Germans made the Holocaust.”

“It is vital that such a description and the narrative of the events of German occupation in Nowy Sącz includes an unambiguous identification of the perpetrators of the crime, so that it does not allow for false and inconsistent interpretations.

These expectations are not exaggerated and unfounded, as we, Poles, have been facing attempts to shift the responsibility for German crimes onto the Polish people. Such attempts are particularly disgusting and unjust, taking into account our tragic war and occupation experience in the period of 1939-1945.”

Poland has long tried to police language around the Holocaust. When former U.S. President Barack Obama referred to “Polish death camps” in 2012, the White House was compelled to apologize. Right-wing lawmakers made several attempts to introduce a three-year prison sentence for using the term.

A widely shared perception among Poles is that the rest of the world underappreciates Polish suffering during Nazi occupation. “They have this obsession that starts when people say that Polish people are responsible for the Holocaust. Now the narrative of the IPN is that nearly all Polish people had a Jew hidden in their basement,” said Popiela. “They are saying that we were all heroes. But from the archives, it doesn’t look so nice.”

I took a ride with Popiela over to the neighboring town of Grybow where in 2019 he and his team of volunteers had installed a memorial in a Jewish cemetery on a hill overlooking the town. Abandoned for 80 years, the cemetery was a fenced-in jungle. Today, it’s a peaceful, wooded plot with several informative plaques displaying photographs of victims installed by the foundation. The centerpiece is a large granite monument of a splintered matzevah, with slabs on either side listing the name and ages of the nearly 2,000 Jewish victims killed in Grybow during the occupation, nearly a third were children under the age of 13.

Further uphill, Popiela crouches down and starts pulling the weeds coming up over a mass grave site they had discovered using a drone and geo-radar. He tells me about some of the online hate he gets for his work, people accusing him of working for George Soros or telling him he’d be better off spending his time cleaning up Catholic cemeteries. When seeking funding, he’s often told to find some “rich Jew” to pay for the memorial. 

We drive back down the hill from the cemetery to town and pass the local Grybow church. It’s Sunday afternoon and the red brick church is packed, with dozens of people crowding at the doors and even standing in the square outside. Just a few steps away from the towering basilica stands Grybow’s Jewish synagogue, abandoned and with its windows knocked out. There are no Jewish people in Grybow. Across from the synagogue an artist has recently painted a large mural in sepia tones. The mural is based off of a 1922 photograph showing three generations of Grybow’s lost Jewish residents.

The Ghosts are coming back

“We are the main enemies of the Institute of National Remembrance,” said Agnieszka Haska, a cultural anthropologist at the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw. It’s one of the first things she tells me when we meet.

Much of Haska’s work focuses on questions of collaboration and Jewish escape from occupied Poland and she says the IPN has put her publications and other writings from the center constantly under the microscope. The institutes’ team of fact checkers flags perceived mistakes, sometimes even a footnote, and publishes lengthy rebuttals. The vice president of the IPN told me it’s part of an “ongoing academic debate.” Called traitors on public TV channels, Haska said “it feels much more like an ongoing war.”

It can also get petty. Haska says she’s called the IPN numerous times asking them to stop their regular deliveries of the latest IPN volumes of historical research to the Holocaust Research Center’s office. The institute’s historians are prolific, publishing up to 300 titles a year. The publications flood national bookstores and are subsidized, making it even harder for non-IPN authors to sell their titles. “They are trolling us!” Haska said.

Some of Haska’s recent writing looks at Polish antisemitic science fiction, a popular genre during the 19th century. Writers could pass off their anti-Jewish texts as “fantasy” books to get by the Russian empire’s censors. Haska is focusing on one novel written by Tadeusz Hollender in 1938 called “Poland Without Jews.” Largely lost to history, Hollender’s fantasy fiction was meant as a critique of Polish antisemitism. In Hollender’s satire, the Jews of Poland finally decide they’ve had enough. Families across the country pack up their belongings and begin a long journey to a new land, settling on Madagascar. Suddenly, Christian Poles find that they have no more Jewish neighbors, no one to beat up or to blame for their misfortunes. It turns out that life in Poland without Jews isn’t what they had hoped. So the characters in Hollender’s fiction summon a delegation that sets off for Madagascar and begs their Jewish compatriots to return back home with the words, “We don’t know who we are without you.”

Just a few years after Hollender’s book was published in 1938, the German army retreated from Poland. The Jews had been almost entirely exterminated. Close to 90% of Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. About 20% of Poland’s total population died of war-related causes, including author Tadeusz Hollender who was shot by the Gestapo in 1943 for his role in the Polish underground. After the war, many of the Jews who managed to survive emigrated to Israel or the U.S. 

Writing about the Second World War in Poland, the country’s most well-known historian Jan Gross quoted a Holocaust-era memoir: “This was a war which no one quite survived.” Nearly six million Poles perished during the six years of Nazi occupation. Gross gives some numbers to describe the utter devastation of Polish urban life: nearly a third of all urban residents missing following the war, 40% of Polish doctors killed, 30% of university professors and Catholic clergy and 55% of lawyers dead by the end of the war. Soviet occupation brought its own brutality, with the massacre of 22,000 military officers and Polish elite by the Soviet Army in 1940 in Katyn and campaigns of terror waged across the country by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. 

To this day, many in Poland remain bitter, believing they had been sold out to the Soviet Union by the West at the end of the war, condemned to 50 years of communist authoritarianism. “Eighty years on, the Second World War still dictates our present,” said Haska. “It’s really scary if you think about it, but the world really ended on the first of September 1939.”

Haska then tells me about one of her first trips to Israel years ago. She remembers her shock, and shame, when people across the country immediately recognized the name of her hometown of Ciechanow in northwest Poland, population 43,000. She got a history lesson from the Israelis she met about how the town used to be nearly half Jewish and about Roza Robota, one of the four women who led an uprising in Auschwitz in September 1944. She was from Ciechanow.

“Everybody knew where Chiechanow was and everybody knew her name,” Haska remembers. “I grew up 50 meters from a Jewish cemetery in Ciechanow and I had no idea.”

The only trace of Robota’s life in Ciechanow is a street named after her, stretching for three blocks on the outskirts of town. Three short blocks that reflect the preference for certain historical narratives by the Law and Justice party and the IPN. Jewish victims of the Holocaust are commemorated as a backdrop for a sweeping story of Catholic Polish heroism and resistance. Little to no space is allowed for one of the cruelest truths of 20th century authoritarianism: People became complicit in their own subjugation.

This truth is one of the opening observations in Jan Gross’s book “Neighbors,” which rocked Poland on publication in 2000 and is still highly controversial today. The book details the previously unstudied July 1941 massacre of Polish Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne. During the pogrom, Gross writes that German involvement was limited to standing by and taking photographs. In the early 2000s, the newly created IPN confirmed that it was the Polish residents who killed their neighbors. A year after the book was published, at a ceremony in Jedwabne, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski publicly begged for forgiveness.

More recently there’s been backlash. There is an ongoing campaign to exhume the bodies of the Jewish victims in order to prove that they were killed by German soldiers, and not their neighbors. Commenting about Jedwabne and the Kielce massacre, led by Polish residents in 1946 in a northern town after the war, the country’s minister of education refused in a 2016 interview to acknowledge that Polish people were responsible, saying that this “has been misunderstood many times.”

Overnight in Jedwabne, an entire town learned that their grandparents either took part, or stood by, in the brutal massacre of Jews, many of whom were burned alive. There are a number of historians studying historical backlash in Poland. Social psychologist Michal Bilewicz has looked at how people who have experienced historical trauma are more prone to believe in conspiracy theories as an adaption to the trauma, and how educational programs about the Holocaust have in some cases caused symptoms of PTSD in Polish participants or fueled disbelief and a rejection of the facts.

During our meeting in Warsaw, Haska told me a story about her aunt who a few years ago got a knock on the door of her home, a beautiful villa built in the 1930s. The woman at the door was German and she had come to see if her old family home was still standing. She had grown up there as a little girl when the territory was part of Germany. In January 1945, the family fled as the Soviet Army advanced across Poland. The women spoke to each other in German. Haska’s aunt told the visitor how her two brothers were killed by the Gestapo in 1943. The German woman shared her memory of her little brother dying as the family escaped their home in the winter of 1945.

“Half of Poland is living in someone else’s home, not only Jewish but German too,” Haska said. “But the ghosts are coming back.”

Patriotic Blackmail

Across Poland, there’s a history museum boom. Over the past fifteen years, nearly a dozen new history museums have opened. In pre-covid years, museums in Poland — a country of 38 million — had 38 million visitors, topping ticket sales for the national soccer team. A number of these new museums have also ushered in scandals and embarrassing international headlines.

In 2020, the director of Warsaw’s renowned POLIN Museum, historian Dariusz Stola, was pushed out by the government. In 2017, the Minister of Culture replaced the director of Gdansk’s new World War II Museum with a more friendly candidate — historian Karol Nawrocki, who today serves as President of the Institute of National Remembrance. The Museum of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising hasn’t even opened yet but is already drawing accusations of politicizing history. Another museum, the Warsaw Uprising Museum which opened in 2004, found itself again in the media spotlight after unveiling a new “Room of the Young Insurgent” exhibition, filled with stuffed animals, crayons and the “inspirational” stories of young child combatants in WWII, along with a statue of a Polish child soldier holding an automatic weapon.

While the IPN is not tied to any of these museums, the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews is perhaps the best brick and mortar representation of the institute’s politics. Opened six years ago, the Museum was curated by the IPN’s current vice president, Mateusz Szpytma.

Polish President Andrzej Duda attended the opening ceremony of the museum — located two and a half hours outside Krakow in the village of Markowa, population 4,000.

"The world does not know the reality that prevailed in Poland during the years of occupation, and it is this ignorance that hurts the good name of our country," read a statement from Polish parliament on the opening of the Markowa museum.

In photos from the opening day, Duda is lit up by some of the courtyard’s thousands of glowing plaques, each carrying the name of a Polish citizen murdered for helping Jews during the war. Many of them have received Israel’s esteemed designation of the Righteous Among Nations given to people who undertook extraordinary risks to help Jewish people during the war. Poland has the largest number of Righteous internationally: over 7,000 Polish citizens, many of whom were killed for their actions.

The museum tells the story of the Ulma Family who sheltered eight Jews in Markowa during German occupation. After being denounced, the entire Ulma family along with the Goldman, Didner and Grunfeld families were shot to death, seventeen people including children and an unborn child.

Walking through the courtyard to the museum entrance, visitors first see a large illuminated photograph of the Ulma family, taken by the family’s father, Jozef Ulma. Ulma was by all accounts a renaissance man who took dozens of photos of his family with his camera, a rare and prized possession in a Polish village in the 1930s.

The exhibition, housed in a minimalist, modern metal and glass structure, features many photos he took of his family, neighbors and surrounding landscape, some still stained in the family’s blood. The Ulma Family Museum highlights the cruelty of the war, that 20% of Markowa’s Jews survived the war in hiding — an unusually high survival number — and the intense pressure villagers faced to collaborate and inform.

“I would like every visitor to this museum, among others, to know the drama that befell the Jewish people during World War II,” said the IPN’s Vice President Mateusz Szpytma who was the first historian to lead the investigation into the Ulma story. He estimates that tens of thousands of Jews survived in Poland thanks to help from non-Jews. “I would like them to know that even in the most difficult moments of totalitarianism there is the possibility of helping people in need. It is up to us individually how we behave, whether we stand with traitors, whether we are heroes, whether we risk our lives for other people.”

Outdoors there’s a large memorial grave to the family with a Polish coat of arms, a cross and on the ground, a fresh bouquet of red roses. Nine urns with the remains of the Ulma family are displayed. The Jewish victims who were hiding at the Ulma family home are buried elsewhere, in a military cemetary about 15 miles away. Golda Grunfeld, Lea Didner and her child as well as five men by the name of Goldman are not listed. They are memorialized collectively with some of the three hundred nameless Jewish Poles murdered during the war and buried there.

Some of Poland’s most prominent historians, Jan Grabowski, Agnieszka Haska at the Holocaust Research Center among others, have been vocal critics of the framing of the exhibition. The Ulma Museum in some ways is an important break with the past. For decades in Poland, people given the Righteous designation hid it from their neighbors and family members out of fear of stigmatization and persecution. Honoring them on a national level has been long overdue, but critics say this is being done at the expense of the Jewish people they saved who are reduced to vehicles for Polish heroism.

“As a Polish citizen, a Polish researcher, I’m totally into commemorating these rare exceptions of noble Poles who were brave enough to somehow oppose this wartime reality. But at the same time these biographies are being used as a kind of patriotic blackmail,” said Maria Kobielska, who co-founded the Center for Research on Remembrance Culture at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She has been researching new history museums and has written about the Ulma Museum.

“The general message is that this was the typical attitude of Polish people, to act as Jozef and Wictoria Ulma. If you oppose this narrative and this museum you somehow oppose the memory of the Ulmas,” Kobielska said. “These people are used as an alibi for anyone who is Polish.”

Maria Babinska at the Center for Research on Prejudice at Warsaw University has been running social psychology surveys over five years. “We asked people to imagine — since the specific historical percentages are not known and will never be known — their estimate of how many Poles collaborated with Germans and the percentage who were indifferent,” said Babinska.

The study showed that Polish people believe that close to 60% of Poles selflessly helped Jews during World War II, but also believe that 25% of Poles collaborated with Nazis.

The results were highly polarized, a split based on which political party respondents voted for but also by factors such as expressing antisemitic views or supporting the IPN Holocaust law. 

I asked the IPN’s vice president Mateusz Szpytma what he made of these numbers: "I don’t think Poland is an exception here, people misperceive history,” said Szpytma. “It’s important to show history as it was, what you have to be proud of and the things that were bad, you have to be ashamed of them. These two sides are strongly present in our work at the Institute of National Remembrance.”

Babinska attributes the results of her research to basic human psychology: members of a community often overestimate the morality of their group. 

Morality, identity, being part of an ingroup have all been powerful themes in the Law and Justice party’s electoral campaigns. Campaign slogans and speeches reinforce the country’s Catholic and Polish identity, patriotic resistance to Nazi occupation and communism.

“Memory policy is a substitute for ideology that legitimizes the party,” says Dariusz Stola, the deposed director of Warsaw’s POLIN Museum and a historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Since 2015, the Law and Justice party has crafted an official party “strategy” for its historical policy with President Duda saying that “conducting historical policy is one of the most important activities of the president.”

People’s history

Maciej Sanigorski and Jeremi Galdamez are guarding a different kind of memory that is even more unpopular in the country than Jewish-Polish history — the history of Polish communism. Since 2017, the IPN has reinvergerated the country’s decommunization efforts of the 1990s, changing street names and removing over 200 monuments across Poland which “symbolize or propagate” totalitarianism. It’s the most public-facing work of the IPN, with the Institute’s current president holding video press conferences as workers drill and demolish monuments behind him in the shot.

Sanigorski, who works in transport for the Polish post office, and Galdamez, who writes for a history magazine and whose father was a member of Chile’s communist youth and fled political persecution for Poland in the 70s, are both left-wing organizers in Warsaw and have led a campaign to preserve the memory of Polish volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Poland had the second largest group of international volunteers fighting in Spain against Franco’s fascists.

So far, their biggest victory was gathering over a thousand signatures necessary to oppose an IPN order to change a street name in Warsaw named after the Polish brigade. It was a considerable undertaking in a post-communist country where anything related to socialism remains toxic. 

Sanigorski and Galdamez took me past the sites where some of Warsaw’s communist monuments have disappeared overnight. Along with holding discussions about historical policies, they organize an annual memorial service for Poland’s fighters in a military cemetery in Warsaw, with delegations from Spain, Germany and Italy joining this year.

“I always say if I lived in communist times I would fight for the memory of the anti-communist resistance because you have to fight for the things that are being thrown away from history,” said Sanigorski.

Valentin Behr, a political scientist at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, says the group is one of dozens of grassroots initiatives in opposition to the decommunization of public space and demonstrates that sometimes national memory politics can end up backfiring.

“It’s a way to produce a counter narrative to the official narrative and to show that there is another Poland that is not conservative, not fascist, which is progressive and that is forgotten most of the time in collective memory.”

Both Sanigorski and Galdamez object to the historical policies of the IPN — which they call an Orwellian ministry of truth, enforcing memory politics down to street names in small towns all across the country. However, both said it would be complicated to do away with it completely. Nearly everyone I asked had a different take on what to do with the IPN. While there’s no indication of the Institute going anywhere under the current government, there is an ongoing debate on how it could be reformed, or even dismantled if the opposition regains the majority.

Guardians of Memory

Adam Musial, a high school history teacher in Krakow for 22 years, quit his job in 2019 after finding it increasingly difficult to teach the Holocaust. “The general atmosphere in Poland surrounding memory simply reinforced my decision,” he said.

As part of a research grant he has been interviewing about 20 teachers across the country. They tell him it’s become more difficult for them to work. “The atmosphere is stifling,” he said.

He offered an example of a teacher who had tried to bring a Jewish Holocaust survivor to the school. During a faculty meeting, another teacher suggested that if they go ahead with the visit it would be best to bring in more than one speaker to offer students different perspectives on the subject. “So what, I should invite a Nazi?” the teacher quipped, eventually dropping the idea altogether.

For the past year, lawmakers have debated a new Polish law that would make it even harder for teachers to bring in outside speakers or participate in extracurricular programming. Right-wing politicians have rallied against “moral corruption” in schools — largely code for sex education — and pushed through a law that would make teachers seek written permission to bring in any outside speaker or organizations that aren’t on a selective, pre-approved government list. Along with sex education, this would shut down the majority of in-school Holocaust education activity. However, after passing through the Polish parliament, the law was vetoed by President Duda who asked lawmakers to ”postpone it,” citing the ongoing war in Ukraine. It appears the law would complicate integrating the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugee students into Poland’s schools.

But the year of uncertainty has already left a mark: Poland’s largest and oldest non-profit organization dedicated to Jewish-Polish communication has been restructuring their programming, orienting away from schools to be more resilient to politics. Since 1998, the Forum for Dialogue has brought Holocaust survivors and educators to nearly 10,000 students in 400 schools across Poland, focusing on programming in small towns and villages that once had a Jewish community. A core part of the program — known as the School of Dialogue — has students at partner schools lead independent research on their community’s Jewish history, which culminates in a student-led public walking tour for local residents.

Now, the Forum is leaning into their other programs such as directly educating teachers and growing their existing network of over a hundred local historical activists across Poland. The Forum calls them “guardians of memory” — Dariusz Popiela from Nowy Sacz is one of them.

Backfire

Back in Nowy Sacz, Popiela tells me about how he got lunch with his grandfather a few years ago. Popiela had already started his commemoration work at that point and they were discussing a project. At one point he noticed tears in his grandfather’s eyes. For the first time he told Popiela about a memory he had as a young boy. The town’s ghetto had been liquidated and the walls separating the ghetto from the rest of the town had come down. 

His grandfather told him how he walked through the empty ghetto streets and then saw a few boys his age hiding in one of the buildings. Books, some even with gold Hebrew lettering, were scattered across the pavement. He told Popiela how stupid he felt that his family and others had gathered and burned the books because they had nothing left to make a fire with. And then he started to cry.

While his grandfather and father both support the ruling party, he says they’ve come around to his work and today the entire family pulls together on the commemoration efforts including Popiela’s young children.

Popiela says he will move out of town when his daughter turns 18 if there’s still no monument dedicated to the Holocaust in Nowy Sacz. When we met in May, he was still waiting on authorization to start building the memorial. The day before, he had been cheering on his 11-year-old daughter in her first canoeing competition down on the riverbank between the two bridges where he plans to build the second part of his commemoration. 

In the weeks since, construction was greenlit. There’s an opening ceremony planned for mid-August.

[CORRECTION 08/02/2023 10:00 AM EDT]: The original version of this story incorrectly attributed former President Barack Obama's statement about "Polish death camps" to a 2012 visit to Warsaw. The comments were made in Washington, D.C. in 2012 at a ceremony posthumously honoring Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.]

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The Pulitzer Prize-winning book brings readers into the lives of Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Holocaust survivor, and his rebellious cartoonist son, Art. The novel unspools two parallel journeys: Art’s attempts to document, understand and ultimately write a graphic novel about his father’s experiences in the Holocaust, and Vladek’s terrifying odyssey from pre-war Poland to Auschwitz. 

As the novel flashes between past and present — from Art’s experiences pleading with his father to tell him his story, to Vladek’s path to the camps — two figures hover like ghosts over its pages. There is Art’s mother, Anja, who survived the Holocaust with Vladek but took her own life decades later, and Art’s older brother Richieu, who died during the war at the age of six, before Art was born. Throughout the text, Anja and Richieu are ever-present reminders of all that was lost during, and after, the war. 

Maus explores how those traumas haunt the two survivors of the nuclear family — Art and Vladek — whose relationship is both tender and deeply tumultuous. Vladek admonishes Art when he shows up at his home late; Art shuts down his father’s appeals for a closer relationship. In one scene, Art explodes at Vladek when he learns his father burned Anja’s diaries after her suicide. 

“God damn you!” he fumes. “You murderer!” Vladek recoils. “To your father you yell this way? Even to your friends you should never yell this way.”

The novel’s experimental qualities are not limited to Spiegelman’s fluid use of present and past. He also famously depicted all the characters in the book as having human bodies, but the heads of other creatures: Jews are drawn in the book as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Brits as fish, Americans as dogs and Swedes as reindeer. This device, which has fueled decades of controversy about the book, carries with it a subversive playfulness, giving readers some emotional distance from the story while simultaneously reappopriating the antisemitic trope of Jews as vermin, which was common in Nazi propaganda. The cover of the book also prominently features a swastika looming above Vladek and Anja.

But when the McMinn County school board convened, its members were not there to dissect the book’s family psychodrama or its characters’ emotional complexities. Instead, they voiced their objections to a handful of swear words in the book and a partially obscured cartoon image of a topless woman.

“We don’t need this stuff to teach kids history,” one board member argued. “We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.”

After some back and forth, the board voted unanimously to withdraw the book from the curriculum. Minutes from the discussion were later published on the district’s website. Local media soon reported on the ban, and it quickly snowballed into an international news story, unleashing a flood of headlines and editorials.

“They’re totally focused on some bad words that are in the book,” said Spiegelman, in a CNN interview about the ban. “I think they’re so… afraid of having to defend the decision to teach Maus that it led to this kind of daffily myopic response.”

But was it really just swear words and nudity that made the board uncomfortable? Another person who spoke at the meeting referred to the book’s depiction of Nazi violence, pointing to an image from the novel showing four mice, representing Polish Jews, who were executed in the town square where Vladek lived. 

“It shows people hanging, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff?” he asked. “It is not wise or healthy.”

“I can understand why people would feel cautious about that kind of violence,” said Hillary Chute, an English professor at Northeastern University who co-authored the 2011 book MetaMaus with Spiegelman, which describes Spiegelman’s process and explores the public reception of the text. 

“But the idea that this school in Tennessee is promoting it by showing it seems wrong to me. If they want to use the Holocaust in their eighth-grade curriculum, they're going to have to figure out what they want because there is no kinder, gentler Holocaust. And that's part of the power of Maus as a book.”

“Maus doesn’t wrap up the trauma narrative,” she added. “The book is very much about Vladek’s experience and not a watered-down version of it. And part of his experience is the swastika. Its horror and its power.”

Chute suggested the school board’s real objection to the text has much more to do with the horrors it depicts. She compared the charge of promoting violence with concerns about the book’s use of swastika imagery. In both cases, critics decontextualize these images, and portray the text as promoting — instead of testifying to — the violence and Nazi propaganda that Vladek witnessed.

The McMinn County school board’s response to Maus follows a longstanding American tradition of paranoia around comics, and in some cases, all-out censorship. In the McCarthy era, fears of the genre’s “corrupting” influence on youth ushered in a moral panic that was on full display at a 1954 congressional hearing on the links between comics and juvenile delinquency. This gave rise to a set of rules known as The Comics Code, which sought to eliminate objectionable content like sex and violence from comic books and similar media. The Code was finally shelved in 2011.

Biz Nijdam, a lecturer at the University of British Columbia whose research explores the intersection of comics and history, said peoples’ comic-related anxieties, born out in censorship and banning efforts, speak to the medium’s unique ability to engage readers at the visual level. 

“The way that visual media can articulate things that we can’t express with words scares people,” she told me. “And really conservative readers are afraid of what it will do to our children, because of the emotional response it creates in its reader. People can’t really do the work of ensuring that readers are reading things correctly, so instead, they just censor it.”

McMinn County is not the only place where the pioneering text has struck a nerve. While the book has been translated into at least thirty languages and is celebrated as one of the most influential graphic novels in history, it has also courted controversy all over the world. In its earlier days, Maus was scorned in Israel. It has been censored in Russia, and narrowly escaped the same fate in Germany. In Poland, Maus was subject to a staged book-burning, and its publishers were formally accused of “defaming” the nation.

The cover of Maus, which we cannot show here due to copyright protections, depicts the large face of a cartoon cat, at the center of a massive swastika. Two mice wearing long coats huddle beneath the startling symbol. The book’s depictions of swastikas, on the cover and throughout its pages, have been a top target of censorship threats outside the U.S.

Maus was taken out of bookstores in Russia in 2014, after the Duma passed a law forbidding Nazi propaganda and insignia, including swastikas. Russian booksellers had little choice but to remove copies of the text from their shelves, effectively erasing a work of Holocaust survivor testimony — under the auspices of rooting out Nazi propaganda. 

The cover of the book also caused problems after it was sent to a publisher in Germany, where it is illegal to display the swastika. The publisher asked Spiegelman to remove the swastika from the cover, but he refused. It was only after Spiegelman’s editor found a loophole in the law that allowed for the publication of Nazi imagery in works of serious historical research, a designation given to Maus, that the book was published.

In an eerie twist, Germany’s publication of the book, swastikas and all, made it a desirable object for at least one neo-Nazi who couldn’t find the image elsewhere. In MetaMaus, Spiegelman recalled watching a documentary about Germany’s skinheads and unexpectedly catching a glimpse of a Maus poster in a neo-Nazi’s bedroom. “It was the only swastika he could get, poor fella!” he joked.

Once it was published in Germany, Spiegelman wrote in MetaMaus that its reception was “intense.” He described being confronted by a reporter at a book fair in Frankfurt, who asked him if he thought a comic book about Auschwitz was in “bad taste.” Spiegelman told him no. 

“I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste,” he replied. 

A few years later, Spiegelman traveled to Germany to accept an award for the German edition of the book. “It’s a strange thing for a mouse to receive an award from a gathering of cats, for telling a story of how cats killed mice,” he told the audience. “Giving me this award could be seen as the result of a guilty conscience, a kind of War Reparations to a child of a survivor.”

In Israel today, Maus is largely heralded as a groundbreaking work of historical testimony. But when it was published decades ago, the book’s reception was not so warm. Spiegelman’s Israeli publisher was threatened with a libel suit by the descendant of a character in the book, who Spiegelman depicted as a Nazi-installed Jewish policeman in Poland. At a 1997 lecture about the novel in Tel Aviv, Cornell University linguistics professor Dorit Abusch was met with boos, cries of protest and even a walkout. 

“[The audience] found it very insulting, the combination between comics and the Holocaust,” Abusch told me. “Because comics are perceived as low art, funny, vulgar. And the Holocaust is a very serious and tragic subject. So, the combination kind of disturbed them.”

But opinions have shifted in the country over the years. The website of Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial, now includes a page about Maus and its educational value. Spiegelman’s exploration of transgenerational trauma and his fraught relationship with his father also inspired a new genre of the graphic novel dealing specifically with Holocaust testimony. 

“If you look at the small library of Holocaust memoirs to come out after that, they’re really all in dialogue with Maus,” the comics scholar Nijdam explained. 

One example is the Israeli illustrator Michel Kichka’s graphic novel, Second Generation: Things I Never Told My Father, which was published in Hebrew in 2013 and reflects on the formative moments in his childhood with a survivor father. Kichka told Haaretz the idea for his book was born out of reading Maus for the first time. 

“I felt a strong connection between myself and Spiegelman from the very moment I sat on a bench in the street and read it from cover to cover,” he said. “It wasn’t just the fact that we’re both cartoonists, but also the similarities between our stories and our father’s stories.”

Spiegelman’s book was also hugely influential for comic artists who didn’t share his family’s Holocaust past, but sought to explore their own cultural histories and identities through the graphic form. Gene Luen Yang, the cartoonist who wrote the 2006 graphic novel and National Book Award finalist “American Born Chinese,” told the Washington Post he first read Maus in his late teens. “Art Spiegelman set the standard for the rest of us… He gave us something to chase after.” 

Since the publication of Maus, memoirs have become a beloved subgenre of graphic novels, establishing a new medium for authors and readers to engage with history and memory.

The book’s most dramatic reaction came from Poland. Spiegelman's decision to portray non-Jewish Poles as cartoon pigs was met with widespread anger and offense inside and outside of Poland, and continues to be a source of controversy today. 

Maus was translated into Polish and published by Polish journalist Piotr Bikont in 2001. Soon thereafter, an angry crowd staged a protest in front of Bikont’s office and set the book ablaze. During the demonstration, Bikont donned a pig mask and waved at the protestors from his office window. 

“As he described it to me, he said he felt like the King of Denmark who wore a yellow star out of solidarity with the Jews,” Spiegelman recalled in MetaMaus. “He put on his pig mask in solidarity with the Poles who were burning the book.”

Even outside Poland, the pig metaphor and the novel’s portrayal of Polish people have generated pushback. They made it all the way to Pasadena, California, where, about a decade ago, a Polish American asked the city’s public library system to take Maus off shelves over its depiction of Polish people. “Maus made him uncomfortable, so he didn't want other people to read it,” explained an employee of the library in a 2012 article. It’s a criticism that lingers even today. 

Of the Polish reaction, Spiegelman suggested in MetaMaus: “There seems to be something deeply problematic about the Polish ability to assimilate the past. It proves that the book actually hit something alive, a nerve that needs to be cauterized.”

Tomasz Lysak, an associate professor of cultural studies at the University of Warsaw, shed some light on that same sensitivity.

“The official line of Polish commemoration is the Holocaust was a great tragedy, but we couldn't really do anything about it,” he explained. “We were trying to help but couldn't do too much.” 

Lysak believes part of the response is rooted in a feeling that Poland needs to defend itself and its reputation abroad — it reflects a discomfort with stories that contradict nationally sanctioned narratives around the war and the Holocaust. Critics of the book’s pig metaphor, he added, “could be offended by the fact that most Poles are represented in a way that doesn't show them in a good light. But we have to take into consideration the fact that this is a Holocaust survival story. And Vladek Spiegelman ended up in Auschwitz because of some actions of Polish characters in the past.”

In MetaMaus, Spiegelman reflected on the different cultural responses to Maus he saw while promoting the book and conducting interviews for it at various points in time. In Sweden, Spiegelman described feeling othered — but in a good-natured way — recalling the time a journalist cheerily compared him to Woody Allen. In France, which has a rich tradition of comic art, the book’s graphic form was embraced and taken seriously, with small-time newspapers analyzing the novel’s artistic choices and illustrations. In Italy, interviewers seemed more interested in the book’s tumultuous father-son relationship than in its narration of the Holocaust and Second World War.

It can be hard to parse through the parallels between these objections at first blush. Some people are mad about cartoon pigs. Others are upset about comic nudity. Many are plainly uncomfortable with the book’s depictions of Nazi violence and propaganda, even though they were a central part of Vladek’s experience of the Holocaust. But among those people who criticized the text in the U.S. and Poland especially, you can see a pattern emerge, in which peoples’ discomfort with the history Spiegelman presents is displaced onto the comic form.

Polish critics who rejected Spiegelman’s work seemed unable to see themselves in this story of a Polish Jewish man who survived the Holocaust and encountered both kind and cruel Polish people along the way. For some, the simpler response was to reject the cartoon image of themselves. As Nijdam put it, “Instead of being upset about the history, they’re upset about the pigs.” 

The McMinn County school board’s rejection of the book can also be seen as an expression of unease with a form of storytelling that does not offer redemption through suffering or make heroes out of its protagonists, but rather, presents the history, and its characters, without sentimentalization or embellishments. 

Spiegelman’s honesty, ambiguity and lack of satisfying resolution run counter to the very American (and Hollywood-esque) impulse to search for heroism, or redemption, out of pain. He refuses to refract the horrors of the Holocaust into a cathartic moral takeaway and is untethered to the need to present the Jewish experience in the war with a neat and tidy resolution.  

Spiegelman himself may have said it best in MetaMaus when explaining his decision to present Vladek in all of his complexities: “It had never occurred to me to try to create a heroic figure, and certainly not to create a survivor who’s ennobled by his suffering — a very Christian notion, the survivor as martyr. And that meant a warts-and-all relationship that included being really unpleasant.”

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The post Banned, burned and critically acclaimed: Global reactions to a Holocaust survival story appeared first on Coda Story.

Otherwise, the 47-year-old knew plenty about his roots. He grew up steeped in his family’s stories, and fears, about Mississippi. He knew his ancestors were enslaved on a sprawling plantation about twenty miles outside of the picturesque town where William Faulkner grew up, and some of them were buried in a nearby cemetery lined with weathered headstones. He knew the slave owners of the plantation were Irish, and he knew, through a DNA test, that he had some Irish heritage, too. And he knew, from a story passed down from his grandmother, that a white man thrust a double-barrel gun in his great-grandfather’s mouth and stole his land. 

He just never knew about the lynching. Until he saw the photo.

The first time Tarrell caught a glimpse of the plantation, a chill came over his body. “You could feel it,” he recalled, winding down a lonely road in Mississippi. It was a stormy day in mid-December, and we were driving to the property where his ancestors were enslaved. The sky was dark and moody, and tall weeds shivered in the wind. The weight of it all hung in the air. “It’s heavy,” he told me, pulling up to a white house overlooking an open field.

Tarrell led me to a tangle of brush at the edge of the house’s lawn. He crouched down, scanning the earth for a budding rosemary plant. When he found it, he gave me a nod. “Here’s where we did it,” he said, pointing to the dirt. We were looking at the de-facto grave of William Steen, whose lynching was swallowed up by more than a century of silence.

Growing up, Tarrell knew nothing about Steen’s death, or that they were related. Nobody in his family did. Like many lynchings of that era, there are few public accounts of what happened. What we do know comes from two short newspaper articles published in the days after the killing: Steen, a former employee at a railroad shop, was hung by a mob on July 30, 1893, near Paris, Mississippi, about 30 minutes down the road from the University of Mississippi in Oxford. “He boasted of being criminally intimate with an estimable white woman,” explained an article published the day after the killing. A second article described Steen as a “negro of ill-repute.”

It’s unclear if Steen was buried, or when the memory of his death began to fade. By the time Tarrell learned about it, nearly 130 years had passed. “I feel like I’m the voice for the dead,” he said.

Tarrell found out about two years ago while scrolling through his Facebook newsfeed. That’s when he came across a picture from America’s national lynching memorial of a rust-colored rectangular column inscribed with the names of seven lynching victims from Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Tarrell lived. He clicked on the photo and glanced at the names. When he saw William Steen, he paused. He knew he was related to a line of Steens from the same part of Mississippi. Could he have ties to this one?

Tarrell messaged the author of the Facebook post. She told him the lynching took place near the plantation where his family was enslaved, and the general area where they later lived. Tarrell reached out to a few family genealogy experts, and they began investigating the connection. Eventually, they concluded that Steen, the lynching victim, was the brother or cousin of Tarrell’s great-great-great grandfather.

Tarrell shared his findings with the members of the racial justice group documenting local lynchings, and they decided to arrange a long-overdue memorial for Steen in May 2021. Tarrell chose the property of the former plantation because of its proximity to his family’s ancestral cemetery. About 60 people showed up, including many of Tarrell’s relatives.

The realization bowled Tarrell over. He couldn’t believe that if he hadn’t checked Facebook, the whole story would have been wiped from his family’s memory. But he also didn’t think any of it would have been particularly surprising to people in Mississippi. The first time Tarrell drove to the former plantation, about a decade ago, a white friend told him to call her in two hours or she would alert the local chief of police. “They’re still active out there,” she warned. “The Klan.”  

When I traveled with Tarrell to the site of the former plantation and Steen memorial, about thirty minutes after we arrived, Tarrell led me to a tall cluster of weeds along the side of the road. He wanted to show me a historical marker identifying the nearby cemetery as a burial site for Black families after the Civil War. “Somebody shot bullets in it,” he said. But as Tarrell sifted through the brush, he realized the historical marker was nowhere to be found. He turned to me, incredulous.

“Somebody took it,” he said.

Steen was one of about 6,500 Black Americans lynched in a cluster of Southern states between 1877 and 1950. Mississippi was home to more lynchings than any other state in the country. Its legacy of violence stretches right up to the modern day — haunting family histories, memory, and behavior. When Tarrell’s grandmother learned he was quietly courting a white girl in high school, in the 1990s, she had an immediate, angry response: You could get lynched. “Those goddamn white folks gonna hang you,” she fumed. She wanted to protect him from the Mississippi she knew.

Lynchings weren’t hidden. They were often a deliberately public spectacle, drawing throngs of cheery white spectators who posed, smiling, in photos in front of the brutalized bodies, or brought home pieces of the victims as mementos. Like the Black man burned at the stake in 1899, dismembered, and sliced “into pieces, bones crushed into small bits and disposed of as souvenirs,” according to a newspaper account from the time. To deepen the terror, mobs would occasionally deposit victims’ mutilated bodies in Black neighborhoods and communities. In 1917, thousands sung Confederate hymns as they watched a Black man burned alive and decapitated in Tennessee. His severed head was then thrown onto Memphis’ Beale Street, the epicenter of the city’s Black business district. Such public, brutal displays of violence were intended to send an unambiguous message to Black Americans: Stay in your place, or else. 

The federal government tried, and failed, to step in. By the 1950s, nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, but not one of them passed; they were often thwarted by Southern white Senators. The consequences of inaction were deep and long-lasting. “More than the poll tax, the grandfather clause, and Jim Crow segregation, lynching and the threat of lynching helped regulate and restrict all aspects of Black advancement, independence, and citizenship in many small towns for half a century,” wrote Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in “On the Courthouse Lawn,” an examination of lynchings in the 1900s. Even today, research has found that the Southern counties with the highest rates of lynching also have the lowest rates of Black voter registration.

Lynchings were so traumatizing that some witnesses stayed silent about them their entire lives.

Tarrell belongs to a movement popping up from Arkansas to Alabama attempting to awaken the country’s memory of these dormant histories, by marking the landscape with echoes of its violent past. 

Despite thousands of documented lynchings, America’s first national lynching memorial did not open until 2018 – in Alabama, where an estimated 300 Black Americans were lynched from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s and Confederate Memorial Day is still an official state holiday.

After more than a century of failed attempts, the U.S. Senate — for so long an obstacle to federal anti-lynching legislation — finally approved a bill designating lynching as a hate crime punishable up to 30 years in prison. On March 29, 2022, President Biden signed the historic bill into law. Still, as the country tiptoes toward a truth, it remains disabled by the long tail of its silence.

Silence distorts memory in various ways. It can happen when a nation, collectively, refuses to engage with the realities of its past, opening up space for revisionist histories and feel good counter-narratives that gloss over the horrors of the past. Sometimes national silence is summoned as an act of avoidance; other times, to serve a political or ideological agenda.

But silence also flows from the collective to the individual. A society can forget on a mass scale, not when the government imposes amnesia as a political project, but when people refuse to look within — to dig into the messy and complex family biographies that turn memory into a landmine, and forgetting into a psychological salve. Even the country held up as the global exemplar of historical reconciliation, Germany, is still haunted by the ghosts of family memory and perpetrator guilt. 

When it comes to facing the past, Germany is often praised as the poster child of success. The country even has a specific term for the painful process of reconciliation that unfolded in the decades after the Holocaust: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung.

The word, which has no equivalent in English, means “working off of the past.” It is occasionally used interchangeably with the English phrase “memory culture” to describe Germany’s wide-ranging and layered approach to Holocaust memory, which includes literature, education, art, popular culture, and physical memorials. I first learned the term in an email with a German historian while preparing to travel to Berlin. I began to use it almost obsessively when I arrived, and not just because there was absolutely no way I could pronounce Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. The idea of a collective, nationally sanctioned culture of remembrance intrigued me, maybe because it felt so impossible to imagine in America, a country perpetually at war with itself over how to remember the past (see: Critical Race Theory).

Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung did not unfold easily or quickly, however. Most Germans were not particularly eager to face up to the horrors of the Holocaust after the war. Although the Allies imposed a denazification program in West Germany, its government was still chock full of former members of the Reich a decade after the war; in 1957, nearly 80% of senior officials in West Germany’s Justice Ministry were former Nazis.

Meanwhile, narratives of victimhood were pervasive across Germany. There was a widespread feeling among Germans that they suffered tremendously during the war, and were its real victims. In the late 1960s, a wave of youth activism began to challenge some of these attitudes, as a younger generation moved to confront the country — and their parents — over its Nazi past.

A decade later, the release of the 1978 American  television miniseries “Holocaust” had an enormous cultural impact across Germany. Nearly 20 million West Germans tuned in to watch the show about a fictional Jewish family. It brought many viewers into the lives and stories of victims for the first time, and is widely seen as catalyzing the country’s reckoning.

In the 1990s, another crucial shift occurred when Germany reunified and memory culture became absorbed by the state: “In order to become accepted globally, a lot of money was put into mastering one’s past, putting up commemoration sites and museums,” Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, a German historian and the director of Berlin’s Center for Research on Antisemitism, told me. Public memorials and museums later popped up across the country, including the famous Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin.

Since then, Germany’s atonement has been invoked as a global success story: an example of a country that bravely dealt with its past and became a model for other countries’ long overdue historical reckonings.

In America, scholars and journalists have increasingly begun to talk about Germany’s process in conversations about race and reconciliation, poring over Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung for clues about how the U.S. can meaningfully confront its history of slavery and racial violence. Seen from an American perspective, Germany is often portrayed as the wise and capable professor of remembrance; the U.S its difficult student.

The Atlanta-raised, Berlin-based scholar Susan Neiman wrote an influential book about what the U.S. can learn from Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, inspiring an outpouring of articles in magazines and newspapers dissecting Germany’s reckoning in an American context. One of the most recognizable figures in America’s lynching memorial movement, the pioneering American civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, has often contrasted the two countries’ versions of remembrance, comparing America’s South “littered with the iconography of the Confederacy” to Berlin, awash in Holocaust memorials. Stevenson, the founder of America’s first national lynching memorial, said his initiative drew inspiration from Germany’s landscape of Holocaust memory and homages to the victims of Hitler’s killing machine.

“When you go to Berlin, you can’t go 200 meters without seeing markers and stones that have been placed next to the homes of families that were abducted during the Holocaust,” Stevenson remarked. “There are no Adolf Hitler statues in Germany.”

On a rainy morning in October, Gisela Martin placed a rose on top of a freshly polished gold stone. She stood outside of her mother’s last residence, an apartment building in a busy Berlin neighborhood, before she was murdered by the Nazis in the late 1930s. Martin was joined by her nephew, son, and a handful of locals, to lay a memorial stone in the sidewalk in front of the building. The brass block, roughly the size of a CD case, is inscribed with Martin’s mother’s name, birthday, and the dates she was deported and murdered by the Nazis. Rain and wind pelted the group, and Martin — petite, in a dark peacoat — stood quietly next to her nephew as volunteers placed the stone in the ground. It was jarring for Martin to see the truth of her mother’s murder, a long-guarded family secret, on the pavement for anyone who walked past it to see.

There are more than 75,000 of these memorial stones, called Stolpersteine, across Europe, making the project the largest decentralized Holocaust memorial in the world. 

“What really works are these little stones,” Michael Naumann, Germany’s Culture of Secretary from 1998 to 2000 as the government finalized Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, told me: “Because these are individual names. The only way you can actually teach the Holocaust is to grab you by your heart.”

In Berlin alone, the streets are studded with roughly 8,500 gold squares, which are impossible to miss once they’ve been pointed out. They glisten off some of the busiest avenues in the city and quiet side streets, in front of apartments, restaurants, cafes, and commercial buildings. For people who choose to read what they say, the individual stories within each stone force the kind of intimate, and personal, confrontation with Germany’s past that can get lost in the larger and more abstract memorials.

Gisela Martin’s mother was the casualty of a little-known Nazi extermination program called Aktion T4, which claimed the lives of about 300,000 people with disabilities between 1939 and 1945. The “euthanasia campaign,” as the Nazis called it, sought out to eradicate German society of people with mental and physical impairments. The victims were among the first targets of the Nazi regime, described as the Holocaust’s “trial run.” The medical establishment was involved in every step of the murder campaign, beginning with identifying victims and ending with overseeing and carrying out the killings. By 1941, the T4 program had exterminated some 70,000 people in death centers across Germany by lethal injection and gassing.

Gisela Martin’s mother, Hedwig Daum, was forced from her home and taken to a psychiatric hospital in December 1937, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia (Daum’s relatives are skeptical of the diagnosis, but say she was under a considerable amount of stress at the time and may have had a nervous breakdown). The following year, officials involved with the program forcibly sterilized her — another feature of the T4 program — and brought her to a psychiatric hospital. She was released, and then shortly thereafter brought back to a psychiatric unit, where she remained imprisoned until she was murdered on May 29, 1939.

Martin, who is 88-years-old, was four when Daum died, and her recollections of her mother are fuzzy. Memories come in abrupt flashes: sitting on her mom’s lap while food simmered on the oven, filling the apartment with rich scents, or waving to her through the window of the psychiatric ward. But a memory of her last glimpse of her mother when the authorities came to take her away is intact. “She fought and screamed like crazy, and my sister held me in her arms,” she told me. “It was terrible.” Daum’s only wish, according to medical records later obtained by her grandson, Reiner Lenz, “was to return to her children.” 

The circumstances around Daum’s death were kept for decades by only Gisela Martin, her siblings, and her father. Even among themselves, the topic remained a source of silence. “It was simply not discussed,” Martin said. The stigma and shame surrounding mental illness were so deeply rooted that Martin even kept the truth of her mother’s death from her husband. “I was afraid that if he heard about the psychiatric clinic, he would think that I'm also not right in the head if I lost my temper,” she explained. “It was kept secret.”

Martin watched solemnly as a volunteer cemented the plaque into the pavement and rinsed it off with water, leaving a gilded block nestled inside the street’s drab row of gray cobblestones. Then she crouched down, gingerly set a rose on top of the stone, and wiped away a tear. For Martin and her family, the unveiling of the marker served as a corrective against the country’s legacy of postwar amnesia about the Nazis’ crimes against the disabled. After so many decades of silence, Martin told me she was “finally ready to talk about what happened.”

The next in line to place a rose over the stone was Martin’s nephew, Reiner Lenz, who spent years researching Daum’s biography and tracking down her medical files to find the official record of her death.

“After the war, nobody talked about people like my grandmother,” he recalled. “They said, ‘forget it.’ But we shouldn’t forget. The death of my grandmother has left a gap for her children and grandchildren that has never been closed.” He believes the stone represents a quiet rejection of the country’s rising tide of right-wing nationalism. “It is intended to commemorate all the sick and denounced sick who need special protection by society,” he said. “It should be a reminder to all of us never to allow such an injustice again.”

Visiting concentration camps is not mandatory in Germany, but it is encouraged and in some schools required. One morning, I joined a class of about 20 high school students on a tour of Sachsenhausen, a Nazi death camp outside Berlin. Nobody in the class had visited a concentration camp before. They gathered quietly around their guide, a German history buff in her early thirties. She carried a black tote bag with “it’s a beautiful life without Nazis” emblazoned across the front in bubbly pink letters.

In recent years, Germany’s sites of remembrance have become a flashpoint among figures associated with the country’s far-right movement, who bemoan the country’s memory culture as a source of national shame and guilt. In 2017, a politician with the country’s main far-right party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, assailed Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame in the capital.” The party grabbed headlines the following year when a group of its constituents interrupted a tour at Sachsenhausen, questioning the existence of gas chambers, and an AfD politician called on a local mayor to ban Stolpersteine, those gold memorial stones, calling the country’s remembrance culture “a dictatorship of memory.” In their narration, the act of remembering is akin to an assault on the German identity, and nowhere are the country’s memory efforts more visible than in its memorial sites.

I decided to join the high schoolers as they toured Sachsenhausen because I wanted to understand what Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung meant to a generation that was further removed from its history than their parents or grandparents. The students passed under the famous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate and walked into the camp, somber as the guide led them around its grounds, through the reconstructed barracks where prisoners slept and the gas chamber and execution site where tens of thousands were murdered from 1936 to 1945.

About halfway through the tour, the guide paused and withdrew two photos from her tote. She asked the class to describe them. The first was a black and white picture taken from the camp’s watchtower in 1941, looming over a neat row of prisoners with the edge of a machine gun in the frame. She explained that it was a propaganda picture of the camp used by the Nazis to convey a message of order, intimidation, and control. The second was a fuzzier snapshot of an inmate kneeling in front of a group of SS officers, including one who was laughing. This photo, she said, made the officers look cruel and arrogant, and the prisoner sympathetic. She then asked the students if they thought the picture was a propaganda photo. The class agreed that the picture portrayed the soldiers in a negative light, and therefore was not used in Hitler’s propaganda machine.

The guide told me the goal of the exercise was to show students how to distinguish between propaganda and reality — and to challenge the myth that everyday Germans didn’t know what was really going on at the time. “It’s important to show that ideas of the concentration camp were distributed very widely.”

At the end of the tour, one of the students approached me and struck up a conversation. I asked her about what she took from the guide’s photo lesson. “It was amazing to see the actual faces of the people and to see who they were because they look like normal people,” she said. “But you imagine them as monsters.” How did she talk about this history with her parents? “We don’t talk about it at all, actually,” she replied. As we chatted, a handful of her classmates migrated over, and within a minute, I was surrounded by 10.

The students told me that visiting the camp was different than reading about it. But then the conversation drifted into what it meant to learn about the Holocaust as Germans, and how they believe the rest of the world views them. “When you go to other countries, they go, ‘Oh, the German guys, they are the people who started the wars and everything. They have stereotypes,” one girl said. “We are a new generation.” Another student chimed in: “We cannot be blamed for this.” In the exchange, I saw edges of the emotions exploited by the far-right in its weaponization of memory politics.

As the two were talking, one of their peers made a face. Germans are still voting for the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, he pointed out. Doesn’t that factor into the conversation about blame? He pointed to Sachsenhausen’s gate, visibly agitated. “Doesn’t everybody have at least a basic understanding of history?” He asked. “There’s still people who openly say they are Nazis.”

I asked the tour guide how memory is integrated into Germany’s educational system. “It is very victim-focused, which is important,” she answered. “But I think now it would be a good idea to focus more on perpetrators. Everybody agrees that the Nazis were evil. But, we have to see them as people, so we can understand that normal people are capable of doing these things.”

“It’s a wall of silence and denial, and also a wall of threat,” Dominik, a playwright, told me over Zoom from his home in western Germany, describing the process of trying to untangle his family’s past. He hoisted a black photo album in front of his screen, opening it up to a page of World War Two-era photos. 

The pictures, he told me, were from his grandfather’s time in the Nazi’s armed forces, the Wehrmacht, and the album was one of just a few family remnants from that period of time (the other: a certificate affirming his grandmother’s Aryan lineage). The first time Dominik leafed through the pages a few years ago, he focused entirely on his grandfather’s face. He had a powerful urge to see if he looked unhappy. The second time he looked at the album, he noticed something startling. In the background of the photos, he saw burning villages and what appeared to be Russian prisoners of war. Somehow he completely missed the horror in the pictures when he saw them the first time around.

To Dominik, who asked to be identified by his first name because he has been targeted by neo-Nazi threats, the omission revealed a longing to see his grandfather as he wanted, not necessarily as he was. “I was looking to find proof that my grandfather was innocent,” he told me. Towns on fire and prisoners muddied that conceptualization, so “I completely kept them out of my mind.” He doesn’t believe he’s alone in that urge. “I think many people have a desire to deal with the past, but they also have a desire to say: not my parents, not my grandparents. They were fine. They helped the Jews. They were resistance fighters or victims of the Nazis.” 

Dominik belongs to a cohort of Germans who are interrogating the country’s reputation as a champion of remembrance and pointing to the gaps within it as symptoms of deeper amnesia. He’s 39, with a dark sense of humor, and wary of the country’s memory worship. I mentioned some Americans’ invocation of  Germany’s process as a possible model for the U.S. He chuckled. “This is like the new export product of Germany,” he told me, wryly. “After the cars, we also make this ‘great’ memory culture.” 

In early November, Dominik, along with the other two members of his theater collective, screened a movie, which they will adapt into a play later this year, about how the descendants of perpetrators engage with their family histories. I attended the screening in Berlin along with a few dozen Germans who quietly sipped beverages and watched the film, which occasionally felt like a fever dream. The movie dealt with the emotional toll of silence within families and was based on interviews between the collective’s members and their parents. For each of them, confronting family narratives of the war and Nazism meant coming up against a “wall,” as Dominik told me, of shame, anger, and denial, from their parents. 

The trio sought out to make the film after recognizing, as a group, that the country’s celebrated Holocaust reckoning had stopped at their own doorsteps. Dominik’s grandfather was in the army and joined the Nazi party when he was 19; the grandfathers of the other two collective members were SS officials. Growing up, their family discussions of the war focused on German — not Jewish — suffering: “about how grandfather was freezing in the Soviet Union, and he was such a victim,” Dominik explained. “These narratives are there all the time growing up. There’s no conversation about the Shoah. There’s a lot of conversation about how cruel the war was.” 

Over time, Dominik grew to reject the narrative he absorbed as a child about wartime suffering, opting instead to research the parts of the story his family and so many others left out. These interrogations, and subsequent discussions with family, formed the basis of Dominik’s contribution to the collective’s film.

At first, the members’ parents were supportive of the movie, which they were told was about family memory and the war. But as the conversations grew deeper and closer to their families’ behavior in Nazi Germany, Dominik said there was a moment for each person where things took a noticeable turn. Their parents “got angry and their faces changed and they started insulting us.” For Dominik, that happened after he asked his father if he knew the history of the shop where his grandfather worked, which had been run by a Jewish family until the Nazis expropriated it. “He was like, ‘OK, now I want to know, what is this project actually about? Do you want to play police and say your family is all Nazis?’” Dominik recalled. “Then, he lost himself in the worst antisemitism I’ve ever heard in my family.”

Dominik said he was shocked and disgusted by his father’s antisemitic screed. But it also revealed to him an internal conflict. Even though he was furious, something unexpected came up: “I had the feeling that I must protect him,” he explained.

“From what?” I asked.

“From the shame I feel. He exposed himself. And it is him, not me, that I want to protect.”

I traveled to Germany to try to better understand the lessons of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung and to unpack the narrative that I had consumed in America about Germany as a champion of memory. But during my reporting, I kept coming up against a particular strain of silence that I couldn’t move past, and I wondered if I had been thinking about the reckoning in the wrong way. Maybe the story was actually about the conversations the country couldn’t have.

Shortly after I arrived in Germany and began talking to people about the past, it became clear that there was a notable gulf between collective and individual memory: the way the country processed memory on a national level and how individuals confronted their own family histories. It didn’t take long for me to pick up on this distinction. I noticed that many appeared comfortable talking about the Holocaust in an abstract way, synthesized more or less under the umbrella of: “the Nazis were evil,”  but withdrew altogether when I tried to nudge them into more personal territory. A common set of answers to my questions about what took place within peoples’ families and communities was: “We didn’t talk about it;” or, “I don’t know.” A level of detachment I found perplexing, given what I had read and studied about Germany’s textured and successful reckoning. 

The lack of interrogation into peoples’ family histories I encountered seemed to stand in stark contrast to national culture of memorialization I saw throughout the country: the shrines and museums; the class field trips to concentration camps; the declarations of public officials on important dates, such as the anniversary of Kristallnacht. So, after attending the screening, I ran my observations past Dominik. Was I being too harsh, or was there a genuine gap between the individual and nation’s ability to process the country’s history?

“This is not just your impression,” he replied. “There is this official culture of remembering and some people are quite cool in talking about it, but there’s not a connection to your own person or to your identity or what actually happened.” 

He added: “The vast majority of Germans grew up with horrible mass murderers as their closest relatives. Or let’s say, to be kind, they grew up with people who were completely callous and indifferent towards mass murder and mass murderers. And then you have these people as your parents or grandparents. The thought that your grandfather, the man you love, who kissed you, who hugged you is such a monster, is actually too painful for many Germans.” 

In 2019, researchers with Germany’s Bielefeld University surveyed more than 1,000 people across the country about their understanding of their families’ roles during the war. Specifically, the researchers asked the subjects to choose if their ancestors were perpetrators, victims, or “helpers” who assisted victims during the war. Nearly 70% of Germans surveyed said their family members were not perpetrators. More than half said they were victims.

I’ve often wondered about the psychological source of a person’s aversion to digging into the dark areas of their family history. Is it rooted in a fear of learning the truth? Or, is it about how to hold on to two contrasting stories of someone you love?

Maybe no one is better positioned to mull over these questions than Peter Pogany-Wnendt, a Hungarian-born Jewish psychotherapist living in Germany. The 68-year-old son of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, Pogany-Wnend works both with the descendants of perpetrators and survivors in his therapeutic practice.

Over cappuccinos in a quiet Berlin cafe, Pogany-Wnendt told me he sees the country’s emphasis on public memorials as a national form of displacement from individual guilt. “Because we are making a memorial public, we don’t need to look in our families. That’s not right. Because a public memorial is only as good as it is anchored in the personal story.”

Pogany-Wnendt believes that when feelings of shame and guilt remain repressed and unaddressed, they pass along to the next generation, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. But he also believes that the emotions transmitted from parent to child come with an “impossible task” for the descendants of both survivors and perpetrators. For the descendants of survivors, the impossible inherited task is to mourn the suffering of their parents and grandparents; for the descendants of perpetrators, to atone for their descendants' guilt and repent.

"Their parents were not able or willing to do this emotional work," he explained. "As it is neither possible for the children of the victims to mourn the suffering and the losses of their ancestors, nor is it possible for the children of the perpetrator to atone for the guilt of their fathers and mothers, both sides have to give the original feelings back to their ancestors. This is an individual inner-soul process that liberates the descendants from their emotional heritage, pain or guilt, and from the impossible tasks." 

In Pogany-Wnendt’s case, that meant realizing he could not mourn for his father, whose parents were both murdered in the Holocaust, and whose deep grief left a lasting imprint on him while he was growing up. Pogany-Wnendt realized he couldn't grieve his dad's losses for him. He had to give that pain back.

“My father, he was always very sad,” Pogany-Wnendt explained. “And I felt as a child that I had to make him happy. I always felt responsible for his sadness and thought I had to mourn for my father. I tried to identify with his sadness and to put it on my own shoulders. But then I realized that I can’t mourn for my father or work through his pain. I have to leave it with him.”

Pogany-Wnendt’s recognition that he could not mourn his father’s losses for him, or resolve his grief, helped him feel more compassion towards him. He sees how the descendants of perpetrators, too, can undergo a similar process. 

“It’s not the guilt they’re inheriting, but the guilt feelings,” he said. “Because you can’t inherit guilt.”

“But there is a responsibility to remember what they did.”

Like the cobblestoned streets of Berlin, there are pockets of the American South coming alive with long-suppressed memories. But the reckoning is far from settled. In some places, two versions of history inhabit the same space. In others, the urge to remember is overwhelmed by the desire to forget.

In November 2015, Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights attorney, issued a memory challenge to Memphis, Tennessee.

At the time, Stevenson’s organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, was a few years away from opening America’s first lynching museum in Alabama, and was at the forefront of the country’s lynching memorialization movement. Stevenson gave a speech to a crowd in Memphis, imploring them to honor the county’s thirty-plus lynching victims.

Recalled Margaret Vandiver, a retired criminology professor who became involved in the effort: “A couple people who were in attendance looked at each other and said: Yup.” A multiracial, intergenerational coalition calling itself the Lynching Sites Memorial Project of Memphis, or LSP, came together shortly after, and set out to begin marking the landscape. The group has installed three memorials and hopes to have another in the ground soon.

The Memphis memorial group is one of a dozen like-minded organizations that have sprung up across the U.S. in the last few years, especially in the South. There are now lynching memorialization coalitions in Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, South Carolina, Maryland, Ohio, Alabama, Oklahoma, Georgia, Oregon, Colorado, and Florida.

Vandiver, who published a book about lynchings in Tennessee, told me she has been surprised by the sustained interest in the group’s work. 

But where there’s support, there’s also opposition. One morning in December, Vandiver picked me up at the local library to show me a few of the city’s lynching markers. She brought me to a green sign installed in 2018 memorializing Lee Walker, who was lynched in 1893 after he was accused of attempting to rape a white woman. A mob of 3,000 people broke into the jail where Walker had been held, hung him on a nearby pole, and then burned and mutilated his body.

As we pulled up to the stop, Vandiver warned me to keep an eye out for an “angry-looking” man. “If he approaches us, just go back to the car and I’ll handle him,” she instructed. The man, she explained, used to own a nearby business, and was enraged after the memorial went up, claiming it loomed over the parking lot. We didn’t see him, but it wasn’t the only story I heard of the business community or local leadership pushing back against markers that unearthed the brutality of lynchings for passersby — including shoppers — to see.

Others would simply prefer to avoid the ugliness of America’s racial violence as a matter of emotional self-preservation. Fred Morton, an 82-year-old volunteer with the Memphis group, told me the predominant sentiment towards this kind of history among white people in his blue-collar, middle-class community is: “Let’s just not talk about it. This is unpleasant, this is unseemly, this is disconcerting.” 

Vandiver brought me to a grassy field in an industrial, gentrifying neighborhood in Memphis. The plot of land marks the spot where a white mob killed three Black businessmen in 1892. The murders profoundly affected Ida B. Wells, a crusading investigative journalist who was a close family friend of one of the victims. The killing led Wells to begin collecting data that would ultimately debunk the widespread myth that lynchings were a form of punishment for Black men sexually assaulting white women. Wells found that the lynchings were instead “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.” 

Despite the significance of the lynching in the city’s history, there are no markers or signs noting what happened. The lot where the men were killed, in fact, now sits on the grounds of a hip new brewery.

Later that afternoon, I met up with Wayne Dowdy, a Memphis historian. Morton and Vandiver joined me, as well as two other local volunteers with the Memphis lynching memorial group, Randell Gamble and Laura Kebede. I intended to talk to Dowdy about Memphis’ history of lynching, but our conversation quickly veered into the personal. Gamble and Kebede are Black; Vandiver, Dowdy, and Morton are white. 

Vandiver, who grew up in Florida, recalled singing the de-facto national anthem of the Confederacy, Dixie, in school. Dowdy explained how he grew up in Tennessee in the 1970s, steeped in the narratives of the Lost Cause, one of the most enduring revisionist mythologies in American history. The story Dowdy absorbed about the Civil War, in school and his community, was “the Confederate soldiers were noble, brave heroes who were fighting to maintain a way of life which had nothing to do with slavery. It was regurgitated at home, in the neighborhoods. It was like the air and water. No one who was white questioned it.”

Vandiver added that her great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, and regaled his grandson — her father — with vivid tales of it while he was growing up. “So there's that one generation between someone who fought for Confederacy and me sitting right here,” she said. “That's how close this all is.”  

“See, for me, I don’t hear these stories from whites,” Gamble interjected. “I hear about the violence from slavery, Jim Crow, with African Americans. But from whites, I don’t hear these stories you’re telling about their families.”

There’s not a lot of talking happening in Arlington, Tennessee. 

That’s one of the first things Cynthia Myers tells me when she greets me in the middle of the small town square, about thirty minutes outside of Memphis. It’s a quaint and small plaza, with a Christmas tree and an old-fashioned red brick store hosting a steady stream of weekend shoppers. One thing that’s conspicuously absent from the courtyard, however, is any mention of the man who was shot to death and castrated right there, in broad daylight in 1939.

“It’s a taboo conversation,” Myers, 59 years old, told me wearily. “People don’t want to talk about it.”

Myers grew up with the story because the lynching victim, Jesse Lee Bond, was a cousin. And she was close to his brother, Charlie Morris, who spent years trying to bring the lynching to light. He died a few years ago, after successfully lobbying the state legislature to pass a cold case bill reopening investigations into unsolved murders from the civil rights era. 

But Arlington remains silent on Bond’s lynching. There’s no sign in the town square marking the site of the killing or stone marking Bond’s grave. According to Memphis lynching memorial members I spoke with, some of the descendants of the alleged perpetrator still live in town but have not spoken up publicly about what happened. “Some of them are in this place of denial, the past is the past,” one Arlington resident told me.

Jesse Lee Bond was a sharecropper who bought his seasonal planting supplies from Arlington’s general store, S.Y. Wilson & Company. The owners tracked the debt of farmers who bought their supplies on credit in a private notebook, and, according to some accounts, Bond was suspicious of how much they claimed he owed them. One day in April 1939, Bond asked for a receipt after buying something on credit, a request that was seen as out of the ordinary for a Black sharecropper in the Jim Crow South, and reportedly infuriated the white store owner when he found out. He ordered Bond to come back to the store, and his aunt accompanied him. When he arrived, the store owner and his employee started shooting, according to the Memphis lynching memorial group. 

“They shot at him and shot him. He ran out to the outhouse. They riddled the outhouse,” Morris said Bond’s aunt later told him. “And when he staggered out of the outhouse, they threw him down and they castrated him and dragged him to the river.” County records reported the cause of his death as an “accidental drowning.” The store’s owner, Charles R. Wilson, and his employee were charged with first-degree murder but later acquitted by an all-white jury. 

Charlie Morris was at school when he found out his brother had been murdered. “It affected me very much,” he recalled in an oral history recorded before he died. “My mother had three sons. And when she passed away, I was six. And the last thing that she said, on her deathbed, was ‘keep my boys together.’ And this was broken when they killed Jesse.” 

On the 79th anniversary of Bond’s lynching, the Memphis lynching group hosted a memorial ceremony and vigil in the Arlington town square. But since then, efforts to install a memorial in the square or a marker on Bond’s grave have been unsuccessful. “Arlington is this little town with this nice cute square, and that’s the icon for the town,” Gordon Myers, a local Reverend, told me, over lunch in town. “There’s a lot of energy towards preserving this facade within the administration of the town and the politics and real estate development.” Placing a lynching memorial in the center of it all would complicate the image the town markets to itself and others.

But Myers wants to see just that. From her perspective, the town’s ongoing silence feels like an acceptance of the lynching itself. “It’s like they’re still supporting what happened. To not want to engage with it, deal with it, or even discuss it, she told me. “Even if you don’t apologize, just open up about it. That would make a difference. It would give some closure about what happened.” 

On one of my last days in the South, I stopped by the town square in Oxford, Mississippi, with Tarrell and some members of the local lynching memorial initiative, the Lafayette County Community Remembrance Project.

The group was about half white, half Black, and mostly over the age of 50, although there were a few younger people there. They wanted to show me the memorial dedicated to the county’s seven lynching victims that was installed on September 17, 2021 in front of the county courthouse after a years-long, messy approval battle with the County Board of Supervisors.

The group included people with deep ties to the town and its violent history. 67-year-old Oxford native Effie Burt told me her grandfather, a sharecropper, left town after he was threatened with a lynching for refusing to work. “That could have been him on that sign,” she said, motioning to the marker. His sons fled to Missouri in the middle of the night to escape the specter of violence. “That destroyed my family,” Burt added. “I grew up without my uncles.”

As we were talking, I couldn’t help but fixate on the visuals of my surroundings. We stood next to the lynching memorial, at one edge of the town square, near the county courthouse. A stone’s throw away, an enormous Confederate statue loomed over the front of the square. Calls to remove it have been unsuccessful, so the statue now uneasily skirts the lynching memorial. It’s almost too perfect of a metaphor for America’s relationship with its past: the tensions of the current moment in the country’s historial reckoning carved in miniature, between these two memorials, on this town square. 

As I reflected on the contrasting iconography, I thought of something Dominik, the German playwright, told me when I explained the fractured state of American memory politics. “To some extent, it’s not that bad,” he replied. “At least you have a fight. A fight about history and ideas and the future of the country.” 

A clash is also a sign of life. Not a calcified, collectivized consensus on the past, but a living organism, being worked out right in front of you — on the Oxford square, or downtown Memphis, or in the minds of white Americans as the country spars over how to narrate the truest version of its history to the next generation. 

“When you move the conversation from the larger historical systemic to the personal, I think that’s what people are afraid of,” Dr. William Horne, Arthur J. Ennis Postdoctoral Fellow at Villanova University, who has written on his family’s role in slavery, told me. “Sometimes I wonder — is the best we can do to have a systemic conversation about systemic wrongs?”

In Mississippi, Tarrell recently learned about a family in the area where Steen was lynched with the same last name as the white woman he allegedly had a relationship with. He told me hasn’t been able to get in touch yet, but he’d like to meet up. He’s not interested in blame. He just wants to get closer to understanding what happened on July 30, 1893, and why.

“I’m not trying to disgrace anyone,” he said. “I just want to know what happened. If I had the opportunity to talk to one of them, they might say something that could help me learn more about my ancestors. I’m just trying to find the truth. And have some closure for the family. That’s the only thing I want to do.”

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The 1852 novel, written by Harriett Beecher-Stowe, for which the station is named occupies a fraught place in the annals of American literature, recognized both for galvanizing public opinion against the brutality of slavery and for reinforcing reductive racial stereotypes with the servile depiction of its main character. 

Pölking, whose parents are German and Cameroonian, spoke of his discomfort passing the station. “It woke up a lot of bad emotions,” he told the broadcaster Deutsche Welle, arguing that it is way past time for it and a nearby street to be renamed.

So far, Pölking’s petition has not succeeded. The station’s name greets visitors on a large sign outside, emblazoned in white letters against a bright blue background. 

A few minutes down the road lie Onkel Toms Hütte stable and horseback riding school, a restaurant called Uncle Tom’s Burger and the Onkel Toms Hütte kindergarten. In fact, the entire area pays homage to a book once described by the Black American writer James Baldwin as a “catalogue of violence.” 

The existence of this neighborhood in modern-day, multicultural Berlin can be traced back to a surprisingly durable national fascination with America’s antebellum South, which first took hold in the mid-19th century. 

Soon after publication, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” became a global sensation and the only book in the 19th century to outsell the Bible. It made Beecher-Stowe Germany’s most beloved American author and had a profound effect on popular culture, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin-themed beer gardens and campgrounds springing up across the country. Berlin’s Onkel Toms Hutte subway station opened in 1929, near an Uncle Tom’s pub and a sprawling housing development of the same name. 

These literary-themed homages tapped into a fantasy with the American South that sanitized the brutality of chattel slavery and characterized plantation life as bucolic, simple and comfortable for thousands of “loyal and happy” slaves. 

Heike Paul, is an American Studies professor at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg who has written extensively about Germany’s obsession with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” She describes this inaccurate interpretation of a brutal and shameful period of American history as the “pastoralization of slavery” and a “total disconnect” from Beecher-Stowe’s text, which was written to expose the horrors of the practice.

Similar ideas are also central to the “Lost Cause,” a revisionist account of America’s past that surfaced after the defeat of Confederate forces in the Civil War of 1861-1865. Romanticizing plantation life and depicting slaves as the faithful servants of benevolent owners, the mythology of the Lost Cause also insists that the war was fought over state’s rights, not whether or not white people had the right to own and place other human beings in chains. 

While Beecher-Stowe was a staunch abolitionist, the unquestioning subservience of her central character reinforced stereotypes and a variety of racist ideas. According to Sanders Isaac Bernstein, a Berlin-based PhD student at the University of Southern California, whose work has included analysis of German nostalgia for the Confederate South, this archetype “was invoked by both German progressives and conservatives as proof of Black inferiority and as a justification for colonization.”

Bernstein holds up as an example the introduction of a 1911 German translation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which states that “the Negroes are undeniably an inferior race, and, now that they have been freed, are widely perceived to be a plague in the United States.”

While living in the South, I encountered ideas rooted in the Lost Cause repeatedly. I’ll never forget the first time I heard the Civil War casually referred to as the “War of Northern Aggression,” or the myriad revisionist narratives I came across while covering North Carolina’s debate to remove Confederate statues from public spaces. Most people who opposed the idea argued that taking down or altering the monuments amounted to historical erasure, advancing the falsehood that the war was fought in response to northern “tyranny.” In reality, however, the defense of these symbols, included, at its core, a glorification of the Confederate cause and antebellum life.

Coming across these ideas in the contemporary South may be unpleasant, but it is not surprising. I did not expect to find traces of them in Berlin, though. Wanting to understand how this contentious American myth gained such a following in Germany, I asked Bernstein to meet me at Onkel Toms Hütte. He arrived, dressed in black. We both took photographs of the station’s sign and then moved to a nearby bench. 

Outside of the neighborhood of Onkel Toms Hütte, most of Germany’s homages to Beecher-Stowe’s book are no longer visible. The nearby tavern shut down in 1978 and the campgrounds disappeared decades ago. But “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not the only example of Southern storytelling that resonated in Germany. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel “Gone with the Wind” became an immediate bestseller under the Third Reich and its 1939 movie adaptation, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, is said to have been a favorite of Adolf Hitler. 

Revisionist interpretations of the Confederacy persisted under the Nazi regime, which had developed its own Lost Cause narrative to cope with the national humiliation that resulted from Germany’s defeat in the First World War. According to an account by the ex-Nazi leader Hermann Rauschnin, Hitler believed that the “American people themselves were conquered” when the South lost the Civil War. Since then, he argued, the United States had slid into a state of political and racial “decay.” 

You can still see clear signs of this strange love affair lingering in the Germany of today: Civil War reenactments in which the majority of participants want to take the losing side; Confederate flags flying at anti-lockdown protests, at country music festivals, or hung in the back of Berlin drinking establishments. In many instances, the Stars and Bars can be seen as a convenient alternative to the Nazi swastika, the display of which has been banned under German law since 1945. 

The cultural resonance of the Confederate war manifests itself in subtler ways, too. Bernstein, who is American, said: “Sometimes I’m surprised by the way in which one can still encounter people being like, ‘You know, the real America is in the South.' I think it comes back to a particular idea of the city being somehow part of the world capitalist system, but the country is where a nation’s cultural life truly exists. I can’t help but think that part of that is the remaining power of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and ‘Gone with the Wind.’”

Of course, Germany is not the only country in which Confederate iconography can be seen. In recent years, the Stars and Bars has become a common touchstone for the far right from Ireland to Brazil. However, it is especially jarring in a nation that has, for decades, made rigorous efforts to confront the violence and prejudice of its past. 

Germany’s long and painful process of reckoning with the Holocaust, known within the country as Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, is often hailed as a global model of historical reconciliation. According to Bernstein, it includes a deep suspicion of wistful longing for an imagined past, an emotion fostered and exploited by the Nazis to advance their ideas of antisemitism and volkisch nationalism. 

However such messaging remains powerful to this day. In a recent campaign, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland called for a return to a “normal” Germany. While, at least on the surface, about the country’s emergence from the coronavirus pandemic, one video juxtaposes grainily nostalgic cinefilm of a white family with contemporary footage of burning barricades, anti-fascist protesters and lockdown signs. At one point a garden gnome makes an appearance in a neat suburban garden, presumably owned by a clean-cut white, middle-class family — a bizarre symbol of the party’s cozy, quaint and culturally homogenous vision for the nation.

That these ideas still have a following in Germany may explain why Pölking’s campaign to rename Onkel Toms Hütte has, as yet, not been acted upon. After all, preserving the name allows people to cling to a German identity rooted in an illusory version of the past, far away from the complexities and tensions that exist in today’s world.

For Bernstein, that raises a worrying question: “Shouldn’t Germany, of all places, be aware of the trap of nostalgia?”

Research for this article was made possible with the support of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, Washington, DC’s Transatlantic Media Fellowship.

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“Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women and children, mainly Jews, from various countries of Europe.”

I had joined a guided tour of the Nazis’ largest extermination camp, and by this point the horror of the place was crushing.

On either side of me were the ruins of the two largest gas chambers with their attached crematoria, and the pits where they dumped the ashes. Auschwitz-Birkenau is actually two separate camps, and the tour began with several hours in the claustrophobic barracks and dungeons of the original concentration camp. Some of the barrack rooms have been turned into shrine-like exhibits of the belongings the Nazis stole from each family once they had stepped off the trains. Most disturbing of all is a room filled with mounds of human hair, cropped from each victim for use in stuffing mattresses and pillows. Here and there, little girls’ ponytails poke out from the mass.

As I stood in front of the memorial plaques, silent like everyone else, I thought of the arguments about the details of the Holocaust and why so many still doubt what happened here. And I thought that Auschwitz is not only a warning to humanity. It’s also a monument to facts, and the sanctity of the truth.

Far from exaggerating the Nazis’ crimes — as Holocaust deniers have so often alleged — the custodians of Auschwitz, and Jewish historians, have actually reduced their estimate for the number of people murdered here.

Far from exaggerating the Nazis’ crimes — as Holocaust deniers have so often alleged — the custodians of Auschwitz, and Jewish historians, have actually reduced their estimate for the number of people murdered here, in accordance with the evidence they have gathered.

The plaques you see today, inscribed with the figure of “about one and a half million” murdered, haven’t always been there. If I had visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial in the 1980s, I would have seen another set of plaques, saying that "four million" people had died here — describing them simply as the “victims” of Nazi genocide, with no mention of their identities.

That figure of four million was conjured up by Poland’s then-communist rulers. Auschwitz is in southern Poland, and they wanted to emphasize Nazi atrocities against communists, particularly their own people. The Jews were edited out of this narrative, even though it was clear even then that the Birkenau death camp had been set up to exterminate them, as part of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” This attempt to rewrite history has echoes even today, in Russia’s efforts to ignore Nazi atrocities against Jews on its own soil.

There’s no question that Poland suffered grievously under German occupation during World War II: as many as three million Poles may have died. And because the Nazis initially set up Auschwitz — which is in southern Poland — as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners, it became one of the focal points of communist efforts to memorialize the country’s suffering. But most of the Poles who perished at the hands of the Nazis died elsewhere, not in this death camp.

By 1989, when communism collapsed in Poland, Auschwitz and Jewish historians had already worked out a more accurate estimate, based on the Nazis’ own transport records of who they rounded up and put on the trains from across Europe.

That is where the figure of 1.5 million on today’s plaques comes from, including at least 1.1 million Jews, as well as Poles, Gypsies, Soviet POWs and some 5,000 nationals of other countries. And in the early 1990s, Poland’s first post-communist prime minister agreed to install new plaques at the memorial.

Despite this strict adherence to fact and evidence, the lies keep coming. And as the annual day of Holocaust remembrance approaches — on 27 January, the day Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army — anti-Semitic attacks are rising worldwide.

The day before my visit I had been at a conference in Warsaw, listening to warnings about the corrosive effect of the tide of propaganda and division sweeping the world. A journalist from Hungary reported how the label “traitor” was now being slapped on anyone who tried to counter the falsehoods of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Who can forget that among Orban’s favorite invented enemies is a Holocaust survivor, George Soros. But when the leader of the free world can be so free with the truth, it is contagious. The tide keeps rising.

The story of Auschwitz-Birkenau is also a parable of what happens when lying becomes institutionalized. When the Nazis rounded up Jewish and Gypsy communities across Europe to be transported to the death camps, they told them they were being resettled (they made them pay for the journey). That’s how they kept them calm as they packed them into the cattle-wagons.

That’s why the Auschwitz museum is now so full of pots, kettles and other cooking utensils that Jewish families packed into their suitcases, the basics for a new life.

In the grainy photos on display, you can see the new arrivals look exhausted and bewildered, but not yet terrified. They were starting to realize something was wrong, as SS officers made their selections — one line for slave labour, another for children and those too weak to work, to be led straight to the gas chambers. But no one yet knew their fate.

They realized something was wrong, as SS officers made their selections — one line for slave labour, another for children and those too weak to work, to be led straight to the gas chambers.

But even as Hitler was trying to create a new truth, that the Aryans were a master race, and that the Jews and others barely deserved the term at all, his underlings knew the truth of what they were doing — and it scared them.

As the Red Army closed in, the SS guards tried to carry out a giant cover-up, by dynamiting the gas chambers, burning paper records and destroying the belongings they had harvested from their victims. But they left it too late. When Soviet troops rolled in, troves of evidence remained — including tons of human hair and stacks of paperwork that had been spirited from the flames.

The Nazis were famous for their record-keeping, but they never wrote down the real cause of death. People in Auschwitz died of coronary heart failure, severe gastric infections or pneumonia, never by being gassed, shot or injected with poison.

As we walked back towards the Birkenau gatehouse, now infamous from so many films, one of the people in my group asked our guide why there were so many solitary chimney stacks where prisoners’ barracks had once stood.

Some were destroyed by the SS, but many of the barracks were dismantled in the years after the war for building materials, Zuzanna explained, before anyone had thought of turning the camp into a memorial. And, she added, with the same dispassionate voice she had employed throughout the tour, “the chimneys were just propaganda anyway.”

Propaganda aimed at who, I asked? The Nazis controlled the camp. The prisoners were destined for death. To whom did they need to lie?

They were worried about visits from the Red Cross, she explained. The Nazis always told Red Cross staff that this was a regular prisoner of war camp, never letting them get too far inside. So they needed to make it look as though all the prisoners had heating.

Zuzanna has been doing her job for more than a decade. “Sometimes, I have to take a break,” she admitted. I thanked her for the way she had told the story of this place. She nodded in acknowledgement, then said: “Everyone should come here.”

The post Postcard from Auschwitz appeared first on Coda Story.

• Bunya Barkina, 40 years old
• Esfir Barkina, 9 years old
• Larisa Belitskaya, 12 years old
• Raisa Alperovich, 57 years old

The Nazis executed an estimated 27,000 Jews, prisoners of war and others in Rostov on Don, Russia, during their occupation, mowing down most of them in unmarked graves in an area in the western outskirts of town called the Snake Ravine. Since 1975 a hulking monument has stood on the lonely grassy hillside to commemorate what is considered the worst Holocaust-era crime in Russia. To activists, the statue is cold and inhuman, as it provides visitors no insight into the individuals murdered nearby. Indeed, no signs mark the mass graves where they died and many of the names of those exterminated have been lost to history.

Rashka is the self-described archivist of Rostov’s Jewish community. His congregation from the Rostov Soldiers’ Synagogue along with the Russian Jewish Congress have been working for years to compile a full list of the Rostov Holocaust victims so they could add them to the Soviet-era memorial already in place. So far they have confirmed only around 6,000 names, mostly of Jewish victims, and they have raised money to pay for a new plaque to display them.

But the quest to commemorate the dead has run into a wall of unsympathetic authorities.

Rostov’s city administration, which oversees the memorial, say the have denied permission for the plaque of victims because the activists have not had their list of names properly attested and verified by the Russian state archives. Yury Dombrovsky of the Russian Jewish Congress says this is an impossible bureaucratic feat because the state archives doesn’t have a list of victims  -- which is why the activists are working to complete the task on their own.

Rostov’s city administration denied permission for a plaque of the Rostov Holocaust victims

For outsiders it may seem inexplicable that Russian officials would stand in the way of a chance to mark the crimes of a Western country upon their own citizens, especially given the current political climate in Moscow. Activists believe that the real motivations to the authorities’ intransigence is because their work to remember the dead raises troublesome questions about how history is remembered and taught in today’s Russia.

The extermination of Rostov’s Jews occurred due to widespread collaboration with the Nazis, a history that has been whitewashed out of the state-sponsored narrative of World War II. The Rostov massacre also raises key questions in today’s Russia about the value of individual lives in a political culture that values loyalty and social unity. And it underscores feelings among many local Jews that anti-Semitism is still alive and well in their country.

“The cult of informing was always around in Soviet times. But now no one speaks about this or talks about it in school books or on television,” said  Rashka in a recent interview.

Rostov’s massacre is one of the least understood chapters of the Holocaust, in large part because of the fickle attitudes that Soviet -- and now Russian -- authorities have had toward their citizens. During World War II about 15 percent of the Soviet population died, many in battle, others from starvation and some from the Soviet regime.

In 1943 after the liberation of Rostov, the Soviet government established a special commission to investigate the Nazi atrocities and executions. The report, filed away by the Soviet secret police, was briefly made public by a Russian documentarian in the mid-1990s, but it is no longer in the public domain.

In the 1970s, Soviet authorities erected a monument to the victims, and in line with the ideology of the time, the plaque at the site emphasized communal suffering and ignored the names, ethnic and religious backgrounds of those killed. The same thing happened at Babi Yar in Ukraine, where over 100,000 residents of Kiev, mostly Jewish, were killed by Nazis.

In Rostov, this whitewashing of history means that today, even some of the most basic facts of the Holocaust-era crimes are in dispute. Dombrovsky of the Rostov Holocaust Memory Foundation says that 27,000 people were killed, and around half of the victims were Jews, numbers apparently taken from the Soviet archival statistics. According to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Center in Israel, 15,000-16,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis in Rostov-on-Don from August 1942 to February 1943. It doesn’t state statistics for other ethnicities or nationalities.

In the early years of the Soviet Union, Rostov was home to a diverse and thriving Jewish community, and in 1939 Jews made up 5.4 percent of the city’s population. Yet more is known about those responsible for the killing due to the reports made by Soviet investigators after the Red Army liberated the area from the Germans, rather than the victims.

Rostov’s extermination of Jews was supervised in a chillingly organized campaign by Kurt Christmann, a 35-year-old Obersturmbannführer, according to German archives.

On Tuesday, August 11, 1942, an announcement published in the name of the Rostov’s Jewish Council of Elders, a Nazi-approved organization, ordered the city’s Jews to leave their homes so they could be moved to safer locations after a series of crimes had been committed against Jewish individuals. In reality, the order was a pretext for mobilizing the city’s Jews for their death.

Individual members of the Elders’ Council were responsible for gathering the families living in various Jewish districts of town. On the prescribed morning, fathers carried suitcases to the central meeting point. Mothers held their children’s hands. Schoolteachers helped assemble children.

From there, people were separated into two groups. Families were loaded onto tarmac-covered trucks and driven towards Zmievskaya Balka, the Snake Ravine, while men aged between 16 and 55 were taken to Zoological Street.

On the outskirts of town, trucks unloaded their unwitting passengers. Local Rostov men joined German army soldiers in pushing families toward two large pits dug towards the edge of the ravine. When the soldiers opened fire, the force and violence of the bullets hurled the victims’ corpses directly into the deep holes.

After the city had been “cleansed” of Jews, the members of the Elders’ Council were also executed in Snake Ravine.

Once the war ended the KGB arrested ten men for collaborating with the Nazis in Rostov. They were convicted and executed for treason.

The names of the victims have never been published in school books or by the state. For now, they only remain alive in an archive run by  Rashka.

The local campaign to memorialize the victims takes on greater urgency as the years pass and fewer Rostov residents remain alive to remember those days of terror.

With local authorities’ animosity toward the project running high, for now the tales of loss and local betrayals lives on as oral histories told by the city’s elderly.

Valentina Barkina, 67, remembers the exact address from where her aunt and cousin were taken away to Snake’s Ravine: 46 Bratsky Lane. She was always told that their neighbors betrayed them to the Nazis. “After the war the Soviet authorities would only put ‘passed away’ in the victims’ death certificates, not ‘shot,” said Barkina. “That’s why today we can’t prove that our relatives were executed.”

“After the war the Soviet authorities would only put ‘passed away’ in the victims’ death certificates, not ‘shot.” 

Valentina Barkina

A short drive away on Pushkin Street, Natalia Petrova says her great-grandmother hid with her daughter in the basement of the building, hoping to escape the Nazi patrols. Both were also killed in the ravine after their neighbors informed on them. “I used to play with the kids of these two traitors and I never knew what they had done,” Petrova said. “It was only decades later that my relatives told me about the tragedy.”

On the other side of the building a former police investigator Erem Nazayan, 84, recalled two sisters in his building rumored to have worked in what had been euphemistically called an “officer’s club,” which everyone understood was a brothel for German soldiers during the occupation.

Dombrovsky of the Russian Jewish Congress says local media outlets as well as officials never discuss these local memories of collaboration and killing.

Instead, whenever they raise the subject of the Holocaust massacre, they emphasize the fact that some Jews of Rostov collaborated with the Nazis notably Gregory Lourie, who led the Elders’ Council.

These days, when driving through Snake Ravine, visitors pass the crumbling remains of a Soviet summer home used by the KGB, a gas station and car wash. There is no sign of the mass graves.

Resurrecting the identities of those killed here is a moral imperative, says Raksha.

“Not a single individual should be lost to history, which has continued to erase names of people as if they never existed,” said Raksha.

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