Who Owns the (Difficult) Past in Poland?

Poland’s nationalist PiS party may no longer be in government, but its divisive brand of memory politics continues to prevail under the new president Nawrocki. Local Polish and German initiatives to commemorate the post-war camps for Germans go against the grain by putting reconciliation before reparations.

When Karol Nawrocki, historian and former head of the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN), became president of Poland in 2025, his first public statements made it clear that ‘historical politics’ would remain one of the state’s main instruments of political communication at home and abroad. This is the approach long promoted by the right-wing Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) that nominated him. At its heart lies a narrative centred on war reparations, national pride, and the ‘defence of Polish dignity’, where more ambiguous aspects of the shared Polish-German past are left in the shadows. One example are the camps for Germans in Poland established and run by the Polish communist authorities between 1945 and 1950 – often on the sites of former German concentration camps. Marked by violence and high mortality, but not designed for systematic extermination, these camps form part of Poland’s difficult post-war heritage.

History as a tool in power politics

The blind spot regarding this difficult heritage was evident during Nawrocki’s inaugural visit to Berlin this September, when he reiterated the demand for war reparations from Germany – a claim valued by a PiS-appointed commission at €1.3 trillion. Described by the Süddeutsche Zeitung as ‘a messenger with an old bill to settle’, the president invoked a familiar trope in Polish politics: the nation as a moral victim of history. In meetings with Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Friedrich Merz, Nawrocki also pressed for the restitution of wartime cultural property, linking memory politics with appeals to justice and national pride.

This strategy is effective above all at home. It mobilises emotions, sustains a narrative of collective grievance, and strengthens the legitimacy of the state through moral language. Yet it also narrows the space for public remembrance: What does not fit into the heroic and martyrological framework – such as the history of post-war camps for Germans – is silenced, localised or stripped of moral complexity.

Beyond official narratives

What emerges when we move beyond the state’s version of the past and listen to voices on both sides of the Polish-German border? Research on the remembrance of post-war camps in Świętochłowice, Łambinowice, and Potulice (2021–2023) shows that memory endures where official narratives fall silent: among the descendants of survivors, members of the German minority, organisations in the border region of Silesia where many of the camps were located, and expellee associations in Germany.

In Poland, this episode is subsumed under what is referred to as the ‘Upper Silesian Tragedy’, a wave of post-war repression directed mainly against Germans or those perceived as such, including arrests, deportations, forced labour, and internment in the camps. In Germany, it is framed within the broader experience of the expulsion of Germans from former German territories in Central and Eastern Europe after the war. Local groups in Upper Silesia have shaped a language of commemoration that bridges Polish and German perspectives, victim and perpetrator, state and individual. In Łambinowice, for example, an annual commemoration organised by the local German minority with Polish partners takes place at the Cemetery for the Victims of the Labour Camp. A similar event in Potulice was inaugurated in the 1990s by a Polish survivor of the former German concentration camp and a German survivor of the post-war camp that succeeded it. These ceremonies are attended by descendants of the camp victims, members of the German minority, Silesian groups, the local community, and, occasionally, representatives of expellee associations in Germany and even Polish members of parliament. Bottom-up practices like this show that even when official discourse resists such gestures, memory can transcend national boundaries to reveal a landscape of remembrance that is diverse in terms of reach, emotional depth, and degree of politicisation.

The limits of empathy

Poland’s collective memory still rests on a hierarchy of suffering, where Polish trauma serves as the central moral reference point. Including the suffering of German civilians within this framework remains politically and emotionally contentious. In Germany, meanwhile, the norm of historical responsibility often discourages open reflection on German post-war suffering. The result is a narrow corridor of empathy – broad enough for symbolic gestures, yet too narrow for a genuine dialogue about shared and entangled pasts.

The coexistence of state and social memory exposes two opposing logics. The first, state memory politics, is vertical and selective: History is used to define who belongs to the moral community of the nation. The second, dialogical memory, emerges from below – in the practices of local communities, minority organisations, and cultural institutions – and promotes coexistence rather than competition, empathy rather than hierarchy.

This tension is now one of the key dimensions of Polish-German relations. It explains why disputes over reparations or historical responsibility rarely lead to reconciliation, as they operate within the register of symbolic power rather than mutual understanding.

Beyond selective memory

Eighty years after World War II, the memory of the post-war camps for Germans in Poland remains incomplete, preserved in archives, local memorials, and the recollections of a dwindling number of witnesses. Nevertheless, it continues to shape perceptions of the past and the experience of trauma. In the current phase of memory politics under President Nawrocki, the state does not seek amnesia but greater control over what is remembered and how.

The task of scholarship and civil society is, therefore, not to replace one narrative with another, but to expand the space where memory can be shared rather than appropriated. The crucial question for the years ahead is not whether Poland and Germany remember differently, but whether they can learn to remember together.

Magdalena Lemańczyk is an assistant professor of Sociology and Deputy Director of Research at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (ISP PAN). A book on the German camps in Poland – Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence: The Politics, Memory, and Commemoration of the Post-war Camps for Germans in Poland (1945–1949) – which she wrote together with Piotr Madajczyk and Paweł Popieliński, is due to be published by Routledge in 2026.