Not long after we crossed into Poland, I glanced out the train window and did a double take. Looming over the snow-covered cabbage fields was a colossal statue of Jesus.
His golden crown, the height of a man, sparkled in the winter sunlight. The rest of him was draped in white. I grabbed my phone to find out whether I was hallucinating. I soon learned that he was real enough—if not that solid—made of fiber glass and plaster. When he was erected in 2010 outside the town of Swiebodzin, he was the tallest Jesus statue in the world, outstripping Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro by three meters. Sylwester Zawadzki, the local priest behind the construction, had tirelessly campaigned for donations and insisted the monument should be 33 meters tall to reflect the fact that Jesus died in his 33rd year. Asked why he felt his small town needed such an outsized monument he said, “It was Jesus’ idea: I was just the builder.”
Whether the contract was heaven sent or not, the statue is a reminder that much of Poland remains deeply religious even if the church’s influence is declining among young Poles. Around two thirds of the population identify as Catholic and almost a third regularly attend Mass. In Poland’s Catholic heartland in the southeast of the country, a woman active in community fundraising and youth counseling once invited me to tea. When I asked her what the biggest problems were facing young people, I was expecting her to discuss drug addiction and unemployment. But she said what worried her most was the way the internet promotes masturbation. Both she and her husband were relieved that their town had declared itself an LGBT free zone.
Competing Versions of the Past
Nearly 700 kilometers farther north, the port city of Gdańsk, known as the “Pearl of the Baltic,” offers a striking contrast. It has long been seen as one of Poland’s most liberal cities. Yet even here, conflicts over museum exhibitions reveal that, in this polarized nation, different groups hold competing versions of the past.
Above the entrance to the Gdańsk shipyard are three steel crosses commemorating workers killed during protests in 1970 over rising food prices. It was the first monument to communist oppression in a communist state. A decade later, the shipyard, once named after Lenin, became the birthplace of Solidarity, Poland’s first independent trade union, led by the mustachioed and charismatic electrician, Lech Wałȩsa.
The legacy of the movement—which ignited a mass challenge to Soviet-bloc rule—is celebrated in the rust-colored European Solidarity Center nearby. Opened in 2014, it tells the story of the shipworkers’ revolt across seven rooms with historic objects and interactive displays.
In the first hall there is a clocking-in board with paper timecards and visitors can sit inside the cabin of crane operator, Anna Walentynowicz. After three decades of toil, she was let go just shy of her retirement. Her unjust dismissal led to a strike on August 14, 1980, that erupted into a broader fight for workers’ rights and political freedom. The ceiling is covered with yellow docker helmets. “Each one has a number on it and workers used to try and cover these up,” said Jacek Kołtan, the center’s director of research. “But with the Solidarity movement they lost their fear of the authorities and their spies.”
Apart from the museum, the building has a library, conference rooms, and the offices of various NGOs. One of these is occupied by Wałȩsa. At the age of 82, the former president and Nobel Prize winner still comes in most days when he is in Gdańsk. The museum is one of Poland’s top attractions with one million visitors a year.
Shipbuilding—and the Church
But the place is less popular with the current President Karol Nawrocki, aligned with the ultra-conservative Law and Justice party (PiS), which is currently in opposition. Last August, Nawrocki unexpectedly beat Rafał Trzaskowski, the seasoned mayor of Warsaw and the candidate for the centrist Civic Platform, Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s party. A fortnight after Nawrocki’s election, on the 45th anniversary of the Gdańsk agreement, Nawrocki snubbed an invitation from the director of the ESC and chose to visit a rival museum a stone’s throw away instead. Housed in a former torpedo warehouse, the hall once used for health and safety training, is where the historic Gdańsk agreement was signed. Here the displays center on shipbuilding and the Church.
The European Solidarity Center initially enjoyed cross party support, but in 2018 the newly elected PiS government announced its funding would be cut by almost one million euros. Some members of the Law and Justice Party thought the museum’s name lacked patriotism and took exception to the fact that an LGBT youth support group occasionally held meetings there. “They called our place the European Solidarity Center for Gays and Lesbians,” sighed Kołtan. But within 24 hours, crowdfunding had made up the shortfall. When the government changed once more in 2023, under the leadership of the pro-European Tusk, funding from the Ministry of Culture was reinstated.
A Battle of World War II
A fiercer battle broke out over another of the city’s museums, which opened in 2017, commemorating World War II. At first sight the red brick and glass building looks as if it is teetering on its side and about to fall over. The architects buried six of the building’s 13 stories underground—“to be closer to hell,” explained Jan Daniluk as he led us down dimly lit, sloping corridors toward rooms devoted to the rise of fascism, the Holocaust, terror, bystanders, collaborators, and the resistance. Throughout, the emphasis is on the suffering of civilians, but, unexpectedly for Poland, one room documents the second-largest group of victims of the Nazis’ genocidal policies—Stalin’s soldiers. Around 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war died either from starvation in primitive open-air camps or were killed between 1941 and 1945.
A film shot by an American reporter records the 1939 German assault on Warsaw, including footage from a bombed maternity hospital. There are pictures of a teenage girl gunned down as she foraged for potatoes in the suburbs of the city with her family. The idea is to show ordinary Poles’ experiences of the war within a broader European context although there is also material from Asia, including objects carbonized by the Hiroshima bomb. “We want people to understand that this was a world war,” said Daniluk.
The President as Historian
But the curators of have not always agreed on what to exhibit leading to rows and even a lawsuit in the Gdańsk district court. President Nawrocki, who happens to be a former historian from the Gdańsk region, wanted to present Poland as both hero and victim caught between two malevolent powers, Germany and Russia. During his four years as director of the museum, he gave pride of place to Polish resistance and sacrifice, and to the Poles who rescued Jews under German occupation. In all he made 17 changes, which included getting rid of a plaque that broke down the death toll by nationality—possibly because it revealed that Soviet and German losses were the highest. He also removed a film in the last room that laments humanity’s inability to learn from its mistakes.
When Rafał Wnuk, one of the museum’s original creators, took over once the government changed in April 2024, he began rolling back the changes, which he saw as politically motivated. Our guide, Jan Daniluk, told us the staff are already bracing themselves for Groundhog Day in case PiS is returned to power in parliamentary elections next year and Nawrocki’s edits are reinstated. At the same time, demands for German compensation for the devastation caused by the Nazis are growing ever more insistent. Back in 2022, the PiS government commissioned a report asking for €1.5 trillion in compensation. It is such a popular campaign that even many of Tusk’s center-right MPs support it.
Against this backdrop, a small display in Gdańsk’s Town Hall proved incendiary. Tucked away in a corner of the 15th century building, the “Our Boys” exhibition sparked street protests but also had long queues of visitors when it opened last year. In the first room are rows of sepia portraits of young Polish soldiers. Most are smiling—all of them are wearing Wehrmacht uniforms.
The fact that up to 450,000 Poles were conscripted by the Nazis is rarely mentioned. It doesn’t fit with the dominant national narrative about heroic resistance, culminating in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. The widespread secrecy was not just prompted by shame but self-preservation. After the Red Army took control of Poland in 1945, evidence of service in the Wehrmacht could mean a death sentence.
Apart from one photograph of an execution, there is little on display here about Poles being complicit in Nazi war crimes or about their suffering on the front lines. While some conscripts were sent to fight in Stalingrad, others ended up in German occupied countries in southern Europe where they praised the food and landscapes in letters home. The exhibition also reminds visitors that Josef Tusk, grandfather of today’s prime minister, briefly served in the German forces. Although he later joined the Polish resistance against Hitler, the revelation wrecked his grandson’s chance of becoming president two decades ago in the 2005 presidential elections.
Under Pressure
With the presidency and premiership held by rival parties, Poland is split down the middle and embroiled in culture wars. Museums are often caught in the crosshairs. Just like the recent clash in the United States between the Trump White House and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, they are put under pressure towhitewash and simplify a complex past.
One floor above the “Our Boys” exhibition, the desk and chair of Gdańsk’s former mayor stand behind a glass screen. It is a shrine to Paweł Adamowicz who was stabbed to death at a charity event in 2019. A staunch defender of minority rights, the mayor was popular but also had his critics. Many felt the murder wasn’t just the random act of a knifeman with a history of mental illness. They saw it as the result of rampant online hate and the ever-present danger of divisive politics.
Lucy Ash is IPQ’s On the Ground columnist. She is an award-winning presenter of radio and television documentaries and author of the book The Baton and the Cross about the Russian Orthodox Church.
