Given my experiences in communicating with the French locals, I braced myself for the worst as we headed eastward to Krakow. While comprehending French was indeed difficult, French is a Romance language that has many Latin cognates and occasionally words that are similar to English. Conversely, the Slavic tongue of the Poles is completely esoteric to me. Touching down on the runway, I knew exactly one word of Polish; at least in French I knew how to say “I don’t speak French.” However, strangely enough, Poland turned out to be far more similar to the United States than France and, if it were not for my lack of Polish language skills, would have given the UK a run for its money in the area of similarity. Most of the Poles that I interacted with were very friendly and spoke decent English, two qualities that I rarely found combined in the French people that I met. Likewise, Krakow is dotted with McDonald’s and KFC’s, and possesses a very posh, American-style shopping mall. Indeed, the combination of plentiful commercial opportunities and the weakness of the zloty to the dollar greatly contributed to my enjoyment of the location.
Other than the incomprehensible language and ready availability of affordable food and souvenirs, the Polish portrayal of history at the Schindler Museum and at Auschwitz-Birkenau was the more prominent difference between Poland and our previous locations. Unlike Britain and France, the Polish museums did not seem overly preoccupied with establishing a unifying, triumphant, or self-justifying national wartime narrative. Instead, the Polish exhibits aimed to provide a comprehensive, detailed, and largely honest overview of peoples’ wartime experiences, analyzing both general societal issues as well as the tribulations of specific groups. The Schindler Museum, despite its specific name, imparts upon the visitor an extremely immersive and engaging portrait of life in prewar and wartime Krakow for both Gentiles and Jews, utilizing an abundance of physical and anecdotal evidence to explicate the realities of the German occupation. While the museum’s notably scanty coverage of Polish collaboration could smack of a nationalistic bias, the conclusion of the exhibit with the brutal Soviet occupation and prominent recognition of moral ambiguity in wartime bolsters the conception of the museum as a display of diverse wartime tribulations rather than an exhibition with a pointed nationalistic agenda. Auschwitz-Birkenau similarly provides abundant and blunt depictions of Nazi brutality, albeit in a far more compelling and emotionally-distressing manner. By highlighting the many groups persecuted by the Nazis while not diminishing the great significance of the Jewish Holocaust, Auschwitz seems to impart to the visitor plain facts without a great amount of spin.
While Poland, like many ex-Eastern Bloc countries, has witnessed a distinct uptick in nationalist sentiment in the last two decades, the stark and pervasive horrors conveyed by the museums that we visited conveyed to me not that the Poles lack a national view of World War II, but rather that the Polish conception of the war is far more sober than that of Britain or France. Given the immense human losses suffered by Poland during the war and the following 40 years of Communist repression, the Poles seem to believe that they have little to celebrate or extract from the war other than its horrible realities.