Joanna Wawrzyniak: Veterans, Victims, and Memory. The Politics of the Second World War in Communist Poland. Translated by Simon Lewis. Frankfurt a.M. [usw.]: Peter Lang, 2015. 259 S., 18 Abb., 6 Tab., 1 Kte. = Studies in Contemporary History, 4. ISBN: 978-3-631-64049-4

Joanna Wawrzyniak: Veterans, Victims, and Memory. The Politics of the Second World War in Communist Poland. Translated by Simon Lewis. Frankfurt a.M. [usw.]: Peter Lang, 2015. 259 S., 18 Abb., 6 Tab., 1 Kte. = Studies in Contemporary History, 4. ISBN: 978-3-631-64049-4.

Joanna Wawrzyniak’s book Veterans, Victims, and Memory is a supplemented and updated translation of her 2009 study ZBoWiD I pamięc drugiej wojny światowej. The book examines the emergence and the development of the Polish Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy (ZBoWiD), the umbrella organisation of war veterans and victims in Communist Poland, between 1945 and 1970.

Wawrzyniak identifies four historical periods during which the Union underwent significant changes, both in terms of its membership and its politics of memory. Wawrzyniak begins with a graphic description of the chaotic immediate post-war period, with the ongoing presence of death, destruction and trauma in Polish everyday life. This period saw a great variety of war victim and veteran organisations emerge and compete for recognition, social benefits and the dissemination of their particular interpretations of the war-time experience. A second period between 1949 and 1956 was distinguished by the forced merger of these associations, which were to form ZBoWiD, a single mass organisation, in 1949. The ruling Communists perceived the Union as a top-down Soviet-style mass organisation whose main task was the spread of the “myth of the victory over fascism”, according to which the brotherly sacrifices Soviet soldiers and Polish combatants made during the war paved the way for the victory over Nazi Germany. This interpretation also emphasised the suffering and resistance of Communists in the camps, but it left little room for an appreciative recognition of the role of the Home Army.

The suppression of alternative views and the inability of ZBoWiD to improve the social protection of war victims and veterans, however, resulted in dwindling membership until de-Stalinisation turned the tide. In the ensuing third period, between 1956 and 1959, the Union’s leadership faced a flurry of dissonant voices and struggled to keep renewed grass-root activities at bay. During the thaw it became all too obvious that the “brotherhood myth” so far disseminated by ZBoWiD was deeply at odds with the living memory in Polish society. Many of the diverse groups forced under the roof of ZBoWiD formulated diverging memories of the war and resistance. Wawrzyniak convincingly demonstrates how the pressure exerted bottom-up forced the Union’s leadership to react and renew itself. Consequently, the founding myth was significantly modified. Aiming to bring together a deeply divided Polish society, it downplayed the Soviet role and emphasised the “unity” of the resistance movement and of innocent victims during the war.

This laid the basis for the next stage identified by Wawrzyniak, the “normalization” period of 1960s. During the 1960s, ZBoWiD turned into a social lobbying organisation for veterans and victims. This was facilitated by Poland’s slow but steady economic recovery on the one hand, and by the integration of ZBoWiD’s functionaries into the ranks of the party (and its economy of favours) on the other. Remarkably, the 1960s witnessed also the dominance of an outright nationalist memory regime which, borrowing from 19th century romantic nationalism, emphasised Polish war-time suffering and heroism at the expense of all other groups, including the Jews. This development is closely related to Miecyslaw Moczar’s directorship of the Union (1964–1972), yet Wawrzyniak’s detailed analysis shows that already under his predecessor, General Janusz Zaryck, ZBoWiD saw a massive influx of former Home Army soldiers. In any case, ZBoWiD served as an important sounding board during Moczar’s notorious “anti-Zionist” campaigns of 1968, provoking Jewish mass-emigration from Poland in the late 1960s.

Pointing to the slow retreat of the war-time generation from Polish politics in the 1970s, Wawrzyniak’s in-depth analysis ends with this stage of development. Yet for the English translation, the author supplemented an informative further chapter dealing with the “long shadow” of communist memory politics in Poland across the 1989 threshold. Here she convincingly shows how core elements of the communist politics of commemoration continue to inform historical debates in contemporary Poland. Against the backdrop of the very inclusive definition of “combatants” and “prisoners” that ZBoWiD operated with, its mass membership and its role in the socialist welfare state, readers will deplore, however, that the book skips the period between 1970 and 1989. Wawrzyniak thus excludes, for example, how ZBoWiD’s positioned itself towards Germany’s new “Ostpolitik” or which stance it took during the Solidarity years in the early 1980s. By contrast, Warwrzyniak included a comprehensive comparative overview into her final chapter, placing the experience of Polish war victims and veterans in a broader European context.

In sum, Wawrzyniak’s study successfully combines a social history approach towards the institutional history of ZBoWiD and its membership with an analysis of the politics of memory pursued by its leaders and ideologist, based on a thorough reading of programmatic speeches and articles of the Union’s periodicals. One may lament, however, that Warzyniak stops short of a more detailed analysis of the personal networks of ZBoWiD’s functionaries, i. e. interpersonal links that may or may not be more obvious to Polish readers. More importantly, Wawrzyniak’s study is more detailed on the earlier periods under consideration, which is somewhat counterintuitive, given the diversification of the political context and the increasing plurality of circles and views within ZBoWid after 1956.

Apart from exceptional hiccups, the book is well translated and makes for a captivating reading. It is a fine study, which offers rich and detailed insights into Polish memory politics. It is likewise an important addition to the growing body of studies on the role of war veterans in twentieth-century Europe.

Christian Noack, Amsterdam