Before Poland’s illiberal Law and Justice party came to power in 2015, the country had been deep in a reckoning over its role in the Holocaust. In 2000, the historian Jan Gross published an explosive book, “Neighbors,” about a 1941 massacre in the Nazi-occupied Polish town of Jedwabne, where Poles enthusiastically tortured and murdered up to 1,600 Jews. The book punctured a national myth in which Poles were only either heroes or victims in World War II.
After “Neighbors” came out, Poland’s president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, went to Jedwabne for a ceremony broadcast on Polish television. “For this crime, we should beg the souls of the dead and their families for forgiveness,” he said.
The notion of Polish historical guilt made many conservative Poles furious. Law and Justice capitalized on their anger, running against what its leader called the “pedagogy of shame.” After the party’s 2015 victory, one of its first targets was the Museum of the Second World War, then being built in Gdansk.
The museum was supposed to explore the war’s global context and to emphasize the toll it took on civilians. Among its collection were keys to the homes of Jews murdered in Jedwabne. Before it ever opened, Law and Justice wanted to shut it down for being insufficiently patriotic.
Today in America, this history has an eerie familiarity. Five years ago, many institutions in the United States tried, with varying degrees of seriousness and skill, to come to terms with our country’s legacy of racism. A backlash to this reckoning helped propel Donald Trump back into the White House, where he has taken a whole-of-government approach to wiping out the idea that America has anything to apologize for. As part of this campaign, the administration seeks to force our national museums to conform to its triumphalist version of history.
In March, Trump signed an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” criticizing versions of history that foster “a sense of national shame.” Museums and monuments, it said, should celebrate America’s “extraordinary heritage” and inculcate national pride. This week, the administration announced that it was reviewing displays at eight national museums — including the Museum of American History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian American Art Museum — and giving them 120 days to bring their content in line with Trump’s vision.
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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.