The memoirs of General Anders, published in 1949, carried the title Bez ostatniego rozdziału (Without the Final Chapter). The Second World War might have finished, but the battle for the history of the war had begun. He and other leading diplomats and politicians believed that the war had ended before Poland had regained her freedom. Other titles also reflected this. Jan Ciechanowski, the wartime Polish ambassador in Washington, called his memoirs Defeat in Victory. Stanisław Mikołajczyk went even further, entitling his The Rape of Poland. The belief that the western allies had betrayed Polish interests to the Soviet Union was shared by non-Polish politicians. Arthur Bliss Lane, the first post-war American ambassador to Poland, wrote of his two years in Poland under the title I Saw Freedom Betrayed. All these memoirs have one thing in common: a belief that there was unfinished business at the end of the Second World War.
The battle for the history of the Second World War was fought throughout the Cold War and followed its fortunes. What was said about the Second World War often depended on where it was said and the stage that the Cold War had reached. Already in 1949, the English translation of Anders’s memoirs carried the less controversial title of An Army in Exile, although the contents, including much about wartime politics and diplomacy as well as the military matters that directly concerned him, were unchanged.
The Cold War formed the backdrop to the reappraisal of an issue that caused continued offence to the Polish community: the correct attribution of responsibility for the murder of the Polish officers whose graves had been found by the Germans at Katyń in 1943. The Polish-American community had been greatly angered by what they considered to be the pro-Soviet policies of the Roosevelt administration and the wartime State Department. The Truman administration after the war had a very different approach as demonstrated by the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, American support for the Berlin Airlift in 1948 and the formation of NATO in 1949. As the Cold War was getting under way, it was now possible to enquire into the actions of the Soviet Union without being seen to denigrate a wartime ally. Consequently, in April 1949, the president of the Polish-American Congress (PAC), Charles Rozmarek, asked the American ambassador to the United Nations, Warren Austin, to ‘demand an immediate and impartial investigation of one of the world’s most heinous crimes’. Austin refused, but the PAC continued to press for an inquiry. In July 1949 a journalist, Julius Epstein, had a series of articles on Katyń published by the New York Herald Tribune which included a request for the establishment of an American Committee of Investigation of the Katyń Murders. His articles aroused the interest and support of a Democrat congressman from Indiana, Ray Madden, whose proposal for an investigation by the International Red Cross won no congressional support. Epstein then approached Bliss Lane with the suggestion of forming a private committee to press for an investigation, to which he responded warmly, and a committee was established under his presidency. Committee members included the former director of the Office of Strategic Services, William Donovan, and Allan Dulles. The committee had no impact until the revelation that American POWs in Korea had been shot in the base of the back of the skull, which eerily resembled the Katyń murders. Thus, when Madden introduced a motion on 18 September 1951 for an investigation to be carried out into Katyń by a committee of seven members of the House of Representatives, it was passed unanimously.1
The Madden Committee began its hearings on 4 February 1952. Its aim was to ‘record evidence, data and facts that will eventually and officially establish the guilt of the nation that perpetrated the greatest crime of genocide in all recorded history’, and also to investigate whether the massacre had been reported fairly in the free world since April 1943.2 The Madden Committee sent letters of invitation to the governments of the Soviet Union, Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany and to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. The London Poles and the Germans responded favourably. The Soviet embassy in Washington responded on 29 February 1952 that it was insulted by the request and reminded the committee that the Soviet Union had thoroughly investigated the matter in 1944 and that the Burdenko Commission had reported that the Germans were undeniably responsible. The Soviets also launched a publicity campaign designed to restate its arguments on German responsibility.3 The reaction to the Madden Committee in the corridors of Whitehall was distinctly muted, for, although few believed that the Germans were responsible, the Foreign Office had no desire to see its wartime attempts to suppress the evidence of Soviet culpability laid bare. Some British politicians, however, viewed the matter differently. One hundred MPs of all political persuasions signed a motion by Sir Douglas Savory, Ulster Unionist MP for South Antrim, calling for the government to support the Madden Committee’s plan to submit its report to the United Nations and for the United Nations to bring it before the International Court of Justice.4
The Madden Committee presented its interim report on 2 July 1952, which concluded unanimously that the NKVD had carried out the massacre, not later than the spring of 1940. The committee’s final report, on 22 December 1952, concluded that the American Government had deliberately concealed and withheld evidence that pointed to Soviet guilt, and it was submitted to the United Nations on 10 February 1953. No further action was taken, however, because the United States was then engaged in delicate peace negotiations with North Korea and Soviet support was needed for them. Furthermore, the Madden Committee had become unpopular for besmirching the reputation of the Roosevelt government as a war-winning administration, over what many Americans saw as a minor issue of no interest to the American people.5
In 1962 Janusz Zawodny published Death in the Forest, a survey of the Katyń murders, which produced little reaction in Britain and the United States. But a reprint in 1971 and the publication of Katyn: A Crime Without Parallel by Louis FitzGibbon led to considerable interest in Britain. There was a lengthy correspondence on the issue in The Times and the Daily Telegraph, and on 19 April 1971 the BBC showed a film about Katyń, The Issue to Be Avoided. The Conservative MP for Abingdon, Airey Neave, put down a motion in the House of Commons calling for a United Nations investigation into Katyń which was signed by 60 MPs.
In January 1972, a Katyń Memorial Fund was established in London and 165 MPs signed a motion welcoming it. Its organisers published Owen O’Malley’s 1943 memorandum to Eden, quoted in Chapter 11, which indicated Soviet guilt. Airey Neave wrote to the foreign secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, on 28 February 1972, asking if a Katyń Memorial could be constructed in one of London’s Royal Parks, but the Foreign Office objected vociferously to the idea of any monument anywhere at all, as it was convinced that such a monument would poison relations with the Soviet Union. Certainly, the Soviets were greatly angered by the proposal, mounting a huge publicity campaign and making an official protest to the British Government. Permission was refused to site the monument in Thurloe Place on land controlled jointly by the Victoria and Albert Museum and by the Department of Education. The next proposal, to place it in the disused churchyard of St Luke’s Church in Chelsea, was initially accepted by Kensington and Chelsea Council, but government pressure on the Church authorities and opposition from local residents led to a court case in 1974 which ended the project at St Luke’s. Kensington and Chelsea Council then offered a site in the Kensington Church Cemetery in Gunnersbury Park on the outskirts of London, and although the Soviet embassy sent bullying letters to the council, on 18 September 1974 the Katyń memorial, a 21-foot high obelisk with a carved inscription ‘1940’, was unveiled by Maria Chełmecka, a widow of one of the murdered officers. The unveiling was attended by representatives of the British Legion and by 20 MPs. The War Office forbade officers to attend in uniform but a few retired officers did so. Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party, then in opposition, sent a representative, and a Labour peer, Emmanuel Shinwell, also broke the official government line by attending. The Foreign Office did not sent a representative on the grounds that ‘it has never been proved to Her Majesty’s Government’s satisfaction who was responsible’.6 In 1980, however, after a change of government, Barney Hayhoe, under secretary of state at the Ministry of Defence, attended the memorial service on the fortieth anniversary of the Katyń massacre.7
Within Poland a veil was drawn over the issue of Katyń. The Polish Government toed the Soviet line on German culpability and joined the Soviets in protesting against the Madden Committee and the construction of the Katyń memorial in London. There is also considerable evidence to suggest that widows and children of the officers murdered at Katyń suffered from discrimination regarding their jobs, promotions and housing. But as the child of one victim, Stanisława Dec, noted:
The worst was the silence, the prohibition against speaking openly of their death, of a dignified burial, for half a century. It was forbidden even to visit the places of execution. My youngest sister, Zosia, always envied those friends of hers whose parents had died in Auschwitz. They at least could go to the grave sites, and didn’t have to hide the truth.8
The rise of Solidarność led a number of Poles to question the official version of events publicly. On the 1981 anniversary of the discovery of the graves, over 2,000 people gathered in the Powązki cemetery in Warsaw for an unofficial ceremony, and their brave action led to a protest in Pravda.9 The loosening of the communist bloc under the Soviet presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev led to revelations on Katyń, and at an official ceremony at the Kremlin on 13 April 1990 he presented the last communist president of Poland, Wojciech Jaruzelski, with two thick files of NKVD documents on the massacre along with lists of the victims. The Poles reacted strongly to this evidence, demanding an official Soviet apology, a trial of those who committed the murders and of those responsible for the cover-up, and compensation for the families of the victims. The Soviets responded with hostility and the Katyń issue continued to poison Polish-Soviet relations.10
The official Soviet line was that the massacre had been carried out by the NKVD on Beria’s orders, but this was breached by the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, when he handed the first post-war non-communist Polish president, Lech Wałęsa, two documents: Beria’s order of 5 March 1940 and an extract from minutes of the Politburo meeting of that day when Beria’s proposal was discussed and approved, bearing the clear signature of Stalin.11 In 2002 a chapel was dedicated in the Military Cathedral in Warsaw that bears the names of the known victims of Katyń and other massacres in the Soviet Union carried out at the same time. In 2007 the film Katyń was produced by Andrzej Wajda to critical acclaim: in 2010 it was shown in Russia for the first time. In 2010 the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, invited Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, to join him at Katyń to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the massacre as a gesture of reconciliation between Russia and Poland; both men attended, Putin being the first Russian leader to do so. Three days later, on 10 April 2010, the Polish president, Lech Kaczyński, and his entourage were killed in a plane crash on their way to a Polish ceremony at Katyń.
In the years immediately after the war as the communist government of Poland sought to establish its rule over the country, AK members were hunted down and, when caught, were tried, imprisoned and, in some cases, executed. Others were apprehended by the NKVD, which was still active in Poland, and despatched to the Gulag. Most of the leaders of the AK, including Bór-Komorowski, had been liberated from German captivity by the forces of the western allies and few of them returned to Poland, preferring exile in the west.
The fate of the AK affected the commemoration of the cataclysmic event – the Warsaw Uprising. While Stalinisation was in full swing, tending the graves of AK soldiers could lead to arrest. No scholar in Poland could write an account of the uprising, and when Adam Borkiewicz attempted to do so, he had all his documents seized by the Security Police and his wife was imprisoned for collating his material. The communist line was that the AK was to be disparaged. Indeed, on the second anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, of which the communists approved, Colonel Mieczysław Dąbrowski of the Polish Army stated: ‘The [Nazi] air force, the SS, German tanks, Polish hooligans, Polish reactionaries, and, in fact, the Home Army: they all fought against the [Jewish] insurgents.’ During this period the only wartime resistance forces acknowledged by and lauded by the authorities were the AL and the Jewish resistance.
After 1956 Poland underwent a period of rapid and thorough de-Stalinisation, and the government’s attitude towards the Warsaw Uprising began to change. The primacy of resistance was still given to the AL, despite the fact that only 400 members took part in the uprising. Following an amnesty in 1956, about 25,000 AK members were released from prison, and the Soviet Union was approached to release its AK prisoners from the Gulag. The government also assured AK fighters in exile that they would have full rights of citizenship should they choose to return to Poland. Polish historiography of the uprising now focused on the AK rank and file, while the officers were still portrayed as reactionaries, if not as the fascists they were once called. Borkiewicz’s study of the Warsaw Uprising was finally published in 1957. In 1956 Kanal, a film by Andrzej Wajda about a group of AK soldiers struggling through the sewers during the uprising, was released. The twentieth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising was celebrated in Warsaw: speeches at the commemoration spoke of the ‘lunacy and political diversion’ of the AK leadership, while at the same time praising the efforts of the common AK soldier and the people of Warsaw. In the United States, the twentieth anniversary was marked by President Lyndon Johnson hosting a reception at the White House at which Bór-Komorowski was the guest of honour.
The rise of Solidarność influenced attitudes towards the uprising. It drew its own lessons and remained firmly against any attempt to overthrow the communist government by force of arms, determinedly adhering to the principle of passive resistance. Solidarność also established its historical links with the wartime Underground Government by publishing a news-sheet with the same title, Biuletyn Informacyjny, as that published under the German occupation. The Polish Government attempted to reassert its position as the guardian of the memory of the Warsaw Uprising by agreeing, at the fortieth anniversary celebrations in 1984, to erect a large memorial to the Warsaw insurgents, which was officially unveiled in 1989 by President Jaruzelski, who in 1944 had been a young officer in Berling’s army watching Warsaw going up in flames from the other side of the Vistula. The 1980s also saw the construction of the Little Insurgent Monument in Warsaw, depicting a boy soldier weighed down by an adult-sized helmet and clutching a Sten gun.
When the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising was celebrated in 1994, Poland was once again free. Invitations were extended to all the western allies whose pilots had flown support missions during the uprising, and to the presidents of Germany and Russia. The Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, declined, but the German president, Roman Herzog, attended and asked ‘forgiveness for what has been done to you by Germans’. In 2004 the Warsaw Uprising Museum was opened in Warsaw on 31 July, and the commemoration reception the following day, the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the uprising, was attended by the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder; the American secretary of state, Colin Powell; and the British deputy prime minister, John Prescott. Russia again failed to send a representative.12
At the end of the war Warsaw lay in ruins. The 840-acre area that had formed the ghetto had been totally destroyed by the Germans after the ghetto uprising. The 1944 Warsaw Uprising had reduced most of the Old Town (Stare Miasto) to rubble, and everywhere else there were damaged buildings from the 1939 campaign and the uprising, as well as the debris from the deliberate dynamiting of important buildings by the Germans after the collapse of the uprising. In January 1945, the Lublin Committee decided that Warsaw would be restored as the capital of Poland and so a vast rebuilding programme was begun, overseen by the Warsaw Restoration Bureau (Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy, BOS), under the leadership of the architect and engineer Roman Piotrowski.
BOS had two priorities: to restore historical Warsaw and to provide urgently needed housing for Warsaw’s population. Photographs and drawings were collected to recreate the Old Town as a facsimile of the pre-war district, work which was overseen by the Historic Architecture Department, led by Professor Jan Zachwatowicz. By September 1950, the Old Town had been rebuilt, and the department was wound up. The success of its endeavours was reflected in 1980 when the Old Town was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List. The mansions and palaces along the Royal Route, running along Krakowskie Przedmieście, Nowy Świat and Aleje Ujazdowskie, were restored to their pre-war glory and are now mainly the offices of government ministries and public bodies. Reconstruction of the New Town was begun, but then the money ran out.
The architectural development of Warsaw from 1949 to 1956 has been termed ‘social realism’. Apart from the restoration of old Warsaw, three major projects were undertaken to rebuild housing and to restore industry and to create a new socialist city: the East-West route (Trasa W-Z), the enormous Marzałkowska Housing project and the rebuilding of the industrial areas. Most of the remaining damaged buildings in Warsaw were gradually demolished and cheap, quickly constructed buildings put in their place. Housing for the workers of Warsaw was built on top of the rubble of the Warsaw ghetto. Despite the shortage of money, finance was found to build the ugly Palace of Culture, which dominates the city centre. Historical reconstruction ended with the assumption of power by Gomułka in 1956. He came from peasant stock, disliked Warsaw and despised its intelligentsia. While he was in power the reconstruction of the Łazienki Royal Palace, begun earlier, was completed but a halt was called to the reconstruction of streets in the New Town such as Ul. Długa. Instead, a massive programme of cheap housing and office buildings was begun – termed ‘pauper-modernism’. Gomułka opposed the rebuilding of the Royal Castle, burnt during the 1939 campaign and blown up by the Germans in 1944, on the grounds that it was a symbol of feudalism and of the rule of the nobility. In 1970 Gomułka was replaced by Edward Gierek, an educated man, who in 1971 demonstrated his commitment to the history of Warsaw by supporting the restoration of the Royal Castle.13
The historiography of Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War was subjected to political manipulation in communist Poland. The role of organisations such as Żegota was underplayed because of their loyalty to the Polish Government-in-Exile. Instead, there was an emphasis on Jewish resistance, especially the Warsaw ghetto uprising, a monument to which was constructed shortly after the war using Swedish stone ordered by Hitler for his victory arch in Berlin. The publication of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1958 was heavily edited to omit many favourable references to the Christian Poles who tried to help the Jews, and this distorted version was sold and translated abroad. In April 1967, a stark grey monument was unveiled at Auschwitz in front of an audience of 200,000, many of whom were former inmates, and the government made political capital out of the ceremony, calling it a grand anti-fascist meeting. In 1968 the communist attitude towards Jews changed: the Soviet Union was hostile to the state of Israel, and its victory over the Soviet-supported Arab countries in the 1967 Six Day War led to an anti-semitic campaign in the Soviet Union and in the Soviet satellite countries, including Poland. Under the new historiography, the Jews were seen as ingrates who not only refused to acknowledge the widespread assistance they had received from the Poles but also, after collaborating with the Germans, had perpetrated crimes against the Poles in the last year of the war and during the early post-war years.14
In 1987 the debate on wartime Polish-Jewish relations was reignited by the publication of an article by Jan Bloński, ‘Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto’ (‘Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto’), in the weekly Catholic magazine Tygodnik Powszechny. He argued that Polish anti-semitism before the war had been widespread, and the result had been that the majority of the Poles had stood by while the Jews were exterminated, neither betraying them nor assisting them. This spurred a furious debate in Tygodnik Powszechny. During an international conference on the history and culture of Polish Jewry held in Jerusalem in February 1988, a special session was devoted to the ethical problems of the Holocaust in Poland and covered many of the issues raised by Bloński and his supporters and detractors. These have been gathered in a volume, edited by Antony Polonsky, ‘My Brother’s Keeper?’
A new debate was sparked off in 2001 with the publication of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne by Jan Gross. The revelation that Poles had collaborated with the Germans in the murder of the Jews drew an angry reaction since it challenged ‘the slogan “Poland brought forth no Quisling”, born under German occupation, developed with celerity into an axiom of Polish national life’.15 Gross’s book has been criticised for his failure to use German material, which allegedly led him to underplay the German encouragement of the massacre, and furthermore for entirely ignoring the question of Jewish collaboration both with the Soviets and with the Germans. It was, nonetheless, a milestone in the discussion of this terrible subject.16
Poland was the graveyard of Polish and European Jewry. The Germans destroyed the extermination camps before retreating, leaving little to be seen. At Treblinka there are symbolic railway lines leading to the execution area, which is covered in hundreds of jagged memorial stones, each dedicated to a lost Jewish community. There is also a monument inscribed Nigdy Więcej (Never Again). There was even less left at Bełżec, but now there is a memorial, erected in 2004, and a museum. Sobibor is marked only by a memorial mound and a small museum. Majdanek was overrun before the Germans had finished their demolitions so there is more left: rows of wooden huts and a mausoleum above reconstructed gas chambers containing the ashes of Jews and Poles murdered there; a memorial was unveiled in 1969, the twenty-fifth anniversary of its liberation.
The commemoration of Auschwitz has been a source of controversy. Auschwitz I, the concentration camp in which Christian Poles and Soviet POWs were the most numerous inmates throughout the war, was built around the former Polish artillery barracks and a tobacco factory. This is why so many of the original buildings have survived and why the main museum facilities, with an area devoted to each nationality of the victims of the whole Auschwitz complex, are located there, with the entrance marked by the wrought-iron sign Arbeit Macht Frei. Auschwitz-Birkenau or Auschwitz II, the extermination camp, is approached along the railway lines, and contains the remains of the huts in which the inmates lived and of the gas chambers. The ashes of the victims are scattered between the huts and the entire area is regarded as a graveyard and is on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. In 1979 Pope John Paul II said Mass in front of 500,000 people in the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau, for which an 85-foot-high cross was erected (and then removed). In 1984 the Carmelite nuns opened a convent near Auschwitz I and erected the ‘Pope’s cross’, which was visible from the camp. The convent was closed in 1993 after Jewish protests, but the cross remained and Jewish protests continued, arguing that the whole of Auschwitz should be regarded as a Jewish memorial. This in turn angered Polish Catholics who argued that the cross honoured Catholic martyrs such as Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in the place of a stranger. The debate over the primacy of remembrance continues to this day at Auschwitz.
Many of the debates on Polish-Jewish relations stem from the ignorance of the importance Poland had for the Jews in the centuries when they were persecuted elsewhere in Europe and of the value of this Jewish presence among the Poles. It can only be hoped that the much-delayed opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, now due in the spring of 2013, will enhance greater understanding.
During the Second World War, members of the Polish armed forces and Polish civilians died all over the world. Many of the Poles who died during captivity or exile in the Soviet Union have no known graves, but restoration of Polish cemeteries in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan has begun, and in 2002 a memorial to the Poles who died in Uzbekistan was erected in Tashkent. For those who died after leaving the Soviet Union, their graves are tended in cemeteries from Pahlevi and Teheran in Iran, to Iraq, Palestine, India and countries in Africa. Polish servicemen lie buried in cemeteries such as Auberive and Langannerie in France, Newark in Britain, Arnhem-Oosterbeek in the Netherlands and Monte Cassino in Italy.17 There are also graves of members of the air forces of the western allies who died in Poland: Poznań Old Garrison cemetery contains the graves of British airmen shot down on supply flights to Poland and those shot after the Great Escape; Kraków Rakowiecki cemetery contains the graves of those allied fighters killed while supplying the Warsaw Uprising.
Commemoration has often been difficult. In the summer of 1946, a fund appeal was launched in Britain for a memorial to the Polish Air Force, which received the support of Air Marshals Portal and Trenchard. The Polish Air Force Memorial was erected on Western Avenue on the edge of Northolt Aerodrome, from which many Polish Battle of Britain fighter pilots had flown, on 2 November 1948.18 In 1993, a memorial in honour of the Battle of Britain unveiled on the cliffs of Dover showed the insignia of all squadrons who had taken part in the battle – except for the two Polish ones, but after a public outcry the insignia of the Kościuszko and Poznań squadrons were added.19 On 19 September 2009, in front of an invited audience of veterans and guests, including the author, the Polish War Memorial was unveiled at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.
In Poland, since the end of communism, Warsaw has seen an explosion in the number of memorials commemorating events in the Second World War. During the communist period, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Saxon Gardens, badly damaged during the war, was restored, but references to the Polish-Soviet War were omitted, and little mention was made of the battles fought by the Poles under the command of the western allies during the Second World War. In 1990 new plaques were erected reflecting Polish sacrifices from 1918 to 1945. The importance of the Warsaw Uprising in the city’s history is reflected by the sheer number of memorials and plaques to individual AK platoons scattered across the city. In 1995 a monument to those deported and murdered in the east was erected on a busy road junction, which lists all the main towns of Kresy from which the victims were taken and which are now outside Poland’s borders. After a campaign throughout the 1990s, in November 2008, stones were placed in the streets of Warsaw marking the outline of the Warsaw ghetto. Veterans too have received recognition: in 1992 those from the Polish Air Force were received with full military ceremony in Plac Piłsudskiego by Lech Wałęsa. In September 1993, the body of Sikorski was exhumed from Newark Cemetery and transferred to Poland, and reburied in the royal crypt at Wawel Castle in Kraków. Post-war events have not been forgotten either: in September 2003, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, issued a formal apology for the failure of the British Government to invite the Poles to the 1946 Victory Parade, and amends were made when the Poles led the sixtieth anniversary parade in London on 9 July 2005. Also in 2005, in a speech in Riga marking the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, President George W. Bush issued an apology for the consequences of the 1945 Yalta conference: ‘The captivities of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.’
Poland has always considered herself to be at the heart of Europe, the last bulwark of civilisation before the alien east began. The communist period was the only time when Poland was cut off from her heritage, forced to become a satellite of her powerful eastern neighbour, the Soviet Union. The end of communism in Poland has meant that the Poles can now look westwards again: hence, Polish pride at Poland’s membership of NATO since 1999 and of the European Union since 2004. This return home has taken time, but now that Poland is once again free, the final chapter of the Second World War has at last been written.