Interview with Dr. Violetta Rezler-
-Wasilewska, Director of the Central Museum of Prisoners-of-War
First of all, we would like to congratulate you on receiving the distinction. The Łambinowice facility constitutes the fifth object distinguished with the European Heritage Label. Where are you searching for this “European symbolical value” in this particular place?
Thank you very much for your congratulations. It is indeed a very important distinction for me. We are keen on the fact that the European Commission (and first the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage) have noticed and appreciated in this way the Site of National Remembrance in Łambinowice of which we take care and within the borders of which one of two seats of our museum is located. That they also noticed our work and the work of our predecessors. And we have been conducting it for 55 years, constantly studying and popularizing POWs’ life stories. We are doing it in the context of the Łambinowice memorial, but not only; the context is also a lot wider as it reaches other places in Europe in which soldiers taken into captivity were incarcerated. I find the “European symbolical value” of Łambinowice that you are referring to in representing them all. It is still a less known part of European history. The figure of a POW, wearing not only a Red Army or Italian uniform, but also Polish or French one, occupies a distant position in the narration of wartime history of subsequent states. But does not a prisoner who rose to fight with the oppressor and got into captivity basing on humanitarian law of war that international community, fortunately, managed to develop and complement after both world wars, deserve to be present in collective memory and – together with other victims – is he to warn about armed conflicts and violence?
The Site of National Remembrance in Łambinowice thus marks in particular the traumatic experience in the history of Europe with relation to POWs. The way in which they were treated in the most dramatic period, during WW2, when Wehrmacht established in Lamsdorf one of the biggest centres of isolation of POWs in Europe (at the time, as many as several hundred thousand soldiers of the anti-Hitler coalition passed through it), would reflect anti-humanistic Nazi ideology, resulting in the death of many thousands individuals, persecuted through purposeful and cynical lowering of living conditions. This is the most violent chapter in the history of POWs in Łambinowice, even though it had begun already in the 19th century from a Prussian POW camp for several thousand French soldiers and would last throughout WW1, in a German camp complex already for several dozen thousand POWs from a few armies of the entente. The striking aspect of this history consists in the scale growing with time and, one could even say, a certain sequential character, marked by increasingly distinct breaking of basic human rights.
If we complement this image with camps for migrating civilians, i.e. a German (1921-1924) and Polish one (1945-1946), we will realize that the Łambinowice memorial also witnessed dramatic events being the result of international politics and population movements after both world wars, also characteristic for Europe. The process of commemorating the victims of the repressive camp from the years 1945-1946 together with public discourse around it, particularly heated in the last decade of the 20th century, constitute another example of European history. This is an attempt to reconcile and build the narration that would describe human experience of totalitarian regimes in a way which will be as multi-sided and empathic as possible and thus will enable European integration at a social level.
Through juxtaposing all these arguments we will understand that the place was largely marked by the results of progressing militarization of Europe in the 19th and 20th century – the wars, which were accompanied by increasing undermining of humanistic (and humanitarian) values. Powerful, anti-war message of the Site of National Remembrance in Łambinowice makes it a symbol of civilizational offenses and a warning sign against the effects of one person’s contempt towards the other.