How does one even begin to capture a global conflict that lasted six years and killed 75 million people in one museum? A war that ebbed and flowed across Europe, North Africa, East Asia, fought across vast fronts, at sea and in the air; a war that began with cavalry charges and ended with the atomic bomb – portrayed in just 18 halls?
Located in the place where WW2 began (the shelling of the Westerplatte garrison by the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, the fight for the Polish Post Office in Danzig), it is obvious that the museum will lean towards a Poland-centric narration. But its overall focus is on human – civilian – suffering rather than the movement of armies across maps, the terror endured by innocent human beings touched by the war. The board of academics that designed the museum included Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands) and Norman Davis (God's Playground), two historians who are steeped in the tragedies that have shaped Poland's development, so not a place for petty nationalisms.
Below: the exterior of the museum. Looks small, but bear in mind that the halls containing the actual exhibits are at Level -3.
The museum's first and penultimate halls depict a typical Polish street as it would have appeared on the eve of the war...
In between, the occupation, the Holocaust, Barbarossa, D-Day, and for Poland and Central and Eastern Europe, the replacement of one murderous totalitarian occupier by another. The Pacific War is also covered, though with a focus on the inhumanity of the Japanese occupation of China and other countries in the Far East. Genocide, ethnic cleansing and evil unleashed by war.
The display-case exhibits tend to be rusty bits of broken military hardware dredged out of muddy bogs rather than the pristine weapons more usually seen in war museums; this one, in keeping with the current trends, functions by unfolding an overarching narrative from one room into the next with large photos and multimedia displays augmenting the artefacts.
Explaining how the war started, the exhibition points to the role of totalitarianism, highlighting the similarities in propaganda methods used by Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese military leaders to ready their peoples for war.
The centre of the hall showing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki draws the visitor's attention to a small cabinet with shards of tableware melted by the blast. Literally a handful of small objects in the centre of a white room with shimmering glass walls. Not much to look at, but haunting when you consider what you are looking at.
The museum is proving a massive attraction to foreign visitors to Gdańsk, of whom there is a multitude, from all over the world. It is heartening that the story of a war which didn't end happily on VE-Day, but with the subjugation of Poland and its neighbours to the Soviet Union, is told to a global audience.
Walking through the halls, I was reminded of my childhood visits to London's Imperial War Museum; the focus back then wasn't on presenting a coherent a narration, but on displaying room after room of tanks, guns, model ships, medals, regimental colours, paintings and uniforms. Stuff rather than story. Modern Polish museums are quite different, and they are world-class. See my posts on the Schindler's Factory museum in Kraków, the Warsaw Uprising museum, and Gdynia's Migration Museum.
Definitely worth visiting, definitely in the top league of international-scale Polish museums.
A word about audio guides. My take: they can be useful if you're not too well acquainted with a given museum's subject matter; I can also appreciate their role in visitor management, subtly pacing crowd flow from hall to hall. If, like me, you listen to many hours of podcast each week about WW2 history, you probably won't need an audio guide (which costs 12 złotys to hire here, but is free with the ticket at the Solidarity Museum, about which more in the next post).
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