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A few years ago, I landed for the first time at Gdansk's Lech Walesa Airport and was struck by the almost comical juxtaposition of the striking new smoked-glass terminal building to the Soviet-era hangar next door that it had just replaced. This was the new Poland, I thought, modern and in-your-face, finally enjoying its moment in the sun without Russia or Germany getting in the way.

My great-great-grandfather left a region of Poland near Gdansk 150 years ago this year and, on my first trip to his homeland, I wondered whatever could have compelled him to take up the offer of a plot of rocky terrain in Ontario that was good for growing absolutely nothing. Was it the creeping "Germanization" of his life under his Prussian overlords? Was it religious persecution? Either way, hopping the boat to Canada, didn't he feel he was rolling the dice?

The descendants of Paul Jakubowski, of which I am gratefully one, came out the winners. I'm not sure the 20th century belonged to Canada, as Wilfrid Laurier boldly predicted, but I do know that it did not belong to Poland. Invaded from the west by Germany and the from east by the Soviet Union, six million Poles died in the Second World War, including three million Jews. Adding insult to injury, Poland was then handed on a platter to Joseph Stalin, ensuring decades of more misery for its people.

It is partly this feeling of being repeatedly wronged by history that has led so many Poles to seek to impose their own version of it. They have long been offended by Western references to "Polish death camps" – a slip once even made by former U.S. president Barack Obama – while the thousands of Poles who rescued Jews or joined the Polish resistance are footnotes to history.

The law signed this week by Polish President Andrzej Duda that bans the phrase "Polish death camps" and makes it a crime to speak of the "Polish nation" as being "responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich" is the manifestation of a country coming awkwardly to terms with its past. As ironic as it seems, it is not that uncommon for those who have suffered to earn their freedom to succumb to the urge to place limits on it. This is what is happening under Poland's Law and Justice Party government, which has stacked the country's courts and censored its media, proving it has learned nothing from history.

As much as it pains Poles to look to Germany, the latter should be their model for facing up to their past and present. The Germans use the word Vergangenheitsbewältigung to designate public debate surrounding their ugly history. This willingness to admit the sins of the past is the secret to avoiding their repetition. Memorials to the Holocaust are everywhere. These include the stolpersteine – brass plaques planted in the sidewalks in front of buildings where Holocaust victims once lived – that serve to humanize the tragedy for Germans and foreign tourists alike.

On this continent, the debate about what to do about memorials to military generals who fought to preserve slavery or plotted to wipe out Indigenous people requires the same degree of honesty and humanity. As Harvard University historian Annette Gordon-Reed notes, what makes the preservation of Confederate symbols so problematic even for historians who normally like to preserve everything, is that the ideology that underlies them is still a force in the modern United States, where white supremacy lives on. "In a reversal of the maxim that history is written by the victors, the losing side in the Civil War got to tell the story of their slave society in ways favourable to them," she writes in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. Taking down Confederate statues and flags is necessary to fully recognize blacks as equal citizens.

In Canada, the pain caused to Indigenous people by statues of controversial historical figures is a good reason to consider their removal.

But it cannot be the only consideration if we're to have an honest discussion about how Canada came to be an independent country.

Statues of General Edward Cornwallis, an 18th century general who was charged with keeping Nova Scotia in British hands, do not represent an ideology of white supremacy despite his revolting 1749 order placing a bounty on Mi'kmaq scalps. He rescinded the order in 1752. We should remember him, warts and all, while making it clear his views about Indigenous people are part of a past we can only overcome with constant reminders of it.

Crews removed the statue of Halifax's controversial military founder Edward Cornwallis from a downtown park Wednesday. Mi’kmaq activist Rebecca Moore says she’s waited a long time for the figure to come down.

The Canadian Press

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