Poland’s World War II Ceremonies Lose Some Edge as Tensions With Russia Ebb

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/world/europe/poland-gdansk-world-war-ii-russia-putin-ukraine.html

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GDANSK, Poland — When they were announced several months ago, the ceremonies to commemorate the end of World War II here on Thursday were widely seen as a rebuke to President Vladimir V. Putin’s plan to stage a military extravaganza in Moscow to honor the 70th anniversary.

Advisers to President Bronislaw Komorowski of Poland were privately assuring journalists in late January that the events at this medieval Baltic port where the war began were designed to “give European leaders an excuse not to go to Moscow,” Roman Imielski, the managing editor of Poland’s leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, wrote at the time.

But by the time the Gdansk ceremonies opened, circumstances had changed. Fighting had subsided in eastern Ukraine with a cease-fire that was shaky but holding, Russia’s economic woes had deepened and there was a diminished appetite in Europe — and Washington — to give Mr. Putin a high-profile poke in the eye.

“We need to distance ourselves from this idea of a rivalry because it doesn’t serve politics,” said Grzegorz Schetyna, the minister of foreign affairs. “We can’t compete about history.”

The result in Gdansk on Thursday was a much lower-key event than had been anticipated several months ago, when fighting was surging in Ukraine and worries about Mr. Putin’s intentions were at fever pitch in Poland and other front-line states.

President Obama did not come to Gdansk. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain is in the thick of his re-election campaign. François Hollande, the French president, planned his own commemoration at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. And Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany skipped Gdansk and will arrive in Moscow for talks with Mr. Putin, but not until the day after his mega-event on Saturday.

Still, Poles announced the participation of the presidents of Lithuania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Romania and Ukraine, as well as Slovakia’s prime minister and the head of the European Council, Donald Tusk, the former Polish prime minister.

And there were still some raw feelings toward Mr. Putin among those who showed up.

“We cannot accept the inciting of a new war and celebrate the conquest of Ukrainian territories, and watch as the Russian Army flexes its muscles during a parade in Moscow,” Lithuania’s president, Dalia Grybauskaite, said in an interview with the Polish press agency. “This nascent Russian aggression and post-Soviet imperialism is the biggest threat to today’s Europe.”

Almost all European Union heads of state had declined to attend Mr. Putin’s event in protest of Russia’s support of the separatists in eastern Ukraine. Only the top leaders of Greece, Cyprus and the Czech Republic were planning to go — the Czech president, Milos Zeman, under pressure from his Parliament, had to promise that he would skip the huge military parade that is to be the centerpiece of the Moscow event.

Here, most of the day’s events were at the European Solidarity Center, a museum and conference center dedicated to the trade union that spearheaded the end of communism in Poland, but the official commemoration ceremony was to be held at the tip of the Westerplatte peninsula on Gdansk’s northern edge.

The peninsula, a sickle of land jutting into the Baltic Sea, was the site of the first fighting between Polish and German forces on Sept. 1, 1939, widely regarded as the start of World War II.

Just before 5 a.m. that day, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had anchored off the coast of what was then known as the free city of Danzig, opened fire on the Polish military transit depot on the peninsula. The depot’s 182 soldiers and 27 reservists managed to hold out for seven days in what is known as the Battle of Westerplatte and have been celebrated ever since as an example of Polish resistance.

A tall stone monument anchors the site and will provide a backdrop for the ceremonies, which have been scheduled for late Thursday night so they will not end until the early minutes of Friday, the actual anniversary of the end of the war.

It will also give those leaders who wish to attend both events enough time to get to Moscow for Saturday’s ceremonies. Since the war did not officially end in 1945 until after midnight in Moscow, it is celebrated there on May 9.

At the Solidarity Center, as a slow dusk fell over the Baltic, a line of European presidents sat in the front row of the main auditorium, nodding thoughtfully as a panel of academics dissected the legacy of the war.

Yuri Afanasyev, a Russian historian, talked about a new kind of Stalinism he saw growing in Mr. Putin’s Russia, which he described as “criminal from the bottom up.” Andrzej Paczkowski, a Polish historian, denounced a persistent myth of Poland as “the messiah of nations, it dies for everyone.” Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian, made a case for capturing the memories of people caught in conflicts before they disappear.

“History is too complicated,” said the British historian Norman Davies. “The past is too big, there is too much of it. Mythology is what is created because people prefer a simple, straightforward explanation of what happened to this awful, complicated mess.”