How Trump Fed Polish Nationalists' Selective Memory

When German chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees in front of the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during his 1970 visit to the Polish capital, Władysław Gomułka, the first secretary of Poland’s Communist Party, is said to have hissed, “Wrong monument!” In Gomułka’s view, if Brandt had to kneel, he should have done so at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, commemorating Polish servicemen who died in World War II. After all, Brandt had come here to put an end to German-Polish border disputes—a bitter echo of World War II—once and for all.