This multimedia collaboration between Coda Story and Magnum Photos looks at battles over history, digging into the cultural wars playing out in different parts of Europe. It reveals that the fights are never really about history. They’re always about the present.
The series begins in a forgotten corner of the United Kingdom: Alderney in the Channel Islands, occupied by Germany in World War Two. The island is still disfigured by concrete bunkers, firing ranges, fortifications and the remains of Nazi labour camps — relics of the darkest chapter of the island’s history.
What precisely happened on Alderney? How many died there? How should they be remembered? These are subjects of fierce contention. Some accuse the British government of “washing its hands” of Nazi atrocities on home soil, of refusing to reconcile with the horrors of its past.
Many people who live on Alderney say that after years of not talking about the occupation, they are ready to know the truth. And there are vastly different opinions on how many died toiling on the island — estimates range from 337 to 70,000.
A question has always hung in the air: why did the British government let evidence of German war crimes on its soil — the concentration camps and those who suffered in them — be lost?
There's a piece of the Holocaust largely, perhaps intentionally, forgotten to history—the existence of two Nazi concentration camps on an island in the U.K. Read our investigation, from @isocockerell: https://t.co/40QkDzpDoR.
— Coda Story (@CodaStory) August 29, 2022
In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, failure to confront the past is starting to bubble over. A peace deal that ended the Troubles didn’t set up a way to grapple with the violence. The past has festered.
The British government introduced a bill to “draw a line under the Troubles”, as then Prime Minister Boris Johnson put it. It includes qualified immunity for crimes committed during the conflict. But for many survivors, it will close the door on justice, as Caitlin Thompson reports.
In Lithuania, a country of fewer than three million people, more than 28,000 men owe their names to a 15th-century duke. Now its medieval history is sparking a fire with neighbouring Belarus.
In Poland, too, efforts to uncover a deeply buried past are sparking controversy and a struggle between the government intent on selling a favourable story about how Poles treated Jews and people trying to tell a more accurate tale.
The National Institute of Remembrance, IPN in Polish, is a major authority in shaping the official history of Polish communism. The institution is intent on telling a specific story — one of Polish Catholics helping their Jewish neighbours.
Jewish victims of the Holocaust are commemorated as a backdrop for a sweeping story of Catholic Polish heroism and resistance. Little to no space is allowed for one of the cruellest truths of 20th-century authoritarianism.
In June 2023, Poland’s ministry of memory spins the Holocaust was runner-up in the Distinguished Reporting Award category of the European Press Prize.
For decades, Polish-Jewish history was kept in what Holocaust scholars call “the communist freezer.” Read the deep dive from @katia_patin into Poland’s ministry of memory. https://t.co/LdhEgTXmDZ https://t.co/9QXRBKtc6q
— Coda Story (@CodaStory) June 9, 2023
See the stories below.
This text was adapted from a Twitter thread about the project by Coda Story.