Living with History: Ghosts of WWII Still Haunt Europe

Outside the shipyard where Solidarity was born
Outside the shipyard where Solidarity was born

There’s Europe, and then there’s Europe. Before St. Petersburg, we visited Gdansk, Poland and Klaipeda, Lithuania, each with a great (and strategically valuable) coastline and harbor.  Along with those very desirable traits came a dark, terrible, history of invasion and occupation, Nazis and Communists and pre-Nazi Germans in the 20th Century alone. Listen to the guides and it sounds as if the last of them left only last week, the memories are so fresh. Each city was all but obliterated after the War, first by the Nazis as they fled and then by the victorious Russians who declared the residents “Nazis” and burned much of what hadn’t been bombed. Jesus mourns 3,000 priests murdered in Auschwitz from St Mary's Cathedral

In Gdansk, along with the Jews, many Poles, including 3,000 priests, died in concentration camps.  This statue of Jesus mourning the 3,000 priests murdered in Auschwitz is from the gorgeous Gdansk St. Mary’s Church was placed there in their honor.  A visit to this city is a rapid education in the continued immediacy of the devastation and misery of the War and the Soviet occupation that followed.  It isn’t history, it’s family.

Veterans of Siberian exile sing songs of their country
In Lithuania they work to preserve memories of forced exile to Siberia and Soviet abuse through an ever-shrinking choir of village elders, many of them survivors of the Siberian deportations, on the lawn of a one-room museum that combines these memories with a commemoration of WWII partisans.

Klaipeda partisan 2

While there is little argument about the roles that Poland and Lithuania had in the Holocaust, I’m offering these examples to demonstrate the immediacy of the War that remains among the communities even today.    Wherever we’ve gone in these places, or in Helsingborg Sweden entire tours are constructed around these memories.

It was quite a shock to meet the ghosts that still haunt these old cities.  Gdansk is charming, and of course visiting the scene where Solidarity was born was wonderful.  What really left with us though, was the enduring impact of a war that ended long before many of those affected were even born.

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.