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Warsaw (dpa) - The opening of an exhibition in Berlin by the organization of ethnic Germans expelled from their Eastern European homelands at the end of World War II has met with sharp criticism in neighbouring Poland.
Speaking to journalists in Warsaw on Thursday, Daniel Pawlowicz, an MP for the nationalist League of Polish Families (LPR), urged Poland's foreign ministry to "react strongly" to the exhibition, titled "Forced Routes, Expulsions in the 20th Century."
He said its treatment of ethnic German expellees falsified history. The LPR is the junior partner in Poland's governing coalition.
Pawlowicz added that the Polish government must always react in similar cases and "show the lines" that Germans may not cross.
Members of the All-Polish Youth, the LPR's youth organization, planned to stage a demonstration in front of the exhibition on Thursday.
"Perpetrators are made into victims, and victims into perpetrators," said Rafal Malolepszy, an initiator of the demonstration.
Many Poles see the exhibition as the first step towards a "Centre Against Expulsions" in Berlin envisaged by Erika Steinbach, head of German expellees federation BdV.
Polish nationalists and conservatives are not the only ones opposed to a German documentation centre on European expulsions. There is a deep fear in Poland, the first country attacked by Nazi Germany in World War II, that the war's history and aftermath could be relativised.
The self-image of victimization is deeply rooted in Poland, which lost six and a half million people in the war and brutal occupation, including three million Polish Jews.
There was no official government statement on Thursday. But Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski's schedule made Poles, who are sensitive to symbols, take notice.
On Thursday Kaczynski planned to visit the former Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, whose inmates included thousands of Poles from the regions of Masuria, Pomerania and Warmia who refused to sign the Nazi occupiers' Volksliste, the list of ethnic Germans living in Poland.
"Erika Steinbach isn't giving up," warned the conservative Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita on Thursday. Zdzislaw Krasnodebski, a Polish sociologist who teaches in Bremen, said in the Polish newspaper Dziennik: "Rewriting the history of a migration whose purpose was ethnic cleansing is unacceptable to me."
Numerous commentaries in recent years have, in fact, created the impression that displaced ethnic Germans from Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia, the Sudetenland, and other regions of Central and Eastern Europe did not lose much more than their fine porcelain and a couple of carpets.
Personal fates and the dramatic circumstances of the explusions, especially in the last months of the war, usually went unmentioned.
This has occurred despite all that has been done since 1989 to cast light on this chapter of German-Polish history. Polish historians have published unvarnished accounts of ethnic Germans' flight and expulsion. In Masuria and Silesia, schoolteachers instruct their classes on the region's former and current inhabitants.
The controversy over a permanent Berlin memorial and documentation centre on expulsions now threatens to undo much of what has been accomplished in a decades-long reconciliation process.
Marta Wasowkska, a young Warsaw resident and volunteer for the German-Polish Youth Office in Potsdam, said it was hard for her to understand at first how Germans could see themselves as victims of World War II.
"As a Pole, you have to think about that for a long time," she remarked. "But people on both sides suffered."
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
