Dr. Marek Mutor, President of the Platform.
RNH is a member of The Platform of European Memory and Conscience, established in 2011 in response to a European Parliament resolution calling for the memory of victims of totalitarianism to be kept alive. RNH Academic Director Hannes H. Gissurarson had already in 2009 translated the Black Book of Communism into Icelandic, and in 2011, he published a history of the Icelandic communist movement. The Platform’s 2026 annual meeting was held in Katowice, Poland, 25–27 May, alongside a one-day conference on heroism and remembrance.
It may be recalled that on 27 September 1939, in an Icelandic newspaper, the communist Halldór Laxness (later to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature) applauded Stalin’s annexation of eastern Poland, writing that fifteen million people under medieval feudalism, notorious for its dirt-poor peasants, had ‘smoothly jumped’ into the Soviet republic of workers and farmers. The truth was quite different. While the Nazis certainly behaved with unspeakable cruelty in their part of Poland, it is less well known that the communists did likewise in theirs: they murdered not only 22,000 Polish officers in 1940, but also deported 1.7 million people to Siberia and Kazakhstan, as described in a well-written book reported on by an Icelandic newspaper in 1946, The Dark Side of the Moon by Zoe Zajdlerowa.
The main topic in Katowice was how to convey totalitarian crimes as well as heroic deeds to the younger generation, for whom they were distant and almost unreal, through survivor testimonies, history textbooks, social media, museums, and elsewhere. All too often, for example, the Cold War is described in textbooks as a game played by two superpowers, the Americans and the Soviets. History is not only about numbers. It is also about names. Of course, numbers are important: the Nazis murdered six million Jews, and communism cost about one hundred million lives. But these numbers only come to life when they are attached to people of flesh and blood. Some victims’ voices were heard at the Katowice conference. Kordian Borejko, who was deported by the Soviets in 1940, a one-year-old with his parents to Kazakhstan, and returned to Poland in 1946, gave a moving speech. Antoine Arjakovsky, a French historian and moderator at one of the panels, recalled that his grandfather, a Russian Orthodox priest in France, had died in a Nazi camp, and that several of his Russian relatives had perished in the Soviet Gulag.
Another topic at the conference was the distinction between perpetrators, accomplices and collaborators. Arjakovsky mentioned the mass arrest of more than 13,000 Jews in Paris on 16–17 July 1942 (which Gissurarson have also written about). It was carried out by the French police at the initiative of the Nazi occupiers. The victims were confined at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a sports arena, and subsequently deported to Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. None of the 3,900 children survived. Later, French President François Mitterand refused to apologise for this action, but his successor, Jacques Chirac, did so in 1995.
