Invisible History.

Of all the moments in the history of Breslau/Wroclaw, the Nazis' building of the airstrip during World War II stands alone in its unique perversity, demonstrating how amoral motives of self-preservation surpassed even the racist principles of the Third Reich.

A visitor traveling through areas in Europe scarred by the Nazi era soon encounters the obvious--places where human tragedy has been memorialized and some attempt has been made to explain to the visitor what happened there: grim rows of barracks preserved in Auschwitz; the white marble marker where hundreds of children died during an air raid in Vienna. These obvious memorials are important and necessary. But there are other places deserving recognition--ones which are invisible unless their significance is explained. They too witnessed evil, but their role in teaching us about that evil remains obscure.

I recently spent three weeks in Wroclaw, Poland--the site of one of these invisible places. Wroclaw is a city whose history is beyond the comprehension of most Americans. This is because its recent history contains a profound shift in its identity --much like that found in places once inhabited by native Americans but now inhabited only by whites. In the United States, such shifts generally go unrecognized--and the same is true in Wroclaw.

During most of its existence the city of Wroclaw was known as Breslau, the capital of the predominantly German province of Silesia. The architects of the Third Reich placed a great value on Breslau, viewing it as a center of German culture and as one of the launching points for its projected Drang Nach Osten--its advance toward the east that would extend German control far into Poland and beyond.

But the Nazi plan for colonies stretching into the Ukraine, Russia, and elsewhere faded after the debacle of Stalingrad, and by the fall of 1944 German armies found themselves retreating toward Breslau. In the waning months of World War II, as Soviet armies bore down on the Reich, Adolf Hitler declared the city a festung (or Fortress) to be defended to the last person. The Schutzstaffel (SS) took control of Breslau, directing its defense as the Red Army closed the city in the vise of a siege. For the better part of three months the residents of Breslau, goaded by the SS and driven by fear of the advancing enemy, built makeshift defenses in the streets as the Soviets continued their advance block by block.

At this point something extraordinary and telling happened. The SS, trapped on all sides, began to plan its escape. It selected an expanse of land in the western sector of the city to build an airstrip on, from which it planned to fly out of the besieged city. Unfortunately, the land was covered with apartment blocks crammed with terrified city residents. The SS was undeterred by the presence of these people, however, and immediately set about blowing up the buildings as rapidly as possible. In the frenzied activity that followed, fires broke out, buildings collapsed on one another, and Breslau residents dragooned into the demolition work vanished. When the dust settled, over 10,000 people had perished--their graves unmarked, their efforts in vain. A single SS plane made it out of Breslau, and in the late spring of 1945 Soviet forces occupied the devastated city.

It is this expanse of land, now covered with hastily constructed postwar housing and more ambitious but equally ugly apartments and university buildings erected in the 1960s and 1970s, with which I am familiar.

In comparison with the other enormities committed by the Nazis, the deaths of a few thousand civilians may seem relatively insignificant. But the circumstances surrounding their deaths should give us pause. They form, as it were, a text upon which a meditation on the nature and characteristics of evil may be written. Many writers have taken up the subjects of World War II and the Holocaust, but words can never do justice to the events that took place. Indeed, one philosopher, Theodor Orno, has even asserted that after Auschwitz there can be no more poetry. My purpose here is not to consider the enormity of the collective crimes of the Nazis but to reflect on a specific place and how Nazi-inspired policy isolated it from its own past.

Wroclaw is not Breslau. Both cities occupy the same physical space but are vastly different in both time and culture. Breslau, a predominantly German city with Polish roots but situated within the German Reich, is no more. After the German-speaking population of Silesia was deported or fled to the west, Breslau--70 percent of which was destroyed--was repopulated with ethnic Poles, the majority of whom were from regions claimed by Stalin for the Soviet Union. Slowly the rebuilding progressed, and stark Soviet-style housing blocks replaced the graceful art nouveau structures destroyed in the siege. The late-Medieval and Renaissance churches of the city, scarred by bullets and bombs, very gradually resumed an approximation of their prewar appearance.

Like many cities throughout postwar Europe, Wroclaw struggled between the need to provide for the immediate material needs of its populace and the desire to restore some of the beauty of its past. This resulted in long delays in the eradication of the more cosmetic traces of wartime misery. Even today many public buildings bear witness to the street fighting of the spring of 1945. Wroclaw, however, faced a special challenge not known to Rotterdam, Munich, and other cities severely ravaged during the war; its very identity as a city, as a gathering of people who had constructed a culture and lived as a community, was uncertain.

The new city was a place of social and cultural discontinuity. The postwar boundaries of Poland had been pushed far to the west to accommodate the westward expansion of the Soviet Union, placing Wroclaw well within the Polish state. But the historic kingdom of Poland had never included Breslau, nor had Breslau ever played a major role in Polish cultural history. The connection between the city's architectural monuments that slowly and painfully regained their former glory and the new residents of Wroclaw was tenuous or nonexistent. Scholars employed by the Polish regime scurried to find traces of the Polish minority in Breslau in the archives of the old city, but their attempts to construct a narrative of continuity with the present were largely futile. Wroclaw today remains a city divorced from its own past, whose inhabitants recall their origins to the east and where German tourists come to see where their parents and grandparents--and perhaps they themselves--had once lived. And the two groups have little to say to one another.

Of all the moments in the history of the city, the building of the airstrip stands alone in its unique perversity. The frantic efforts of the SS to provide itself with an avenue of escape provide an object lesson in the smaller moral bankruptcies that accompanied the more conspicuous evils of the Nazi regime, but they form an entirely different lesson from that taught by the death factories and macabre medical experiments of Nazi scientists. The systematic liquidation of millions of victims is a demonstration of the philosophy that glorified the domination of the cruel over the weak, an expression of the Nazi worship of brutality and supposedly heroic violence, and the objectification and dehumanization of a group of people. But the willingness of the SS to sacrifice German lives--those who fit and even supported its concept of master race--in an effort to save its own skin is another matter.

In its hour of extremity this supposedly elite corps could not muster even the most minimal loyalty to the yolk, whose dominance it was sworn to ensure and whose future success was the reason for its existence. Amoral motives of self-preservation surpassed even the racist principles of the Reich; and Breslau, like many other centers of Nazi culture, was destroyed in part by its defenders. The Nazi philosophy thus revealed itself to be terrible in its failures as well as its successes, bringing about the destruction of not only its intended victims but also its allies, supporters, and sympathizers.

Faced with this enormous paradox, Wroclaw--the city resurrected from the ashes of Breslau--has been unable to confront and commemorate the deaths of some of its former residents. The arid space that covers the scene of this tragedy today bears witness to nothing more than the unsystematic and hasty reconstruction of the city. Trolley stops, sausage stands, and a drab stretch of university housing cover the graves. This amnesia is reinforced by the growing presence of Western consumerism; billboards advertising Coca Cola and Nokia provide no more insights into the events of 1945 than do the blank-faced architectural efforts of the communist era.

Wroclaw is not alone among eastern European communities in its alienation from its recent past. In Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, the Jewish ghetto, emptied of its inhabitants, stood intact for more than a decade after the war until the Slovak authorities had it cleared to make way for the approach of a new bridge. The Nazi persecution of the Rom, or Gypsy people, in what is now the Czech Republic has received little attention in a society that itself holds little tolerance for these people today. Hungarians speak with passion about the territories in Slovakia and Romania lost following World War I after a thousand years of rule by Hungary, but they have little to say about the centuries of discrimination against Slovaks and Romanians that drove these peoples to seek separation from Hungary. Eastern Europe, like so many other places, is littered with grievances--some recent in origin, some so ancient that their roots are no longer remembered--each understood from a single perspective.

Yet the Wroclaw paradox is distinct from many of the other open wounds still visible on the landscape in this part of the world. This is for two reasons. First, among those who died somewhere near the Grundwaldsky Bridge and the ugly government buildings overlooking the Odra River--built by the Nazis and still used by the regional administration--were some people who had, initially at least, welcomed the Nazi revolution. Breslau was a stronghold of support for the aims of the Third Reich, a place Hitler visited often and where he was enthusiastically received.

The dead who now lie under the plazas of the university complex were noncombatants, but can they all be considered innocent in the way that the victims of Buchenwald are judged innocent? Some readers may be offended by this question, but one must remember that Breslau was never an occupied city as Prague was. Breslau, to the degree any place can be so called, was a Nazi city. And so any discussion or commemoration of what happened there must consider the relationship of the dead to the regime that brought about their deaths.

How should we commemorate those who died as a result of the cruelty of a totalitarian regime but who weren't originally its intended victims? Can they even be considered victims?

The response of the communist governments that controlled Poland for four decades was to ignore these questions. This has also been the policy of the democratic government Poland has had since 1990. Whether the reason is because the victims were Germans rather than Poles or because some were Nazi sympathizers is unclear. But surely this amnesia may be linked to the cultural discontinuity that haunts the city. Innocent or not, the dead surely deserve to have their memory restored. And until such a time, a part of the history of Wroclaw will remain obscure, not just to foreign visitors but to those who live there as well.

The second reason for the paradox has to do with the nature of the Nazi regime itself. The massacres of innocents perpetrated by the Nazis are terrible to contemplate, making it easy for us to react with undiluted horror to them. The Nazis--and perhaps in particular the SS--have become in our gallery of historical types the embodiment of evil, people from whom we want to divorce ourselves and whose actions lie outside the spectrum of what we can ever imagine ourselves doing. This reduction of the Nazi era to a simplistic cliche is understandable, given the incomprehensibility of the crimes committed, but sheds little light on the story of Wroclaw/Breslau. Even the villains of melodramas and children's cartoons usually show great strength and determination; were they too easily defeated, the story told wouldn't hold our attention, and the victory of the good guys would be less inspiring.

The airstrip that pushed its way through the crowded neighborhoods of Breslau illustrates the underlying weakness of the Nazi regime. Despite its terrifying early military successes, the Third Reich revealed its profound internal weakness in its inability to foster a sufficient sense of collective responsibility and loyalty even among those identified as its rightful citizens. Like other, less repulsive political experiments, the Nazi period was a human creation with limitations and flaws, even with regard to its own principles.

This makes the dead of Breslau a particularly instructive lesson for Europe and the rest of the world today. The rise in visibility of nationalistic emotions--not only in the formerly communist lands of eastern Europe but also in western European democracies--is one of the most notable developments in the political life of the region. Politicians appealing to these emotions talk about their concern for the well-being of whatever group whose support they seek. policies ranging from restriction of immigration to "ethnic cleansing" are justified in terms of the benefit they will bring to one group or another. Old grievances are recalled to provide the context for contemporary discrimination. The costs to the group that will supposedly benefit from the discriminatory policies are seldom mentioned but nonetheless exist. The example of Wroclaw is an extreme one but its very extremity makes this point easier to see.

The solidarity among the German people and its allies and the loyalty of the SS to the supposedly higher goal of the German yolk proved to be illusions of the most bitter kind. The Nazi brutalist philosophy--promoted in schools, art museums, and mass rallies--ultimately produced a mentality that could literally destroy all in its path. The exclusion of certain groups from the list of those deserving protection led inevitably to the exclusion of all except those who wielded the ability to terrorize others. In the former Yugoslavia, in Belarus, and in a dozen other places the question of what will happen if those with the capacity to wield this terror have free rein is real and immediate and rendered all the more urgent by the eagerness of some members of these societies to embrace a philosophy that places great emphasis on who will be excluded from the vision of the society's future.

This is why Wroclaw and other places with similar histories need to confront their own histories and construct a narrative about the less famous victims of totalitarianism whose exact relationship to exclusionary and brutalist regimes is ambiguous. It is never too late to begin this process, although the circumstances of contemporary eastern Europe remind us that it is already very late in the day.

Paul Shore, associate professor of educational studies at St. Louis University, was a visiting scholar at the University of Wroclaw during the summer of 2000. His books include The Myth of the University; Encounters, Estrangements, Connections; and the forthcoming Eagle and the Cross: Jesuits in Baroque Prague.