The Great Green Investment Investigation

Explore The Great Green Investment Investigation via this link, and read a translated version of “Half of Europe’s ‘Dark Green’ funds invest in the fossil fuel industry or in aviation“, one of the signature publications of the project here below.

Half of Europe’s ‘Dark Green’ funds invest in the fossil fuel industry or in aviation

It seemed like an ordinary Tuesday in Frankfurt, the financial heart of Europe. Hundreds of bankers were busy working in Deutsche Bank’s two giant skyscrapers. Across the street at DWS, the asset management division of Deutsche Bank, employees had unsuspectingly started their day as well.

But then, midway through that morning in May 2022, some fifty police officers raided the offices of Deutsche Bank and DWS. Employees were questioned, files were confiscated, and data was retrieved from computer systems. The allegation: greenwashing. DWS allegedly portrayed its financial products as much greener than they really were.

Sustainable investing was once a niche. Ethical investors played a modest role in the abolition of slavery: they refused to make money from industries that employed slave labour. A small group of European and US investors turned their backs on Shell late last century because the Dutch-British company was active in apartheid-torn South Africa.

Then impact funds were created, focussing on investments with a positive social impact instead of excluding companies. For instance, the Dutch sustainable bank Triodos started a fund in the 1990s to finance farmland, favouring organic farming. Its volume: 25 million guilders (converted: 11.3 million euros). ‘It was still tiny,’ recalls Marilou van Golstein Brouwers. She was the Managing Director of Triodos Investment Management and had a hand in creating the fund. ‘People, including the government, were positively surprised that private individuals were willing to invest in a public cause.’

Nowadays, sustainable investing is no longer ‘tiny’, that is: if we are to believe the financial sector. Since the turn of the century, there has been a steady growth in the number of investment funds that claim to invest their clients’ money sustainably. It started slowly: in 2010, only 3 per cent of European investment funds labelled themselves as sustainable.

The breakthrough came in 2015. That year, the Paris Climate Agreement was concluded, the United Nations set the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and Pope Francis called upon humanity in the encyclical Laudate Si to be frugal with the Creation. Investors responded. They are no longer merely concerned with financial returns: more and more, they want to help create a better world through their investments.

The financial industry answered that call. In Europe, roughly 100 new funds labelling themselves as sustainable were set up that year; currently, around 100 are added every quarter. According to financial services provider Morningstar, 50 per cent of all the money in European investment funds is presently labelled as ‘sustainable’. This amounts to over 4.18 trillion euros, an amount comparable to the market capitalisation of Alphabet, ASML, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Pfizer, Samsung, Shell, Toyota, Walt Disney, and Walmart combined.

That’s a lot of money. But where does it actually end up? Do the investment funds that promise sustainability – and to which millions of Europeans entrust trillions of euros – deliver on their promise?

The Great Green Investment Investigation was set up to address those questions. This is a pan-European investigative journalism collective, founded by Dutch platforms Follow the Money and Investico, which includes Handelsblatt (Germany), Le Monde (France), El País (Spain), IRPI (Italy), De Tijd (Belgium), Børsen (Denmark), Der Standard (Austria), Luxemburger Wort and Luxembourg Times (Luxembourg). With 26 journalists from nine different European countries, we investigated where exactly the money of European investors seeking sustainable investments ends up.

Trump boosts your sustainability score

A major stumbling block is that ‘sustainability’ has no fixed, legally-defined definition, so one can easily apply the term to almost anything. For many investment funds, it merely means that the so-called ESG criteria (ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance) played a role in the decision to invest in a specific company.

This can be interpreted broadly: many funds that claim to be sustainable do not really focus on a company’s environmental, social, or governance contribution to the world; instead, they focus on how changes in environmental, social or governance conditions could affect that company.

Tariq Fancy, former head of the sustainable investment division of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management fund, explains this as follows: ‘Suppose Trump returns to power. Many companies’ ESG ratings will then go up, because the likelihood of those companies facing new social or environmental laws in America will decrease.] As such, ESG doesn’t really measure a company’s effect on the world, but rather how the world affects a company. Fancy: ‘It’s about value, not values.’

So the 4.18 trillion euros in European investment funds that supposedly flow into sustainable investments is, in reality, a collection of money pots that each use a different interpretation of sustainability. At one end of the spectrum, sustainable investing means that the fund ‘considers’ ESG scores when deciding to invest in something. Social impact is not a goal, and social harm is no reason to exclude a company; it merely looks at how a world becoming more sustainable might affect a company’s returns.

At the other end of the spectrum we find the impact funds, where financial returns play no, or a lesser, role and success is measured by the social improvement achieved through an investment. Among them are funds that invest in organic farming, nature reserves or education for girls: not because it makes money, but because it makes the world a better place. They define sustainability in a completely different way.

Grey, light green, dark green

The European Union has been trying to clarify the muddled interpretations for several years. In 2018, it developed the Sustainable Finance Action Plan, a strategy to shift money flows from companies contributing to global warming to sustainable initiatives. By now, this plan has become part of the Green Deal, the programme through which Europe aims to become the world’s first climate-neutral continent.

The Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) is a key part of that plan. Under those new rules, which have officially been in force since March 2021, fund managers are obligated to provide a sustainability assessment of their fund. They can choose between three flavours: grey, light green and dark green. Grey funds (officially: Article 6 and Article 7 funds) are merely required to provide an analysis of the sustainability risks they face. Light green funds (officially: Article 8 funds) must pursue sustainable goals and must explain how they do so.

Lastly, Article 9 funds. The market promotes this category as the most sustainable form of investing. Companies including BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, ABN Amro, Unicredit, Deloitte, Robeco and ING Bank label these funds as ‘Dark Green’.

This category has the highest sustainability requirements. Funds claiming Article 9 status must pursue an explicit social or environmental goal, for instance preventing human rights violations or environmental pollution. Moreover, they may not inflict ‘significant harm’ to other sustainable goals in any way. Even if an Article 9 fund only aims to prevent human rights violations, its investments may not significantly harm the climate or nature.

A fund that claims the Article 9 classification clearly benefits commercially. While equity markets went down in recent months due to inflationary pressure, geopolitics and impending recession, green funds managed to raise more money in Europe. According to the European Fund and Asset Management Association (EFAMA), Article 6 and Article 8 funds lost tens of billions since the beginning of this year, whereas the capital in Article 9 funds grew by 31 billion euros. In other words, the Article 9 flag attracts clients.

Thousands of investments in the aviation and fossil fuel industry

This is why The Great Green Investment Investigation focuses on these Article 9 funds to find out what happens to the money of European investors with a sustainable conscience. After all, these funds have to meet the most stringent requirements and should be greener than green.

First, we listed all European funds that classified themselves as Article 9. There are 1141 of them (reference date: June 30, 2022). We then tried to find their complete portfolio and succeeded for 838 funds, three-quarters of the total. Their portfolios collectively contained 130 thousand investments worth over 619 billion euros.

We measured these investments against a sustainability yardstick and kept the threshold for being earmarked as a ‘sustainable investment’ low. While the European rules for sustainable investments uses a broad definition of sustainability – from social sustainability, such as respect for human rights and good employment practices, to environmental sustainability, such as preventing harm to nature and water quality – we only looked at climate damage inflicted by the companies in Europe’s Darkest Green funds. (For more information on our research methodology, click here).

Yet many funds already failed to meet this low bar. In almost half of the Dark Green funds, we found investments in the aviation or fossil fuel industry. For example, a BlackRock Article 9 fund has over a billion euros worth of investments in energy companies such as RWE (that derived approx. 65 per cent of its energy from lignite, coal and natural gas in 2020), ENEL (43 per cent) and Nextera (75 per cent).

A Dark Green investment fund from French asset manager Carmignac, which writes in official documents that it ‘thematically invests in companies that mitigate climate change’, appears to invest in, among others, petroleum supermajor TotalEnergies and in Glencore, a fossil fuel conglomerate with large stakes in Russian oil company Rosneft and coal producer Xstrata.

Money from all over Europe flows from Dark Green funds to investments in grey companies. In Luxembourg, we found grey investments in 43 per cent of the Article 9 funds, percentage-wise the least. In Italy, we found grey companies in over 49 per cent of the Article 9 funds. Green money flows to investments in supermajors (including Shell, Total, BP and Saudi Aramco), airline companies (including Lufthansa, Delta and Air France-KLM) and coal giants (such as RWE, Glencore and Uniper).

We found well over 8.6 billion euros worth of grey investments in Europe’s Dark Green funds. That does not mean that the remainder are explicitly green. The most popular investments are Microsoft (8.2 billion euros), pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk (7.6 billion), Apple (6.7 billion), Alphabet (4.4 billion) and pharmaceutical company Thermo Fisher (4.1 billion). McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Pepsico, L’Oréal, and Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy also rank high on the list.

European investors pay a fee for the composition of their ‘sustainable’ fund. A recent experiment by Paul Smeets, professor of Sustainable Finance at the University of Amsterdam, suggests that the financial sector charges higher fees for sustainable funds. Smeets calls this a greenium, a green premium. This markup ranges from 7.7 to 8.3 basis points. Over the total capital of 619 billion euros invested in Dark Green European funds, that amounts to an additional annual premium in the range of 480 to 510 million euros.

‘And that while sustainable fund managers put the same or even less effort into composing these funds,’ Smeets explains. ‘Besides sustainability factors, they didn’t look at other financial data, for example. And now that your investigation reveals that sustainable funds are also investing in oil and gas companies, investors may be facing double the risk: they pay more for a sustainable fund and invest in something that in reality is not green at all.’

‘In violation’

European-VEB, the advocacy group for European securities owners, is outraged by the investigation results. ‘It is absolutely reprehensible. You simply cannot use a Dark Green label to raise billions of euros without being truly sustainable. That label is not a marketing tool, it is a promise to investors.’

Julien Lefournier, former employee of the bank Crédit Agricole and author of L’illusion de la finance verte (The Green Finance illusion) calls this ‘strong observations’, which prove that ‘the rhetoric of Artikel 9 funds [is] often hollow’. ‘They go out of their way to make people believe that they are transitioning, but invest in old-fashioned fossil companies.’ Reclaim Finance, a French NGO aiming to make capital markets more sustainable, calls these investments ‘not in line with protecting nature and the climate’. Its German counterpart Urgewald states: ‘Article 9 funds claiming to support a “climate transition” but actually still invested in expanding fossil fuel companies are denying climate science and acting highly irresponsibly.’

Experts argue that the aviation and fossil fuel industry investments found in Article 9 funds do not comply with European investment rules. ‘I don’t see how investing in fossil energy cannot cause significant environmental harm,’ says ESG expert Ruud Winter. Sjors Vogelsang, a lawyer advising on financial regulatory law, is adamant: ‘A fund manager who labels a fund as “Article 9” while it partly invests in fossil fuel companies is in violation.’

‘May I invest in an oil company, yes or no?’

However, the asset managers putting grey investments into green funds believe they are not doing anything wrong. They say it is down to the rules, which would still not make it sufficiently clear that fossil fuel investments do not belong in a sustainable fund.

Amundi, one of France’s largest asset management companies, argues ‘that the current regulatory framework does not yet allow for a uniform response from the financial industry as to what should be considered “sustainable” or not’. Axa, which offers its funds throughout Europe: ‘The notion of “sustainable investment” remains subject to various interpretations, as the definition given so far by the European regulator [..] is not very precise.’ The Spanish industry association for investment funds INVERCO says they ‘were astonished to see that one of the questions [for the European regulator] was the definition of sustainable investment, more than a year after that the regulation was published’. Dutch Actiam also believes it is not in violation of European regulations, which the asset manager incidentally calls ‘crap’. ‘I want clarification. May I invest in an oil company, yes or no?’

However, according to the European regulator, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), it is not all that complicated. Last summer, ESMA once again clearly explained the rules: ‘Financial products that have sustainable investment as an objective should only make sustainable investments.’

Still, ESMA will not take action against asset management companies that sell grey investments as Dark Green. While the rules are clear, according to ESMA, it is not responsible for their enforcement. That task lies with national regulators, who seem to be struggling with it.

On the one hand, they find grey investments in a sustainable fund remarkable: ‘It’s very difficult to reconcile fossil fuel companies with investment funds that have a sustainable objective,’ says Raoul Köhler, Sustainable Finance Coordinator at the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM). ‘To me, it seems obvious that shares in highly polluting companies do not belong in such a fund. That will be a big problem.’ Spanish regulator CNMV argues that fossil fuel companies are allowed in an Article 9 fund ‘under very specific circumstances’ only. ‘And even then, they may not inflict any significant harm.’

Yet national regulators argue that the law doesn’t provide them with sufficient guidelines for enforcement. ‘The text is just not specific enough,’ says the French AFM. According to Luxembourg’s regulator, the question arises as to what exactly is meant by greenwashing. ‘The problem with greenwashing is its complexity and unfortunately there is no uniform definition on a European level at present.’ The Dutch AFM says it has asked ESMA to ‘clarify what constitutes a sustainable investment, and what constitutes “significant harm”’. We therefore understand why asset management companies are not doing everything correctly yet.’

ESMA doesn’t understand where the ambiguity comes from. Speaking to The Great Green Investment Investigation, the regulator says: ‘While there is not an explicit ban on fossil fuel investments as “sustainable investments”, it should be quite challenging to make such investments under sustainable investments due to the need to show that the investments do not harm any environmental or social objective. [..] it should indeed be quite difficult to argue that fossil fuel investments would respect DNSH.’

Taking action is possible

The raid on DWS proves that it is indeed possible to take action against greenwashing in the financial sector. German authorities took action after discovering that the asset manager recorded in its annual report that ESG factors had been applied in more than half of its total invested assets – 451 billion euros – to make the portfolio sustainable. This turned out to be untrue, resulting in DWS finding the police on its doorstep.

In America, investment bank BNY Mellon was fined one and a half million dollars in spring this year for failing to conduct sustainability checks on investments it promoted as sustainable. Last month, investment bank Goldman Sachs received a 4 million dollar fine after it transpired that ESG analyses had been carried out after the decision to invest in a company had already been made, meaning that sustainability was an afterthought instead of a selection criterion.

Even with grey investments in Europe’s Dark Green funds, national authorities can simply take action if they want to. This is according to Myriam Vander Stichele, who was part of an expert group that laid the foundation for European legislation and regulations on sustainable investing on behalf of the European Commission. One of her priorities was to empower regulators to take action. ‘Funds with a clear sustainable objective should not be allowed to invest in shares of fossil fuel companies. They can then not deliver on their sustainability promise. The regulator has the mandate to fine misleading funds.’

She therefore fails to understand why there is no enforcement. ‘If the AFM does not take action or does so too late, it poses a huge risk. The credibility of sustainable investing is at stake.’ Danish consumer organisation Forbrugerrådet Tænk says: ‘This destroys the confidence in green investment funds, and if that happens, we risk losing the billions for a renewable transition. That will hurt us all.’ European-VEB fears irreparable damage: ‘The biggest cynic of all is the disappointed idealist. We run the risk that a large group of investors who factor sustainability into their fund choice will be disappointed and lose faith in maintaining a sustainable economy.’

Since the beginning of this year, several European asset management companies have downgraded their Article 9 funds to Article 8. But in the meantime, numerous new Article 9 funds have been added that, in the end, increase the number of funds proclaiming to be ‘Dark Green’.

Translation by Delia Burggraaf

Poland’s ministry of memory spins the Holocaust

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

For years Olympic slalom canoeist Dariusz Popiela, 36, trained on the Dunajec river in southern Poland. During his twenties, he paddled every day on a churning stretch between two bridges in his hometown of Nowy Sacz. He never thought that this place so familiar to him would become the source of what can be called his memory rebellion. Popiela has always been fascinated by history. He grew up quizzing his grandfather about his childhood memories of life in Nazi-occupied Poland.

But there was an enormous chapter that his grandfather had ripped out of his mental storybook of recollections: the nearly 12,000 Jews who lived in Nowy Sacz before 1939 — about a third of the town’s pre-war population. They had disappeared from the town’s memory. Absent from lessons at school, it wasn’t until Popiela began his own research that he learned about the scale of Jewish life in Nowy Sacz and in Poland. With a thousand years of Jewish history, the country was home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of the United States at the start of World War II.

Popiela was floored when he read the details of how Jewish residents from his town were transported to the neighboring Belzec death camp. Many spent their final night in Nowy Sacz huddled on the riverbank exactly between the two bridges where he had paddled in his canoe so often.

“They saw this same view. They heard the same river voices and sounds,” Popiela said when we stood by the riverbank this past May. Running through some of the most picturesque scenery in southern Poland, the Dunajec river flows through steep gorges, pine forests and fields of tall grass growing right up to its fast-moving waterline. Popiela pointed to families cycling by and couples walking along the river path. “Half of the city disappeared and you have no memory,” Popiela said, shrugging his shoulders. “How is that possible?”

Since his discovery, Popiela has led dozens of commemorations to Jewish life across Poland through his foundation “People, Not Numbers.” Popiela is part of a new generation of Polish citizens, historians, writers and educators pushing for a more honest confrontation with Poland’s 20th century history.

For decades, Polish-Jewish history was kept in what scholars call “the communist freezer.” Around three million Polish Jews were murdered by the Nazis. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Polish communist authorities tolerated much discussion of the genocide. When they did — such as during an anti-semitic purge of the party in 1968 — it was to blame Jews for not showing enough gratitude towards ethnic Poles who tried to save them.

After the fall of communism, some of that silence was broken. More recently, the country’s ruling right-wing government has been consolidating a nationalistic narrative about the past that emphasizes pride over what they say are a politics of shame. It has been effective. Recent surveys show Polish people believe that more than half of Poles directly helped or hid Jews in their homes during Nazi occupation, an absurd overestimate. Those like Popiela who work to commemorate Jewish victims are accused of promoting what’s been coined by the government as a “pedagogy of shame.” The term is used as a political slur by Jaroslaw Kaczynski and members of the party he leads, the ruling Law and Justice party. It has come to mean a liberal historical agenda that exaggerates dark facets of Polish history.

At the center of these competing historical narratives is Poland’s ministry of memory — called the National Institute of Remembrance, IPN in Polish, which was created in the early 2000s to deal with the country’s communist legacy, manage the historic KGB archives and prosecute crimes committed under communism. Today the Institute also largely deals with the legacy of Nazi occupation and is charged with defending the country’s “good name.” The IPN was at the center of international fury in 2018 when the government passed a “Holocaust law,” known as the “IPN law” within Poland, making it a criminal offense to “defame” the Polish nation by claiming Polish people had responsibility for Nazi crimes.

The IPN is one of Poland’s most powerful institutions, with its budget making it the largest institute of historical research in the country, eclipsing university history departments and independent research institutes. A one-of-a-kind bureaucratic creation, it is the country’s most prolific publisher of historical texts, a prosecutor’s office, a production house of historical films and games, and a major authority shaping what students across the country are taught about history in school. The Institute of Remembrance’s budget has nearly doubled under the Law and Justice Party, which has been in power since 2015. Today it has an annual budget of 430 million PLN ($105 million), a staff of about 2,000 and 11 regional branch offices.

With its leadership appointed by parliament, the Institute is controversial in an already highly polarized political environment. There is demand from a number of leading historians for the Institute to be dismantled or reformed. Far more widespread opposition comes in the form of local level initiatives like Popiela’s that are trying to change memory culture in Poland.

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

A memory rebellion

When Popiela learned about the concentration camp on the banks of the Dunajec, just steps away from the beautifully preserved town square in Nowy Sacz, his first feeling was in fact shame.

Each new detail that emerged felt personal: the dam further up the Dunajec river was built by forced Jewish labor, he discovered; and he later found slabs of 17th century matzevot, or Jewish gravestones, used in the construction of town infrastructure, their Hebrew script just barely still legible off the curb of a busy roadside.

“But the shame was something that gave me power,” said Popiela. “It gave me rebellion and the power to do something.”

For the past ten years, Popiela has devoted the time he has outside of his sport to commemoration work. With just a handful of members, his foundation, People, Not Numbers, has researched archives and interviewed older residents to identify the name, surname and age of Jewish victims across rural Poland. They’ve installed 10 monuments and discovered 10 mass Jewish grave sites. Volunteers maintain a number of Jewish cemeteries that were abandoned. Popiela self-publishes what he calls — with a wink — his “underground” monthly newspaper about Jewish history in Nowy Sacz. He leaves out stacks at local coffee shops and in the town hall.

When we meet in May, Popiela is about to break ground on his most recent project: a memorial park in Nowy Sacz located within what had been the town’s Jewish ghetto along with the installation of a plaque along the Dunajec river bank at the site of the former camp. All of the efforts are crowdfunded by Popiela. I asked him, why is he — an Olympic canoeist about to compete in the European Championships — doing this in a country that’s created an entire state bureaucracy to deal with historical remembrance.

“They are caring about other stories,” he said. I push him to elaborate and he gives an example. A few years ago the foundation tried to team up on the commemoration of a Jewish family of eight, murdered in 1944 after being turned over to the Gestapo by their neighbor. The Institute’s local branch said the memorial plaque must say that this family was killed by the Nazis. Popiela refused.

“Do you put the name of the murderer of your family on their grave?” asked Popiela. It’s the same demand he’s just recently received in an open letter from several local, patriotic organizations in opposition to his plan for building a monument to Jews killed in Nowy Sacz. “They don’t have the point of view of the victims. The most important part for them is the sign that the Germans made the Holocaust.”

Poland has long tried to police language around the Holocaust. When former U.S. President Barack Obama referred to “Polish death camps” during a 2012 visit to Warsaw, the White House was compelled to apologize. Right-wing lawmakers made several attempts to introduce a three-year prison sentence for using the term.

A widely shared perception among Poles is that the rest of the world underappreciates Polish suffering during Nazi occupation. “They have this obsession that starts when people say that Polish people are responsible for the Holocaust. Now the narrative of the IPN is that nearly all Polish people had a Jew hidden in their basement,” said Popiela. “They are saying that we were all heroes. But from the archives, it doesn’t look so nice.”

I took a ride with Popiela over to the neighboring town of Grybow where in 2019 he and his team of volunteers had installed a memorial in a Jewish cemetery on a hill overlooking the town. Abandoned for 80 years, the cemetery was a fenced-in jungle. Today, it’s a peaceful, wooded plot with several informative plaques displaying photographs of victims installed by the foundation. The centerpiece is a large granite monument of a splintered matzevah, with slabs on either side listing the name and ages of the nearly 2,000 Jewish victims killed in Grybow during the occupation, nearly a third were children under the age of 13.

Further uphill, Popiela crouches down and starts pulling the weeds coming up over a mass grave site they had discovered using a drone and geo-radar. He tells me about some of the online hate he gets for his work, people accusing him of working for George Soros or telling him he’d be better off spending his time cleaning up Catholic cemeteries. When seeking funding, he’s often told to find some “rich Jew” to pay for the memorial.

We drive back down the hill from the cemetery to town and pass the local Grybow church. It’s Sunday afternoon and the red brick church is packed, with dozens of people crowding at the doors and even standing in the square outside. Just a few steps away from the towering basilica stands Grybow’s Jewish synagogue, abandoned and with its windows knocked out. There are no Jewish people in Grybow. Across from the synagogue an artist has recently painted a large mural in sepia tones. The mural is based off of a 1922 photograph showing three generations of Grybow’s lost Jewish residents.

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

The Ghosts are coming back

“We are the main enemies of the Institute of National Remembrance,” said Agnieszka Haska, a cultural anthropologist at the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw. It’s one of the first things she tells me when we meet.

Much of Haska’s work focuses on questions of collaboration and Jewish escape from occupied Poland and she says the IPN has put her publications and other writings from the center constantly under the microscope. The institutes’ team of fact checkers flags perceived mistakes, sometimes even a footnote, and publishes lengthy rebuttals. The vice president of the IPN told me it’s part of an “ongoing academic debate.” Called traitors on public TV channels, Haska said “it feels much more like an ongoing war.”

It can also get petty. Haska says she’s called the IPN numerous times asking them to stop their regular deliveries of the latest IPN volumes of historical research to the Holocaust Research Center’s office. The institute’s historians are prolific, publishing up to 300 titles a year. The publications flood national bookstores and are subsidized, making it even harder for non-IPN authors to sell their titles. “They are trolling us!” Haska said.

Some of Haska’s recent writing looks at Polish antisemitic science fiction, a popular genre during the 19th century. Writers could pass off their anti-Jewish texts as “fantasy” books to get by the Russian empire’s censors. Haska is focusing on one novel written by Tadeusz Hollender in 1938 called “Poland Without Jews.” Largely lost to history, Hollender’s fantasy fiction was meant as a critique of Polish antisemitism. In Hollender’s satire, the Jews of Poland finally decide they’ve had enough. Families across the country pack up their belongings and begin a long journey to a new land, settling on Madagascar. Suddenly, Christian Poles find that they have no more Jewish neighbors, no one to beat up or to blame for their misfortunes. It turns out that life in Poland without Jews isn’t what they had hoped. So the characters in Hollender’s fiction summon a delegation that sets off for Madagascar and begs their Jewish compatriots to return back home with the words, “We don’t know who we are without you.”

Just a few years after Hollender’s book was published in 1938, the German army retreated from Poland. The Jews had been almost entirely exterminated. Close to 90% of Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. About 20% of Poland’s total population died of war-related causes, including author Tadeusz Hollender who was shot by the Gestapo in 1943 for his role in the Polish underground. After the war, many of the Jews who managed to survive emigrated to Israel or the U.S.

Writing about the Second World War in Poland, the country’s most well-known historian Jan Gross quoted a Holocaust-era memoir: “This was a war which no one quite survived.” Nearly six million Poles perished during the six years of Nazi occupation. Gross gives some numbers to describe the utter devastation of Polish urban life: nearly a third of all urban residents missing following the war, 40% of Polish doctors killed, 30% of university professors and Catholic clergy and 55% of lawyers dead by the end of the war. Soviet occupation brought its own brutality, with the massacre of 22,000 Polish military officers by the Soviet Army in 1940 in Katyn and campaigns of terror waged across the country by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.

To this day, many in Poland remain bitter, believing they had been sold out to the Soviet Union by the West at the end of the war, condemned to 50 years of communist authoritarianism. “Eighty years on, the Second World War still dictates our present,” said Haska. “It’s really scary if you think about it, but the world really ended on the first of September 1939.”

Haska then tells me about one of her first trips to Israel years ago. She remembers her shock, and shame, when people across the country immediately recognized the name of her hometown of Ciechanow in northwest Poland, population 43,000. She got a history lesson from the Israelis she met about how the town used to be nearly half Jewish and about Roza Robota, one of the four women who led an uprising in Auschwitz in September 1944. She was from Ciechanow.

“Everybody knew where Chiechanow was and everybody knew her name,” Haska remembers. “I grew up 50 meters from a Jewish cemetery in Ciechanow and I had no idea.”

The only trace of Robota’s life in Ciechanow is a street named after her, stretching for three blocks on the outskirts of town. Three short blocks that reflect the preference for certain historical narratives by the Law and Justice party and the IPN. Jewish victims of the Holocaust are commemoratated as a backdrop for a sweeping story of Catholic Polish heroism and resistance. Little to no space is allowed for one of the cruelest truths of 20th century authoritarianism: People became complicit in their own subjugation.

This truth is one of the opening observations in Jan Gross’s book “Neighbors,” which rocked Poland on publication in 2000 and is still highly controversial today. The book details the previously unstudied July 1941 massacre of Polish Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne. During the pogrom, Gross writes that German involvement was limited to standing by and taking photographs. In the early 2000s, the newly created IPN confirmed that it was the Polish residents who killed their neighbors. A year after the book was published, at a ceremony in Jedwabne, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski publicly begged for forgiveness.

More recently there’s been backlash. There is an ongoing campaign to exhume the bodies of the Jewish victims in order to prove that they were killed by German soldiers, and not their neighbors. Commenting about Jedwabne and the Kielce massacre, led by Polish residents in 1946 in a northern town after the war, the country’s minister of education refused in a 2016 interview to acknowledge that Polish people were responsible, saying that this “has been misunderstood many times.”

Overnight in Jedwabne, an entire town learned that their grandparents either took part, or stood by, in the brutal massacre of Jews, many of whom were burned alive. There are a number of historians studying historical backlash in Poland. Social psychologist Michal Bilewicz has looked at how people who have experienced historical trauma are more prone to believe in conspiracy theories as an adaption to the trauma, and how educational programs about the Holocaust have in some cases caused symptoms of PTSD in Polish participants or fueled disbelief and a rejection of the facts.

During our meeting in Warsaw, Haska told me a story about her aunt who a few years ago got a knock on the door of her home, a beautiful villa built in the 1930s. The woman at the door was German and she had come to see if her old family home was still standing. She had grown up there as a little girl when the territory was part of Germany. In January 1945, the family fled as the Soviet Army advanced across Poland. The women spoke to each other in German. Haska’s aunt told the visitor how her two brothers were killed by the Gestapo in 1943. The German woman shared her memory of her little brother dying as the family escaped their home in the winter of 1945.

“Half of Poland is living in someone else’s home, not only Jewish but German too,” Haska said. “But the ghosts are coming back.”

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Patriotic Blackmail

Across Poland, there’s a history museum boom. Over the past fifteen years, nearly a dozen new history museums have opened. In pre-covid years, museums in Poland — a country of 38 million — had 38 million visitors, topping ticket sales for the national soccer team. A number of these new museums have also ushered in scandals and embarrassing international headlines.

In 2020, the director of Warsaw’s renowned POLIN Museum, historian Dariusz Stola, was pushed out by the government. In 2017, the Minister of Culture replaced the director of Gdansk’s new World War II Museum with a more friendly candidate — historian Karol Nawrocki, who today serves as President of the Institute of National Remembrance. The Museum of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising hasn’t even opened yet but is already drawing accusations of politicizing history. Another museum, the Warsaw Uprising Museum which opened in 2004, found itself again in the media spotlight after unveiling a new “Room of the Young Insurgent” exhibition, filled with stuffed animals, crayons and the “inspirational” stories of young child combatants in WWII, along with a statue of a Polish child soldier holding an automatic weapon.

While the IPN is not tied to any of these museums, the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews is perhaps the best brick and mortar representation of the institute’s politics. Opened six years ago, the Museum was curated by the IPN’s current vice president, Mateusz Szpytma.

Polish President Andrzej Duda attended the opening ceremony of the museum — located two and a half hours outside Krakow in the village of Markowa, population 4,000.

“The world does not know the reality that prevailed in Poland during the years of occupation, and it is this ignorance that hurts the good name of our country,” Duda said in a speech in the museum’s courtyard.

In photos from the opening day, Duda is lit up by some of the courtyard’s thousands of glowing plaques, each carrying the name of a Polish citizen murdered for helping Jews during the war. Many of them have received Israel’s esteemed designation of the Righteous Among Nations given to people who undertook extraordinary risks to help Jewish people during the war. Poland has the largest number of Righteous internationally: over 7,000 Polish citizens, many of whom were killed for their actions.

The museum tells the story of the Ulma Family who sheltered eight Jews in Markowa during German occupation. After being denounced, the entire Ulma family along with the Goldman, Didner and Grunfeld families were shot to death, seventeen people including children and an unborn child.

Walking through the courtyard to the museum entrance, visitors first see a large illuminated photograph of the Ulma family, taken by the family’s father, Jozef Ulma. Ulma was by all accounts a renaissance man who took dozens of photos of his family with his camera, a rare and prized possession in a Polish village in the 1930s.

The exhibition, housed in a minimalist, modern metal and glass structure, features many photos he took of his family, neighbors and surrounding landscape, some still stained in the family’s blood. The Ulma Family Museum highlights the cruelty of the war, that 20% of Markowa’s Jews survived the war in hiding — an unusually high survival number — and the intense pressure villagers faced to collaborate and inform.

“I would like every visitor to this museum, among others, to know the drama that befell the Jewish people during World War II,” said the IPN’s Vice President Mateusz Szpytma who was the first historian to lead the investigation into the Ulma story. He estimates that tens of thousands of Jews survived in Poland thanks to help from non-Jews. “I would like them to know that even in the most difficult moments of totalitarianism there is the possibility of helping people in need. It is up to us individually how we behave, whether we stand with traitors, whether we are heroes, whether we risk our lives for other people.”

Outdoors there’s a large memorial grave to the family with a Polish coat of arms, a cross and on the ground, a fresh bouquet of red roses. Seven urns with the remains of the Ulma family are displayed. The Jewish victims who were hiding at the Ulma family home are buried elsewhere, in a military cemetary about 15 miles away. Golda Grunfeld, Lea Didner and her child as well as five men by the name of Goldman are not listed. They are memorialized collectively with some of the three hundred nameless Jewish Poles murdered during the war and buried there.

Some of Poland’s most prominent historians, Jan Grabowski, Agnieszka Haska at the Holocaust Research Center among others, have been vocal critics of the framing of the exhibition. The Ulma Museum in some ways is an important break with the past. For decades in Poland, people given the Righteous designation hid it from their neighbors and family members out of fear of stigmatization and persecution. Honoring them on a national level has been long overdue, but critics say this is being done at the expense of the Jewish people they saved who are reduced to vehicles for Polish heroism.

“As a Polish citizen, a Polish researcher, I’m totally into commemorating these rare exceptions of noble Poles who were brave enough to somehow oppose this wartime reality. But at the same time these biographies are being used as a kind of patriotic blackmail,” said Maria Kobielska, who co-founded the Center for Research on Remembrance Culture at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She has been researching new history museums and has written about the Ulma Museum.

“The general message is that this was the typical attitude of Polish people, to act as Jozef and Wictoria Ulma. If you oppose this narrative and this museum you somehow oppose the memory of the Ulmas,” Kobielska said. “These people are used as an alibi for anyone who is Polish.”

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Maria Babinska at the Center for Research on Prejudice at Warsaw University has been running social psychology surveys over five years. “We asked people to imagine — since the specific historical percentages are not known and will never be known — their estimate of how many Poles collaborated with Germans and the percentage who were indifferent,” said Babinska.

The study showed that Polish people believe that close to 60% of Poles selflessly helped Jews during World War II, but also believe that 25% of Poles collaborated with Nazis.

The results were highly polarized, a split based on which political party respondents voted for but also by factors such as expressing antisemitic views or supporting the IPN Holocaust law.

I asked the IPN’s vice president Mateusz Szpytma what he made of these numbers: “I don’t think Poland is an exception here, people misperceive history,” said Szpytma. “It’s important to show history as it was, what you have to be proud of and the things that were bad, you have to be ashamed of them. These two sides are strongly present in our work at the Institute of National Remembrance.”

Babinska attributes the results of her research to basic human psychology: members of a community often overestimate the morality of their group.

Morality, identity, being part of an ingroup have all been powerful themes in the Law and Justice party’s electoral campaigns. Campaign slogans and speeches reinforce the country’s Catholic and Polish identity, patriotic resistance to Nazi occupation and communism.

“Memory policy is a substitute for ideology that legitimizes the party,” says Dariusz Stola, the deposed director of Warsaw’s POLIN Museum and a historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Since 2015, the Law and Justice party has crafted an official party “strategy” for its historical policy with President Duda saying that “conducting historical policy is one of the most important activities of the president.”

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

People’s history

Maciej Sanigorski and Jeremi Galdamez are guarding a different kind of memory that is even more unpopular in the country than Jewish-Polish history — the history of Polish communism. Since 2017, the IPN has reinvergerated the country’s decommunization efforts of the 1990s, changing street names and removing over 200 monuments across Poland which “symbolize or propagate” totalitarianism. It’s the most public-facing work of the IPN, with the Institute’s current president holding video press conferences as workers drill and demolish monuments behind him in the shot.

Sanigorski, who works in transport for the Polish post office, and Galdamez, who writes for a history magazine and whose father was a member of Chile’s communist youth and fled political persecution for Poland in the 70s, are both left-wing organizers in Warsaw and have led a campaign to preserve the memory of Polish volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Poland had the second largest group of international volunteers fighting in Spain against Franco’s fascists.

So far, their biggest victory was gathering over a thousand signatures necessary to oppose an IPN order to change a street name in Warsaw named after the Polish brigade. It was a considerable undertaking in a post-communist country where anything related to socialism remains toxic.

Sanigorski and Galdamez took me past the sites where some of Warsaw’s communist monuments have disappeared overnight. Along with holding discussions about historical policies, they organize an annual memorial service for Poland’s fighters in a military cemetery in Warsaw, with delegations from Spain, Germany and Italy joining this year.

“I always say if I lived in communist times I would fight for the memory of the anti-communist resistance because you have to fight for the things that are being thrown away from history,” said Sanigorski.

Valentin Behr, a political scientist at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, says the group is one of dozens of grassroots initiatives in opposition to the decommunization of public space and demonstrates that sometimes national memory politics can end up backfiring.

“It’s a way to produce a counter narrative to the official narrative and to show that there is another Poland that is not conservative, not fascist, which is progressive and that is forgotten most of the time in collective memory.”

Both Sanigorski and Galdamez object to the historical policies of the IPN — which they call an Orwellian ministry of truth, enforcing memory politics down to street names in small towns all across the country. However, both said it would be complicated to do away with it completely. Nearly everyone I asked had a different take on what to do with the IPN. While there’s no indication of the Institute going anywhere under the current government, there is an ongoing debate on how it could be reformed, or even dismantled if the opposition regains the majority.

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Guardians of Memory

Adam Musial, a high school history teacher in Krakow for 22 years, quit his job in 2019 after finding it increasingly difficult to teach the Holocaust. “The general atmosphere in Poland surrounding memory simply reinforced my decision,” he said.

As part of a research grant he has been interviewing about 20 teachers across the country. They tell him it’s become more difficult for them to work. “The atmosphere is stifling,” he said.

He offered an example of a teacher who had tried to bring a Jewish Holocaust survivor to the school. During a faculty meeting, another teacher suggested that if they go ahead with the visit it would be best to bring in more than one speaker to offer students different perspectives on the subject. “So what, I should invite a Nazi?” the teacher quipped, eventually dropping the idea altogether.

For the past year, lawmakers have debated a new Polish law that would make it even harder for teachers to bring in outside speakers or participate in extracurricular programming. Right-wing politicians have rallied against “moral corruption” in schools — largely code for sex education — and pushed through a law that would make teachers seek written permission to bring in any outside speaker or organizations that aren’t on a selective, pre-approved government list. Along with sex education, this would shut down the majority of in-school Holocaust education activity. However, after passing through the Polish parliament, the law was vetoed by President Duda who asked lawmakers to ”postpone it,” citing the ongoing war in Ukraine. It appears the law would complicate integrating the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugee students into Poland’s schools.

But the year of uncertainty has already left a mark: Poland’s largest and oldest non-profit organization dedicated to Jewish-Polish communication has been restructuring their programming, orienting away from schools to be more resilient to politics. Since 1998, the Forum for Dialogue has brought Holocaust survivors and educators to nearly 10,000 students in 400 schools across Poland, focusing on programming in small towns and villages that once had a Jewish community. A core part of the program — known as the School of Dialogue — has students at partner schools lead independent research on their community’s Jewish history, which culminates in a student-led public walking tour for local residents.

Now, the Forum is leaning into their other programs such as directly educating teachers and growing their existing network of over a hundred local historical activists across Poland. The Forum calls them “guardians of memory” — Dariusz Popiela from Nowy Sacz is one of them.

ARTWORK BY RAFAL MILACH/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Backfire

Back in Nowy Sacz, Popiela tells me about how he got lunch with his grandfather a few years ago. Popiela had already started his commemoration work at that point and they were discussing a project. At one point he noticed tears in his grandfather’s eyes. For the first time he told Popiela about a memory he had as a young boy. The town’s ghetto had been liquidated and the walls separating the ghetto from the rest of the town had come down.

His grandfather told him how he walked through the empty ghetto streets and then saw a few boys his age hiding in one of the buildings. Books, some even with gold Hebrew lettering, were scattered across the pavement. He told Popiela how stupid he felt that his family and others had gathered and burned the books because they had nothing left to make a fire with. And then he started to cry.

While his grandfather and father both support the ruling party, he says they’ve come around to his work and today the entire family pulls together on the commemoration efforts including Popiela’s young children.

Popiela says he will move out of town when his daughter turns 18 if there’s still no monument dedicated to the Holocaust in Nowy Sacz. When we met in May, he was still waiting on authorization to start building the memorial. The day before, he had been cheering on his 11-year-old daughter in her first canoeing competition down on the riverbank between the two bridges where he plans to build the second part of his commemoration.

In the weeks since, construction was greenlit. There’s an opening ceremony planned for mid-August.