Berlin
Leaders from Germany and Poland this week rejected a proposal to build a memorial in Berlin to the 15 million Germans deported from Eastern Europe after World War II. The German League of Expellees asked for the monument to recognize their suffering. “It’s difficult to talk about,” said Friedrich Vetter, whose family was kicked out of what is now Poland when he was 5. “I cry almost every time.” But the proposal opened old wounds in the Czech Republic and Poland, where a recent newspaper headline blared, “No Sympathy With the Germans!” The Czech and Polish governments kicked out ethnic Germans as retribution for Nazi aggression. A memorial would distort history by implying that German suffering was on a par with that of the countries that Germany vanquished, said Tadeusz Cegielski, a Warsaw University professor. “They were victims of their own war.”
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