When I bring American visitors to POLIN, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, most of them assume they are walking into a stable institution. It stands on the grounds of the former ghetto, facing the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. It has won the European Museum of the Year award. Presidents and prime ministers visit it. From the outside, it looks like the kind of place whose future no one would think to question.

The reality is more complicated. For the past several years, the most important question at POLIN was not about any exhibition. It was about who would be allowed to run it, and by extension, which version of Polish-Jewish history the Polish state was prepared to stand behind.

On March 1, 2026, Dariusz Stola returned to the director’s office he had left seven years earlier. To understand why his return matters, and why it was never guaranteed, you have to understand what happened in between. I will try to tell that story here, because I think it explains something about how historical memory actually works in my country that no exhibition label ever could.

What Stola Built, and Why It Made Him a Target

Stola led POLIN from its opening in 2014. Under his direction, the museum told the thousand-year history of Jews in Poland in full. That meant the extraordinary chapters, the centuries when Poland was home to the largest Jewish community in the world. It also meant the painful ones: antisemitism before and after the war, the state-organized antisemitic campaign of 1968 that drove some thirteen thousand Jews out of the country, and the hardest subject of all, the behavior of Poles toward their Jewish neighbors during the German occupation.

In 2018, POLIN mounted an exhibition marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 1968 campaign. The curators included antisemitic statements drawn from contemporary Polish media alongside the historical material. The point was quiet but unmistakable: the language of 1968 had not disappeared. Visitors came in large numbers. The government of the day did not thank the museum for it.

That government, led by the Law and Justice party, had made historical policy a central part of its program. Its officials spoke of defending Poland against a “pedagogy of shame,” by which they meant honest public discussion of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. In January 2018 they passed an amendment to the law governing the Institute of National Remembrance (so-called “Poland’s Holocaust law”), introducing criminal penalties for attributing Nazi crimes to the Polish nation or state. Stola opposed the law publicly. The culture minister, Piotr Gliński, accused him of politicizing the museum.

There was also money in the background, and Stola himself later put it on the record. In 2018, Norway and its EEA partners allocated roughly ten million euros in grant funding for POLIN, part of the funds these countries provide to Poland in exchange for access to the European market. According to Stola’s account, given in interviews after his departure, the ministry demanded that he hand over half of it, five million euros, to a different institution: the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, a new museum the ministry itself had just founded, widely understood as the government’s own counterpoint to POLIN’s way of telling wartime history. Stola refused. He said that giving away half of a grant awarded to his museum would mean acting against the institution he was responsible for, and that demanding this of him was absurd. In the end he agreed to pass one million euros to the Jewish Historical Institute, and nothing to the ministry’s new museum. The ministry, for its part, denied that the grant dispute had anything to do with his removal and accused POLIN of treating itself as the grant’s sole beneficiary. I cannot settle from outside what weighed most in the minister’s decision. But I can note the sequence: a director opposes the government’s memory law, refuses to redirect foreign funds to the government’s rival museum, and then finds his winning competition result left unsigned on the minister’s desk for a year. Readers can draw their own conclusions.

I want to be careful here, because the details matter and they are often told imprecisely. Stola was not fired. What happened was slower and, in its way, more revealing. His contract expired in February 2019 and the ministry declined to renew it, announcing instead an open competition for the position. Stola entered that competition and won it, taking eleven of fifteen votes. The ministry then simply refused to confirm the result. For nearly a year the museum operated under an acting director, Stola’s own deputy Zygmunt Stępiński, while Stola waited without salary and without answer. Donors grew uneasy; at least one suspended a pledged contribution because of the uncertainty. In February 2020, facing a deadline that could have allowed the ministry to install its own candidate, Stola withdrew. He did it, by his own account, to protect the museum. Stępiński became director as a compromise acceptable to all three of the museum’s founders, with Stola’s support.

Seven years later, under a different government and a different culture minister, Stola won a new competition and returned for a five-year term. He called it a victory of justice and the rule of law. Stępiński now serves as his deputy. The two men have effectively traded places twice, following the political weather.

The Pattern: Gdańsk Before Warsaw

If this were an isolated story, it might be read as an unfortunate dispute between one director and one minister. It was not isolated.

Two years before the POLIN standoff began, the same government and the same minister had removed the director of another major institution, the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. That museum, conceived under Donald Tusk’s earlier government and built over nearly a decade, presented the war through the experience of civilians across Europe rather than through Polish military heroism alone. Party leaders objected to this framing before the museum had even opened its doors; in their view it was not Polish enough. The director, historian Paweł Machcewicz, could not be dismissed easily, so the ministry found another way. It announced a merger of the completed museum with a second institution that existed mostly on paper. The merger dissolved the original museum as a legal entity, and its directorship with it. Poland’s courts allowed the maneuver. Machcewicz was out within days of losing the final ruling. The exhibition he and his colleagues built was then rewritten by the new management to carry a more national narrative, and it has been contested ever since, changing again after the next political turn. That story deserves its own telling, and I intend to give it one; for now it is enough to know that in Gdańsk, unlike in Warsaw, the government succeeded.

Notice the method, because it repeats. In Gdańsk, a merger. In Warsaw, an expired contract and a confirmation withheld. In neither case did anyone stand up and say that a museum director was being removed for telling history the government found uncomfortable. The instruments were administrative, procedural, deniable. That is precisely what made them effective, and precisely why they deserve more attention than they usually receive. A firing makes headlines. A merger makes footnotes.

Someone will object here, and the objection deserves an answer rather than a dismissal. Stola’s return also came with a change of government. The rewriting of the Gdańsk exhibition, in both directions, also came with changes of government. Am I not simply cheering when the pendulum swings my way? I do not think so, and the reason is process. Stola won an open competition under rules all three of the museum’s founders had agreed to, and the ministry refused to honor the result; in 2026 he won another competition under the same kind of rules, and the result was honored. Machcewicz was removed by a maneuver designed to avoid any competition at all. The question that separates a correction from a capture is not which government was in power when the change happened. It is whether the decision was made through procedures the institution’s founders agreed to, or around them. By that measure, the record is not symmetrical, and I see no obligation to pretend it is.

The National Museum in Warsaw lost its director in the same period, in that case through a resignation over lack of ministry support. Museum professionals in Poland understood what they were watching: a sequence, not a series of coincidences.

There is a coda to the Gdańsk story that I find genuinely sobering. The man appointed to run the WWII Museum after Machcewicz’s removal was Karol Nawrocki, a historian from the Gdańsk branch of the Institute of National Remembrance. He reshaped the exhibition, ran the museum until 2021, then became president of the Institute of National Remembrance itself. In 2025, with Law and Justice’s backing, he was elected President of Poland. I do not mention this to suggest that every contested museum appointment is an audition for higher office. I mention it because it shows the stakes plainly. In Poland, the people who win the argument over how history is told sometimes go on to govern the country.

How Close It Came at POLIN

Here is the part of the story that even well-informed visitors rarely know.

POLIN is not a state museum in the ordinary sense. It was founded through a partnership of three institutions: the Ministry of Culture, the City of Warsaw, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, a private organization descended from the community that preserved the Ringelblum Archive. Each founder holds five seats on the fifteen-member body that selects the director. This structure was designed, deliberately, so that no single government could control the museum alone. In 2019 it worked as intended. The committee voted eleven to four for Stola, and though the ministry could stall the result, it could not replace him with its own person.

Now consider how narrowly that arrangement survived. In October 2018, the Law and Justice candidate for Mayor of Warsaw was Patryk Jaki, the deputy justice minister who had personally steered the IPN law amendment through parliament, the very law Stola opposed. Had Jaki won, the party would have appointed ten of the committee’s fifteen members: the ministry’s five and the city’s five. I will not claim to know how every one of those ten would have voted; committee members are appointees, not delegates, and the 2019 result itself shows that at least some members voted across expectations. But control of appointments is control over time. The Association, the museum’s Jewish founding partner, would have held five seats against ten in an institution its predecessors had spent a decade building, and the competition Stola won in 2019 would have looked very different, if it had been run the same way at all.

Jaki lost. Rafał Trzaskowski took the mayoralty in the first round with about 57 percent of the vote. I doubt that many Varsovians walking to the polls that October were thinking about the governance structure of a museum. But that election, decided on entirely other questions, is one of the main reasons the POLIN story ended differently from the Gdańsk one. The city’s five seats stayed independent. The committee held. When the ministry stalled, there were still founders at the table with the standing to object, and eventually to broker the compromise that kept the museum out of the ministry’s hands until the political situation changed.

It is an uncomfortable thing to accept, that the integrity of an institution devoted to a thousand years of Jewish history in Poland turned partly on the arithmetic of a municipal election. But I think we should accept it, because it is true, and because it tells us something important: the safeguards were not norms or good intentions. They were seats, votes, and a structure someone had the foresight to design a generation earlier.

Why This Matters Beyond Poland

For American readers, it may be tempting to file this under the particular troubles of a faraway country. I would suggest reading it differently.

POLIN is not simply another national museum. It is arguably the world’s most important museum devoted to the history of Jewish life in one country. It tells the story of nearly a thousand years of Jewish civilization in Poland—a civilization that, for centuries, was the largest and among the most influential Jewish communities in the world. For many American Jews whose parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents came from Poland, POLIN is where family history becomes tangible. It is often their first opportunity to encounter not only the story of how Polish Jews died, but how they lived, created, argued, prayed, prospered, and shaped Jewish life across the world. That is one reason the struggle over its leadership resonated far beyond Warsaw.

POLIN receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, many of them Americans. For a large share of them, the museum is their first serious encounter with this history in the place where it happened. When I watched the Stola standoff unfold, what troubled me most was not the fate of one director, whom I admire. It was the precedent: that the story presented to those visitors—and to future generations—could be reshaped by whoever happened to control the Ministry of Culture.

The deeper pattern is not uniquely Polish. Wherever difficult history collides with national pride, similar pressures emerge: laws that seek to define what may be said, appointments that reward those seen as politically reliable, and administrative procedures that remove inconvenient voices without anyone having to defend the decision openly. Poland’s recent experience is simply an unusually well-documented example, one that allows us to see these mechanisms with unusual clarity.

Stola’s return is unquestionably good news, and I welcomed it as such. But I resist the temptation to see it as a happy ending. The memory law remains on the books, softened but not repealed. The exhibition in Gdańsk has now been rewritten more than once, reflecting successive political changes. And the institutional lesson cuts both ways: the same democratic mechanisms that allowed Stola to return could one day produce a different outcome.

What his story ultimately demonstrates is not that independent institutions always prevail. It is that they survive only when they are designed to withstand political pressure, and when enough people—in ministries, on governing boards, in city halls, and occasionally in voting booths—decide that historical integrity is worth defending.

That last phrase is not accidental. Marian Turski, the Auschwitz survivor who helped bring POLIN into being and who chaired its council for years, left us with the words that guide everything my foundation does: Thou shalt not be indifferent. He spoke about people confronting hatred and injustice. I have come to believe that his warning also applies to institutions. Museums do not preserve historical truth automatically. They preserve it because people choose to protect their independence. The struggle over POLIN’s leadership was, at its core, a struggle over whether one of the world’s most important guardians of Jewish history would remain free to tell that history honestly. For now, it has.