GDAŃSK, Poland — So sure was the staff of Poland's new Museum of the Second World War that the country's government would not like it, that it was advertised with the slogan, "See it before they close it.”

They were right to be wary of the government's reaction.

Since the museum opened its doors in March, its director, Paweł Machcewicz, has lost his job and the museum has been combined with another institution. The new director is expected to change the exhibits to make them focus more on Polish suffering in the war.

The original idea for the museum was to break with the tradition of talking about the war through a uniquely national perspective. Machcewicz is now threatening to sue if the government alters the museum. “Interfering in the exhibition is a barbarity and an absolutely political gesture,” he said.

The dispute over the museum isn’t simply an issue for historians and archivists. It roughly reflects the split in the country as a whole between Poland's mostly urban liberals who ran the show until two years ago and the nationalist, Euroskeptics from the Law and Justice party (PiS) who hold the reins today.

As often in Poland, the fight over the past is in reality one over the future direction of the country.

Who suffered most?

There is no question that Poland suffered horribly in the war. It lost about 20 percent of its population, saw its borders shifted hundreds of kilometers to the west in 1945, millions uprooted, and ended up languishing for decades under Soviet domination.

Poland's communist rulers used the war to justify the alliance with the USSR, stressing that Poland had been betrayed by its Western allies and needed to be friends with Moscow. In more recent times, some Poles feel that the flood of EU structural funds to modernize the country is overdue compensation for the war. Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the Law and Justice party, suggested in 2007 that Poland should be given more voting weight in the EU to account for the citizens it would have had had they not been murdered by the Germans.

For more liberal historians, the problem with the narrative that Poland was unique in its suffering is that lots of other parts of Europe also had an awful war. Belarus lost a higher percentage of its population than Poland, almost all of the Continent's Jews were killed, other countries also had brave resistance movements, while some Poles (as well as people in other countries) collaborated with the occupiers.

Machcewicz tried to tell that story by not just focusing on Poland, but making Polish history part of a much broader tale.

At the Gdańsk museum, Machcewicz and three Polish colleagues — backed by well-known historians of eastern Europe such as Timothy Snyder and Norman Davies in the museum's advisory body — created an exhibition that presents the Second World War by comparing how different peoples experienced the Holocaust and Nazi occupation, collaboration and resistance. Poles feature prominently, but not exclusively.

Located 14 meters undergound in an unconventional red brick and glass building, the €12 million exhibition is built around objects belonging to people whose lives intersected with the war. The museum has up until now proven popular, with long lines and tickets running out during weekends.

House keys belonging to Jews killed in 1941 Nazi-occupied Poland in the village of Jedwabne with the participation of their Polish neighbours sit in a section that also tells the story of Jews murdered in the same year in the Iasi pogrom organized by Romanian authorities.

Toys and jewelry belonging to Poles massacred in 1943 by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Volhynia (then in Nazi-occupied Poland, today in Ukraine) are located in a room that also depicts mass killings of Serbs, Jews, Roma and others by the Croatian fascist Ustashe regime.

“I thought the best way to understand the various types of Nazi occupation, for example, was to put them in the same room,” Machcewicz said in an interview. “In fact, this shows most clearly that the Polish one was the worst.”

A very Polish story

For Law and Justice, however, telling the global story of the war amounts to diminishing the Polish experience.

"The authors made a strategic choice to cover up the Polish point of view in pseudouniversalism,” wrote Jan Żaryn, a PiS senator and historian, one of three reviewers the Polish culture ministry asked to evaluate the museum.

Żaryn argued that the museum should have concentrated more on depicting "features characteristic of Poles'" such as "loving freedom, Catholicism, patriotism and especially being proud of their history."

Minister of Culture Piotr Gliński told the Polish parliament last year that the museum "should present the Polish point of view.”

“PiS wants to politicize history to a degree unseen in the last 25 years” — Historian Norman Davies

Another problem for the government is that the museum was commissioned in 2008 by former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, PiS' main political rival.

Law and Justice acted just after taking power in late 2015. A smaller museum in Gdańsk commemorating the battle of Westerplatte, the first military confrontation in the 1939 German invasion of Poland, was merged with the larger institution on Gliński's orders in early 2016.

Machcewicz's job disappeared and Karol Nawrocki, a historian active in promoting PiS' historical perspective, was made director of the new combined museum. Nawrocki has already hinted that the exhibition could be modified.

“History is lived once and described many times,” he told Polish media after taking office. "I stay open to the fact that historians or public opinion might point to things that need to be changed or improved.”

“All decisions about public institutions are in the end political” — Tadeusz Rakowski, museum spokesman

Tomasz Rakowski, the museum's new spokesman, said no concrete plans have been made yet as to how the exhibition would be modified, but it's clear that the views of the new management differ from those of the old.

“All decisions about public institutions are in the end political,” said Rakowski. “We have a new government elected democratically who appointed professional historians to run the museum, and this is normal. The old director also didn't come out of nowhere — he was chosen by the former prime minister.”

Machcewicz, on the other hand, argues that the museum is an intellectual and artistic creation to which its authors have copyright. On April 26, he sent a notice to Nawrocki threatening that he would take legal action in case any changes are made to the museum.

Norman Davies, a British historian who has focused on Poland and who headed the museum's advisory board, insisted that the original museum experienced no external interference while preparing the exhibition. He does expect, however, that changes made under PiS would introduce a strong element of political bias.

“PiS wants to politicize history to a degree unseen in the last 25 years,” Davies said.