“I do not agree that this monument skirts over differences,” said Archbishop Jozef Zycinski of Lublin. “In times of war, all those who faced dramatic situations and died without knowing the fate of their loved ones, were victims, irrespective of which side they found themselves on.”
The church leader was reacting to a protest letter by lawmakers from Poland’s center-right opposition Law and Justice party who demanded the dismantling of the monument in the northern port of Gdynia to victims from the Wilhelm Gustloff, Goya, and Steuben. They claimed the monument showed a “lack of sensitivity” and “erased differences between victims and executioners.”
Zycinski told his archdiocese’s radio station on February 12 that Polish parliamentarians were not entitled to “pose as supreme moral authorities,” and said he believed people who “died with suffering” merit “respect rather than ideology.”
The archbishop added, “Remembering those who died is an aspect of our Christian culture.” He said in his remarks, which were also carried by Poland’s Catholic information agency, KAI, “We don’t want to touch up history in the style described by George Orwell, and we don’t need Stalinist corrections to history. We should speak about painful things, which is why I see this memorial as a sign of solidarity and a lesson in history.”
A total of 9,343 German civilians, more than half of them children, were killed when the Gustloff was blown apart by three Soviet torpedoes after leaving Gdynia on January 30, 1945. It sank within 45 minutes, 22 nautical miles off the town of Leba, in the greatest single loss of life in maritime history.
The liner, named after a Swiss Nazi party leader, had been used as a floating barracks by Germany’s Kriegsmarine, and was evacuating civilians and officers from East Prussia to escape the advancing Red Army.
A further 10,000 Germans lost their lives the following February and April, when the Goya and Steuben were sunk in similar submarine attacks further west.
The memorial was unveiled on January 30 by priests from the Redemptorist order at the Gdynia parish of Our Lady and St Peter the Fisherman for the 65th anniversary of the disaster, which was first commemorated by a joint Polish-German ecumenical requiem Mass in 2003. A film about the sinking, Die Gustloff, was shown on German television in 2008.
